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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30217 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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On top of worries about the drone itself others have expressed, an explosive payload that's stable enough to be loaded on a drone, but reliable enough that you can plan on being able to trigger it, that's powerful enough to guarantee a kill but that's also light enough to fit on a small drone, that's not the kind of thing that you can get anywhere, and trying to acquire it is likely to attract more attention from the authorities than acquiring a gun.

If terrorism is your objective, a guaranteed kill isn't really necessary. A drone can probably carry enough of a highly flammable liquid or powder and cause severe burns or death and in many ways that's the stronger signal. It would however result in a lot less of a folk hero image though.

Yeah, the victim surviving and appearing on TV with injuries won't garner the assassin much sympathy.

Why does the drone need to explode?

I’ve seen drones drop grenades that have killed in war footage

Yeah, but grenades are not as easy for civilians to acquire as guns, don't have that big a range and you'd need quite a bit of testing to get the sequence right for pulling the pin, cooking them and dropping them from a specific height. And in war you can usually iterate on failures, but an assassin doesn't have that luxury, one failure means the target goes into hiding or goes around with beefed up security and if you tried to use drones, that security will have jammers and will be looking for any drones that tries to get close.

okay fine we do not yet live in a Cyberpunk dystopia, my claim is withdrawn

We're getting close to it though. In a couple of years, when military kamikaze drones have become ubiquitous in all military armories (and thus can disappear from military armories), when the people with the knowledge to make them at home, from places like Ukraine and the ME, have spread everywhere, then I think we'll have a whole new thing to worry about.

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