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FPV drones are for most intents and purposes illegal to fly (you can technically do so with a spotter keeping it in line of sight, or with a hard to obtain license). However, there's no law against building one, and the FAA has not nearly enough enforcement capacity to do anything about it if you do fly it. Rigging them to drop things is legal, though actually dropping something from it isn't, but again, no enforcement capacity. The Trump administration banned many drone parts using the FCC, but this too is unlikely to actually have any effect. The limit remains getting the grenades.
FPV drones can be flown, just with in line of sight. It's pretty much just a usecase deployment bottleneck, which would already be too late for FedGov interference. You can still test and develop your FPV drone if you just stand in a field and fly it.
I might be misremembering but wasn't this mostly a DJI company ban? Drone parts themselves are producible, and manufacturable/craft-able. You just can't order cheap chinese drones and deploy from those. Only American-Made(TM) domestic weapons.
Yes agreed. I'm shocked we haven't seen a jailbroken LLM finetuned on chemistry textbooks and old anarchist-explosive making books developed for the purpose of democratizing energetic creation and particularly blasting cap development. I suppose they could exist out there but aren't being publicly advertised.
The DJI company was banned, but also all new models of non-American UAS (drone) parts. There's a lot of drone parts that American companies simply don't make, or don't make except for a few small companies who do it for the defense industry only. Transmitters and receivers, flight controllers, servos, and motors. Motors probably don't need FCC certification, servos are general-use items, but flight controllers and transmitters are pretty drone-specific.
The problem isn't the knowledge; you can get that anywhere. The problem is
1) Getting precursor chemicals.
and
2) Not blowing yourself up making the stuff.
Number 2 is probably the larger. Electronics is easy, chemistry (especially explosives chemistry) requires a lot of washing and temperature control (often cooling and heating at the same time, as with nitroglycerin) and very careful control of impurities (e.g. if you're making an azide propellant, it doesn't take much lead getting mixed in to end up with a primary explosive. Which might be a good thing, but only if you intend it). Anyone using AI starting from zero is either going to (most likely) produce nothing or just blow themselves up.
Once you've made the stuff, putting it into a useful form is an art of its own, but a bit less fraught.
Yeah, but nitroglycerin? That stuff tends to result in an ignobel fate on a good day.
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