Russia Created a Shotgun-Toting Drone for Shooting Down Other Drones

Russia has created a new drone with a built-in shotgun that’s specifically designed to shoot other drones out of the sky.

Consumer camera drones are making headlines for all kinds of wrong reasons these days, causing governments and industry to scramble to create effective anti-drone measures. Everything from specially-trained eagles to “energy weapons” to “special” shotgun shells have been unveiled in recent times. Over in Russia, the new idea is to mount a shotgun to a drone itself.

The Russian defense blog Dambiev reports that the prominent Russian defense contractor JSC Almaz Antey has patented a new shotgun-wielding drone.

The drone takes off from a vertical orientation, flies like a plane, weighs 50 pounds, has a flight time of 40 minutes, and features a 12-gauge fully-automatic Vepr-12 shotgun.

“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,” Jalopnik reports.

Here’s a 3.5-minute video that shows off what the drone-hunting drone can do (we see takeoff, shooting targets, and landing):

Russia previously developed another anti-drone drone called the Karnivora that features net guns — the nets capture drones in mid-flight and parachute them safely to the ground for recovery.

(via Jalopnik via Engadget)