Link – Air Force Testing Anti-Drone Shotgun Shells

Three left.
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This is kinda interesting…….(and, yes, clever name)

The Mi-5 shells are anti-drone rounds and contain a five-foot wide capture net. When fired, five tethered segments spin and extend to create the net which travels towards the targeted drone, wraps around the frame, and brings it down, according to pcmag.com.

The only damage caused will be from the impact with the ground, which should offer a chance to inspect and collect evidence from the drone.

The types of drones these shells can target are classed as Category 1 & 2 by the Pentagon. They weigh up to 55 pounds and typically fly at heights of no more than 3,500 feet….

They must be fired from a rifled choke barrel. You can buy them on the web in three packs for $20 each.

I had no idea that there were specific ‘anti-drone’ shotgun shells. To my way of thinking, virtually any shotgun shell is ‘anti-drone’. You see someone floating a drone 80′ over your hot tub one evening, why screw around with specialty ammo? Whatever is sitting in the 870 will probably do the job just fine.

Also, I’ve yet to meet the shotgun shell that has a reach of 3500 feet. If such animals existed, we’d have a lot less geese.

But, it does segue into a larger issue – how do you secure your little slice ‘o heaven against such intrusions? I mean, all the systems I’ve seen…shotguns, jammers, trained eagles, etc, are all active systems – someone has to be directing the action at the time of intrusion. There needs to be some sort of passive ‘electric fence’ sort of preventative. I suppose you could set up some sort of powerful jamming system that is on all the ime and rotates through the most popular known frequencies for these sorts of things. You know, come to think of it, I’m kinda surprised this hasn’t come up on The Walking Dead yet.

I suppose the most logical, although not the easiest, method is to make sure that you don’t keep anything in the open that you wouldn’t want someone to see. It’s not my favorite option since, as I see it, I should be able to do whatever the heck i want on my property without having to worry about airborne peeping toms, but thats just not the world we live in.

Mike Rowe, of ‘Dirty Jobs’ fame and seemingly genuine great guy, had his own incident which he talked about in a podcast which turned into an impromptu advertisement for the Mossberg 500:

I might, just for giggles, pick up a tubes worth of these anti-drone shotgun shells just for the novelty value in rounding out my ‘specialty’ shotgun ammo selection. But, really, if I need to knock down something like that I’d imagine the cheap bulk shotgun ammo from WalMart will do just fine.

3 thoughts on “Link – Air Force Testing Anti-Drone Shotgun Shells

  1. About the only current defense is move your perimeter out far enough they run out of juice before getting to your sensitive area.

    There have been other reports of using EMP guns on them, but that’s also an active system.

    If everything holds together long enough, and gets all science fiction-y on us, I suppose we’ll end up with our own drones on patrol, like the ‘dog pod grid’ in Diamond Age, by Neil Stephenson.

    n

  2. Kinda makes you miss the good ‘ol days of landlines, antennas, radio, and the privacy that could be achieved…pandora’s box has been opened with technology, patriot act, stingrays, and all the crap we don’t even know about…funny thing is the NSA is probably logging this entry, ISP, etc, but some goofball will try to do some homeland jihad and they won’t/don’t see it coming…

  3. I was watching a fishing show on some cable network and the host was down in the delta, going by a coast guard base followed by a drone flown by the production crew, and they lost comms. with it. They had to go and show that they were shooting a fishing show before they could get it back. Took them a day to get it back. They were jammed.

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