Colorado town has received pre-orders for 983 drone-hunting licenses
slate.comthis line of reasoning seems like the least of our concerns in a discussion centered around firing ammunition into the clouds
Well you'd use birdshot, obviously. How does the author think people hunt ducks?
Well, everyone has seen a movie where someone shoots around up into the air and it comes down just as fast as it went up, typically wounding someone. Obviously physics doesn't allow that but the myth remains.
It's a lot like the shoot into the water and the bullet streaks through and wounds people. There was a great Mythbusters that debunked that - the water tears apart the bullet within about a foot of the surface. Yet, once again, the myth remains.
Mythbusters have also done "bullet fired into the sky" as well, and while the results were not terribly simple, the gist of it is that it should not be considered safe (and there are confirmed incidents of people being killed that way).
There are a few things going on, but most of it, IIRC, stems from the fact that a bullet fired into the air is almost certainly not fired straight into the air, so it retains it's ballistic trajectory and spin. The spin keeps its air resistance relatively low and gravity does not work against the horizontal component of the bullets velocity. The bullet, fired slightly not straight up, will therefore hit you with whatever velocity it got from falling nose first from apogee, combined with whatever velocity sideways it started with (minus some from air resistance).
Bullets fired from a rifled barrel straight up will turn over and tumble at appogee, and their velocity on return will be only terminal velocity of the bullet tumbling through the air. Presumably this case is safe, though potentially painful.
Birdshot is safe I assume because the mass of the individual pellets are low enough so that air resistance is enough to arrest its velocity to something safe. (also the pellets aren't nearly as streamlined as bullets are anyway, though I wouldn't want to be downrange of buckshot fired into the air at an angle...)
Yes, any horizontal distance is the danger, but that's not generally what movies show. An example is the movie 'The Mexican'.
Birdshot is somewhat powerless anyways, at even minimal distances, although I wouldn't particularily volunteer to be on the receiving end.
Ask Dick Cheney's hunting partner how this feels. I believe the doctors were more concerned about a pellet traveling to his heart/brain via an artery (possibly causing a heart attack or stroke) then the damage to his body.
People can no longer claim that the BMG cartridge has no legitimate hunting use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.50_BMG
Indeed. It is important to use a cartridge of the appropriate size for your target. Shooting a drone with .22 rimfire for instance would be cruel. You need something that will kill the drone, not make it suffer.
"What goes up must come down", and while that's often not such a big deal if the bullet goes at a high enough angle due to relatively low terminal velocities, a bullet that heavy (1.4 oz/29 g and on up) would do considerable damage if it hits someone.
That said, some crazy big game hunters use it for long range shots. WAY too much tissue damage for my family's tastes (as it were, what we hunt, we eat), but it is used.
I don't really know much about hunting, but I imagine such a large round might legitimately be necessary for things like bears or moose. You have a good point though, you shouldn't be firing stuff other than birdshot into the sky.
Anti-material rounds like .50 BMG are way overkill for anything you'll find in North America, calibers in the .338/.375 range, with around 1/3 the weight and energy are probably good enough (would have to check for bear, my family's never hunted them and none are to be found in my home town). For "thick skinned" dangerous game in Africa, heavier stuff is legally required, but the energies are still quite a bit lower than .50 BGM.
Hmmm, while it gets into "destructive device" territory ($200 Federal "tax" per round and of course paperwork, which they aren't exactly required to accept), something that explodes with a fuze that sets it off way before it nears the ground is called for. You want proximity fuzing anyway ... send a microprocessor after a bundle of them wrapped in an airframe ^_^.
Anything in the "military .30-calibre" (.308, .30-06, .303) range is good enough for bear (and moose) hunting; there's no need for exotics of any sort when you can choose the presentation, and any of that class of round will perform a humane kill (by any hunting standards) without unnecessary waste.
That said, one might want something heavier for stopping bear, but the ranges involved would suggest something more along the lines of a good 10- or 12-gauge slug than something with enough ballistic efficiency to have a kill potential more than a mile away.
True, but not thaaat large. 50BMG is meant to destroy vehicles and small structures.
Well I mean, both bears and moose are very capable of destroying vehicles too... ;)
You're also unlikely to hit a UAV with a rifle, unless you're given perfect conditions (e.g. a very stable hover or very low and slow flying).
Oh, you never know who might show up to hunt game like that http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/01/17000-linux-powered-r...
Where is your moral superiority to (and right to shoot down) other people's drones if your weapon isn't "the old fashioned kind" either?
Somewhere in the vicinity of incidents like this one. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/so-thi...
I'm ok with this as long as they don't waste this as a trophy and properly clean and eat the drone.
Otherwise imagine all the wasted money they could cause.
Heh.
Semi-seriously, the two are not mutually exclusive, what's on display, bone, antlers, tusks, fur, etc. is not fit to eat.
Not that I understand the trophy hunting mentality, although the best of them make sure the tasty meat goes to a good home.
Okay, now I kind of want them to make it an annual event where we go fly some cheap throw-away styrofoam drones[1] and everybody gets together and shoots them out of the sky like skeet. You, know, safely, with minimal drunkenness. Anyway, it would be great if it became so popular that the FAA had no choice but to issue a TFR over the town for the event.
[1] like the kind you make for RC dogfighting
For some reason, I can't see your username
Lucky for you!
When I saw the headline I thought people wanted to hunt using drones. I guess that will be next year.
I was really disappointed when I realized it wasn't that. Maybe you don't need a license for that.
I suppose that could be an option, send your drone up to hunt another, collect bounty, rinse and repeat.
Let's hope this becomes a felony when the drone laws are updated in 2015.
No, wait. HN is ok with shooting down our technological advances.