"winning" and my dumb brain..

Hah, I suppose that could work!

Reminds me of ratshot .22 rounds.

Maybe somebody will start properly manufacturing basically ratshot 5.56 rounds.

A quick Google search shows birdshot has an effective rang on the order of 40 - 50 yards. Now, you still have to be competant with a shotgun, but the public perception of shotguns is generally skewed. They have a much tighter spread and longer range than movies and games would have one believe.

Using a gun with a 25' effective range

Translation: I know fuck all about shotguns beyond what I've seen in movies and video games.

25' against what, humans?

I got news for you, birds that get shot are usually more than 25' away.

I have 10 or so shotguns, of all sorts. None of them put out much spread at 25'. That would almost be too close.

Other people have already pointed out that your conception of shotgun spread is essentially based in video games, where the spread is (in all but basically milsim games) greatly exaggerated.

You've countered that drones can fly higher than an actual shotgun range.

Yep. They can.

... Did you read the article I posted?

Shotguns are being used fairly commonly by both sides.

It doesn't matter what you or I think about how practical or useful they are...

The people fighting the war think they are practical and useful.

...

Nonetheless, here's my attempt to explain the popularity of shotguns in Ukraine as anti drone weapons:

This is not a solution geared toward being able to shoot down any drone, of any size or capability, at any range, at any altitude.

Obviously a shotgun is not going to be able to shootdown a greyhawk or reaper style drone.

Most of the small FPV drones that attack infantry or ground vehicles do so by basically either dropping a bomb or grenade or mortar round from maybe 25 to 150 feet in the air...

Or just being rigged with some kind of an explosive to explode on contact or via a remote trigger.

(Also, these cheap FPV drones do not really handle altitudes above roughly 150 ft that well (though this will vary by exact model). Unless its a dead calm day, gusts of wind easily blow them around, draining its limited batteries as it tries to keep its position steady, severly shortening the drone's range.)

These kinds of drones are extremely cheap, plentiful, and effective against infantry and many ground vehicles...

When it comes to these kinds of drones, shotguns are also extremely cheap and plentiful, and practical self defense weapons.

Shotguns are more useful against these kinds of FPV drones than an average assault rifle, due to the spread of shot.

They are way, way more cost effective than using a tunguska or gephard or some kind of MANPADS platform designed to shoot down jet aircraft.

Shotguns are also just more numerous, and don't require specialized training/equipment like a dedicated AA platform or EM jamming and all the equipment that entails.

You can just give a few out to every squad or vehicle crew, and thats way, waaay better than just hoping you're operating near enough to an expensive friendly AA platform that exists in far more limited numbers, or being SOL if you're not.

Further, a shotgun is also just useful as a general combat weapon.

Sure, buckshot has limited range, but sometimes fights occur within tight conditions... namely trenches or an urban environment.

Also slug rounds exist and can give you more range than buck or birdshot.

Also you can use door breacher rounds, or slugs in a pinch, to blow apart door hinges and locks.

You don't have to register it with the FAA; you're already going to murder someone, who cares if you break a few more laws?

The last point assumes someone's recording the wireless activity of the drone in the moments before the explosion, which I think is pretty unlikely. And the internals of the drone should be destroyed by the explosion, rendering it practically impossible to extract any identifying information other than the general drone model.

And even if all wireless traffic is being recorded and triangulated, pick a busy place and you're just one guy on your phone in a crowd of thousands. You can also order the drone anonymously months ahead of time and pick it up somewhere with poor security camera coverage to all but ensure there's no record linking it to you.

Communications with commercially available drones are generally unencrypted and easily intercepted. Triangulation of the source of the controlling unit would be trivial.

You'd have to be looking for it while the drone was being operated, so you would have to either monitor all the time or be tipped off that someone was coming to get you. This isn't really a good deterrent to drone-based assassination.

Also, drones are trivial to build on your own these days. With a few months of extremely basic electronics education, a pile of off-the-shelf components and a little iteration you can have your own "ghost" drone that you can control via RF, cell towers from a modem you put onboard, bluetooth, line-of-sight-laser or whatever. The weapons on it are a different story, but people have been improvising ways to off each other forever. It's kind of what humans do best.

1. They're supposed to be registered for use, but that's something YOU do, on the website. That's not done automatically as part of the purchase.
2. Not all stores manage inventory at the serial number level.
3. That requires them to be actively looking for it while you're flying. Once you turn off your transmitter there's nothing to track. Don't fly near restricted airspace and they have no reason to try to fine a random drone pilot.

Register with the FAA? Lmao
Yes, yes. Let's also register our crime gun before we do the crimes with it.

Drones that weigh 0.55 pounds or more must be registered with the Federal Aviation Administration. If you buy a drone, you're supposed to register it, and that puts the drone and your name into a Federal database.

Now that Ukraine has made it clear that drones are "arms," the anti-gun-registration 2nd Amendment people are gonna get right on that, right?

...right?