Shoot Down Drones With Pumpkin Cannons

Are you worried about the inevitable drone invasion? Have you been waiting for a defense system that you can trust? Look no further. This video shows just how effective the system is — no smoke and mirrors. Just results.

Forget RF jamming or WiFi hacking. If those devices work at all, they’re probably only good for stopping consumer devices. If you want to be sure that a drone is taken down, you’ll need a pumpkin cannon.

Wait what? Our hero was filming his massive pumpkin cannon, shooting pumpkins at around 200mph. So far, just another normal October afternoon. But then, his daughter recommended getting a nice shot of video from over the woods:

“It would be cool to get video from the woods!”

It sounded so easy. Simply fly the quadcopter up above the trees and shoot the pumpkin right by it for dramatic effect. And that was the beginning of the end. He doesn’t blame her though. It was a good idea in theory…

Total damage is estimated at about $500. Three out of four props still worked, the other one needed resoldering and a new shell. The GoPro gimbal was pooched and so was the landing gear. But thankfully the GoPro was fine.

Lesson learned.

[Thanks ipaq3115!]

28 thoughts on “Shoot Down Drones With Pumpkin Cannons

      1. If you put a guidance system on the pumpkin, it becomes a missile under U.S. Law, which means you can’t share details (“exporting”) on the internet.

        So even if making a drone-hunting Arduino-guided RF-targeting “wild weasel” ballistic pumpkin launching cannon battery would be cool,

        Telling us about it would be illegal.

      1. If you graph the expense of the drone, camera, cannon and pumpkin and determine intersection of same you’ll have a full graph of proportional probability of Murphy’s law. Lots of factors go into making it work, and Murphy was no idiot! :)

  1. You do a pumpkin and you poke loads of sprung steel wires through it. Upon launching the pumpkin all the wires spring out in a gigantic ball increasing the contact area whiles keeping the drag per mass ratio relatively low for the increased probably of making contact with the target.

    1. That’s not quite how aerodynamics works.

      Each strand makes air around it turbulent, which traps the air between the wires and increases the effective surface area of your ball. It works like the fluff-ball on a dandelion seed.

    1. I’d like to see that. A drone that can dodge a projectile. The maneuverability is certainly there. Maybe a capacitive bubble might be the fastest reaction time. A bit like a gigantic theremin.

          1. A bullet the is just falling with no horizontal speed is not deadly… one on a steep ballistic arc can be, since it carries a lot more kinetic energy…the thing is that hilling a small fling target with a single unguided projective is very hard.

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