Ever since drones were first made available to consumers, people had always wondered how long before people would equip these consumer and professional drones with real weapons. While I know this is not the first time this has happened, it has video along with it of a non-military drone flying with a machine gun.
Video of a DJI Drone Equipped with a Machine Gun
As the fighting continues in Ukraine, there continues to be consumer and non-military type equipment adapted to the fighting. For example, there are consumer Garmin GPS devices being used to help coordinate targets and Starlink’s internet is being used by military commanders to coordinate and keep in touch with their various troops and government officials when regular communication is cut.
DJI drones have also been used to surveil various areas and to check for damage and enemy soldiers. On the Russian side, Iranian Shahed-136 drones are being used to swarm areas and attack. But, these are drones built for this kind of purpose. On the Ukrainian side, there came out video of some Ukrainians outfitting a DJI Matrice 600 professional drone. This particular drone is no longer produced but was built to carry cinema-style cameras.
The DJI Matrice 600 drone
Apparently, according to Roman Kyryliuk (a Ukrainian software engineer and military volunteer), they setup a machine gun in the place of the cinema camera on this DJI Matrice 600 and control it as a camera would be controlled. Check out this video:
Hello Shahed-136 !
We attached a mini-machine gun to the drone.
1000 likes on this video and I’ll post a video of this drone in action! pic.twitter.com/ROK6uyuVqb— Roman Kyryliuk🇺🇦 (@KyryliukRoma) October 18, 2022
Now, I cannot find a video of the drone in flight with the gun shooting. I imagine this would/did take a lot of trial and error for balancing to keep the gimbal working with the recoil of the machine gun. I would imagine that it cannot be super accurate in its current form but I know more about drones than machine guns so I’ll leave that part to the weapons experts!
…original video was deleted pic.twitter.com/4CpdJfXguS
— BlueSauron👁️ (@Blue_Sauron) October 18, 2022
HT: Drone DJ
