Ukraine’s shotgun-wielding drones are hunting Russian infantry now.
A video montage that a Ukrainian drone group posted online on Saturday depicts one of the group’s “Winchester” quadcopters performing its usual mission: hunting down and blasting Russian quadcopters before they strike Ukrainian troops.
But seemingly taking advantage of a fleeting opportunity, one operator also took aim at a solitary Russian soldier—or North Korean, if the engagement took place in western Russia’s Kursk Oblast—marching along a dirt road under the Winchester’s flight path.
The drone swooped past the initially unwitting soldier and opened fire with both of its shotgun barrels. Apparently having missed, the drone came around for a second pass. It’s unclear whether the soldier was wounded or killed. The video appears to depict the person dodging or falling.
It’s hard to day whether this signals a shift in Ukrainian drone tactics, but the value of a gun-armed first-person-view drone is obvious.
Most FPV quadcopters are single-use systems. Clutching a grenade or rocket warhead to their bellies, they barrel into their targets and destroy themselves in the process. An FPV might cost just a few hundred dollars, so the type isn’t exactly expensive.
But Ukraine would undoubtedly prefer to squeeze more than one strike out of each of the 100,000 or more FPVs its workshops build every month. Firing shotguns at individual soldiers rather than ramming them with explosives, the Winchesters could become multi-use systems—boosting the number of strikes a typical FPV completes before its self-immolates or gets shot down.
If there’s a downside to FPV shotgun ambushes, it’s that shotguns work best at close range owing to the dispersal of their shot. To blast a soldier, a drone needs to get close. And at that range, it could be vulnerable to the soldier’s own weapon—potentially including the weapon of choice for defeating incoming FPVs: a shotgun.
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