- Joined
- Apr 15, 2022
With fishing braid or aramid cord a good net could fit into a 12 gauge shell, but it slows down too much in flight. Hard to lead with and short range. It doesn't really have to be extraordinarily strong, a line that isn't under much tension is hard to cut, so even at high rpm props are still likely to tangle even thin nets. You could improve the cutting ability in response by using less flexible props with sharper edges, the tradeoff is that if you clip branches or something on your way to your target you will break stiffer props. Most racing and freestyle propellers are way more flexible and durable than people expect. You can fly through some thin branches you didn't see until too close "ghost branches" while shooting gaps in trees and come back with a bunch of nicked leading edges and bent blades, straighten them out, and go flying again. Gemfan made some thick, flexible props that could take a beating, and they even started making folding props which might even help with entanglement.
I don't know what kind of weight the payloads are in anti-personnel operations, but it's pretty standard to have thrust to weight ratios in excess of 5:1 with battery. Relying on a motor hit to drop it outside of fragmentation range would be a no-go for me, if I were a suicide drone operator I'd probably hit the detonation switch as soon as it started tumbling on approach. It's an airburst at that point and some frags may still reach the target.
Not in reply to the above but more as a general note:
Intercepting a multirotor with another one that trails a few weighted cords has always been a good method. The problem is acquiring your target, they're hard to see from a distance under the goggles. In the 2010s I was building primitive multirotors and flying with an early racing group, a couple of the guys were adamant that the more modern quadcopters people were building could change warfare. They were experimenting with ways to take out multirotors and planes. A few fishing weights on braided line trailing behind one of their tricopters (yeah it was that long ago) or an RC plane was enough to take down a multirotor with a couple of well executed passes. I have wondered every time an airport was shut down because of a "mystery drone" why the authorities didn't have some of these trolling lines in their drone surveillance drone kits. There's no way a couple of college students at a drone racing club made something work 10 years ago that nobody else figured out.
