[exDM69]

The drones here aren't your neighbor's kids' quadrotors. Some sightings over airports have been large (>2m) fixed wing aircraft travelling at 200 km/h. Even the quads are pretty fast. And they can appear out of nowhere, taking off from the ground near the target.

Shooting them down from the ground is next to impossible. They don't hover around waiting for someone to come by with a shotgun in their hand, catching them by land (ie. chasing them in a car) is not feasible.

Just to give an idea how hard it is to hit airborne targets from the ground with traditional guns: I once spent an afternoon shooting at a slow moving fixed wing target drone with tracer rounds from a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun. There were about 50 of us taking turns, each with a few hundred rounds to shoot at the damn thing and the target aircraft didn't get a single hit.

My guess is that the drones are conducting signals intelligence, listening to radar signals and radio comms around sensitive installations (airports, military bases) and surveying the response time to a sighting.

[tim333]

We need interceptor drones like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-xH6OLY_Y

something that could help Ukraine would be to make thousands in the EU. There's already a factory going up in the UK.

[tim333]

Actually a couple of drone factories (https://thedefensepost.com/2025/11/24/stark-uk-drone-uav-pro... and https://militarnyi.com/en/news/ukrspecsystems-in-the-united-...)

but the interceptors are Project Octopus:

>The initial pilot batch, consisting of up to 1,000 drones, will be built in the UK at state-owned facilities. The Octopus drone will become the first Ukrainian combat drone to be serially produced in a NATO country, with Ukraine retaining full intellectual property and technological control. https://euromaidanpress.com/2025/10/26/uk-to-build-pilot-bat...

and they are being secretive about the design.

[zelphirkalt]

If you watch some videos from Ukraine, you will see, that shotguns can hit them with much increased chances. So if possible without endangering civilians around the place where drones are sighted, I say get finally started, take the shotguns out and take out Russian resources. Just for the time of war make private drone flying without special permission and preflight registration illegal, then take down any drone that moves and is not registered to have a flight at the time. This also won't be giving away very critical military knowledge either.

One thing I don't know about shotguns is, how dangerous falling projectiles are. How much velocity they accumulate. That could be a real problem with this approach.

[exDM69]

I've seen my fair share of frontline combat videos from Ukraine.

The hard part isn't shooting a drone when it is in shotgun range. It's getting the shooter close enough to the drone to have a chance of taking the shot in the first place.

For example the drones mentioned in the article can fly at 2.5km altitude at 140km/h.

[zelphirkalt]

I guess the only solution then is to already have people in places where it counts. I would suspect military bases have more than enough people. But then again the drones can just fly too high, at which point it becomes a cost/benefit tradeoff, or futuristic laser weapons.

[exDM69]

Anything involving people on the ground is just too slow.

It takes radars, interceptor drones, sensor networks, etc. Stuff like this is in active development but not widely deployed yet.