Drones have become a bit of a public nuisance over the past couple of years.
That was probably brought to a head during the winter holiday travel season at London’s Gatwick airport which was shut down for days by a rogue drone.
Outside of bringing air traffic to a standstill, there are reports of drones spying on people as well as plain old tales of stupid UAV pilots making a mess of things.
To combat this “problem,” a bunch of solutions are coming out of the private sector.
These include a anti-drone gun that blasts the UAV out of the sky to disable its flight systems to software that allows people to assume control over drones.
Most of the ideas are really cool – heck, one even has a netting that captures the drone and then deploys a parachute to bring the device safely to the ground.
And then there are other options, such as this crude but likely effective coming out Russia.
Russian defense contractor JSC Almaz Antey developed a shotgun-armed drone as a possible solution to rogue drones invading sensitive airspace.
It is about as cool – and terrifying – as you could probably imagine.
According to PetaPixel, it takes off at a vertical orientation, flies like a plane, weighs about 50 pounds, has a flight time of 40 minutes, and packs a 12-gauge fully-automatic Vepr-12 shotgun.
Jalopnik reports, “The Vepr-12 is externally similar to the AK series of Russian assault rifles, but instead fires from a magazine of ten 12-gauge shotgun shells.”
The fact that it can maintain control after firing a shotgun is a feat of engineering for sure but this whole concept is pretty terrifying.
If you want to watch a video of it in action, you can do that here on YouTube.
A shotgun isn't the only way you can get rid of a drone – you can also use a helicopter.
