I think you're overestimating how easy explosive material is to get.
this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
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That strongly depends on where you live, how much you need, and how good of a home chemist your are. Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places. Enough to kill a bunch of people in a crowd? Quite easy.
Enough to take down a large building? Hard in most places.
It's a case by case thing of course but incendiaries are also an option sometimes and these are laughably easy to make. Strategically placed near fire exits the results could be devastating.
Fireworks sales are legal in Ohio. Setting them off is illegal.
However buying them and harvesting the gun powder seems pretty easy.
nitric acid and cellulose or most organics. I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds. Air is mostly nitrogen. Two air conditioner compressors can work in series to with the second running ethylene glycol IIRC to get low enough to liquefy air for nitrogen. It probably only takes something like hydrochloric acid and a few steps to get somewhere useful. Probably written in a high school chemistry textbook.
I'm sure there is a relatively simple way to get from liquid nitrogen to nitrogen compounds
These days we do have the means to do it, though I don't know how achievable they are to the home-gamer
But historically this was actually a huge chemistry problem
I'm not a chemist, so I gotta gloss over some stuff I don't fully understand
But nitrogen tends to form bonds with itself and makes an N~2~ molecule. That's what the nitrogen in the air is, that's what liquid nitrogen is.
And unfortunately for us (for chemistry purposes) that molecule is very stable, it doesn't like to react with much, for most practical purposes it can basically be considered inert.
However, nitrogen is of course part of a whole lot of other chemicals as well, very important chemicals that plants and animals need. You probably heard about the nitrogen cycle in middle or high school science class at one point, and how nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil can convert atmospheric nitrogen into stuff that plants can use, and then animals eat the plants, and their waste also contains nitrogen compounds that can feed plants, etc.
But for us to do that through chemical processes isn't easy. We can't just pour some liquid nitrogen into a beaker and mix in some other stuff and it reacts to make ammonia or whatever other nitrogen compound you desire.
Until around 100 years ago, we basically couldn't turn atmospheric nitrogen into anything else, at least not at any kind of scale and not in any commercially viable way. Which was a huge problem as the world's population was growing and growing enough food to feed everyone was hard without being able to make synthetic fertilizers. The US actually has a law saying that they're allowed to just claim uninhabited islands that are covered in bird shit because that guano was rich in ammonia and other nitrogen compounds and so immensely valuable as a fertilizer.
Then along comes Fritz Haber, who comes up with the Haber process to turn atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. This was a huge deal and he won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for it. I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you've eaten pretty much anything grown on a farm you owe it to the Haber process.
And it's still a huge deal to this day, the haber process is responsible for around 2% of the world's energy consumption, and about the same amount of our greenhouse gas emissions.
If you've got a quick and easy way to turn pure nitrogen into something else, there's probably another Nobel Prize waiting for you.
There is Ostwald and Birkeland–Eyde
Birkeland–Eyde, yes, but that's even more inefficient than the Haber process.
Ostwald is something else though, that's basically the next step after the Haber process to turn the ammonia into nitric acid.
Birkeland–Eyde seems quite scalable and accessible. Like just lightning in a bottle. A few solar panels and an old automotive ignition coil, CRT TV transformer etc.
Far easier ways to make/acquire gun powder, and far better explosives available. Fireworks make a lot of noise and light, but they aren't particularly strong explosives.
But the ensuing video will be so pretty!
And yet we've had numerous terrorist attacks in the UK involving explosives. That is both northern Ireland related terrorism and Islamic terrorism.
We just had the 20th anniversary of the 7!7 bombings of the London underground where 3 separate suicide bombings detonated.
Such events are thankfully rare and very difficult to pull off, but unfortunately it only needs to happen once to be a "success" for terrorists. While the police and intelligence services have to stop every single potential attack to be successful.
Sadly I think OP is right. There will eventually be a successful terrorist attack involving drones. After which, attitudes to drones will harden.
It's very difficult to get explosives and it's very difficult for terrorists to get a explosive to a target. Unfortunately drones make the both potentially easier.
You need compact explosives to effectively deliver by drone. The attacks you mentioned will typically use the homemade stuff that use fertiliser and is less compact (which is easier to deliver by van, as shown by Breivik and the guy that did the Oklahoma bombing).
Fair
I think you're underestimating how easy it is to make.
No, I think you're underestimating how hard it is to make small explosives.
If you can point out where in history a small explosive that could be delivered via drone has been used by the public that would be fantastic.
Isn't that the whole point of those past? That it hasn't yet, but plastic based explosives are easy enough to make at a quantity that could kill several people and could be delivered with a drone to do so. This would be a new form of terrorism (new in the sense that it is available to the public and not just state actors) that would be similar to 9/11 if perpetrated at scale.
I think you're overestimating how difficult it is to make your own.
I make my own black powder for shooting.
2 KNO3 + S + 3 C
Stump remover, sulfur, charcoal. Few bucks to make a kilo.
Consumer drones can't carry that much weight, the explosives would have to be very, very powerful.
Fair enough! I was going to edit and say that black powder isn't technically explosive, just burns real fast.
Civillian ownership of drones will likely be heavily restricted
They're very easy to DIY though. Much easier than a plane.
Eh, that depends. I feel like Boeing doesn't put much craftsmanship in. How hard could it possibly be to build a boeing quality aircraft? Some styrofoam and some duct tape, right?
Sure thing, McGyver...
Terrorism is all about terror.
Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three drones, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…
Imagine a major league football or baseball stadium packed to capacity. Two or three suicide bombers/inside people ~~drones~~, each with a relatively small explosive charge surrounded by shrapnel fly in, crash into the spectators, and detonate. You end up with a small number of immediate casualties like what happened at the Boston Marathon. But the stampede of tens of thousands of panicking people trying to rush out of the stadium will probably injure and kill many more. Have a car bomb or two strategically located a couple blocks away where you expect those crowds to run and you’ve succeeded in your terror plans quite nicely…
We should understand anything is possible but drones complicate a simpler version of that plan that has worked many times previously.
A sports stadium is different in the sense that customers are screened for weapons before entering and escape routes are very limited. It's a confined and defined space. Having a trash can bomb is scary, but it's gonna be hard to stop people from going outside their homes. On the other hand, being in a specific place where drones were able to circumvent security measures? That scares people from events themselves.
There are countermeasures and protections in place against drones too.
A suicide bomber doesn't need to escape. Inside people could plant remote detonated or timed devices between any final sweep and the start of the event.
Personally, I wouldn't put my trust in the security theater at sporting events; not in the US at least.
The combination of security theater (metal detectors) and captive sales (no outside thermoses) makes it somewhat difficult to sneak something substantial into a closed event. As for not needing to escape, we'll if suicide is already on the table, then a drone operator doesn't need to survive either.
The combination of security theater (metal detectors) and captive sales (no outside thermoses) makes it somewhat difficult to sneak something substantial into a closed event
Lol
AI alignment is authoritarian now in a very dangerous way. That combined with drones is what scares me. Without reasoning AI is far more dangerous. Politics is pushing it that direction and it will turn on us. Normalizing authoritarianism is mass murder of future millions.
There will be terrorist drone attacks in the US or Europe, but I highly doubt they will be at a 9/11 scale. The destructive power of a drone is nowhere near the power of a fueled jet, you can get close with a swarm, but that adds several new problems.
- getting high yield explosives is pretty hard. 9/11 stole the bombs on the day, which is much harder to respond to. You could try using drones to take out aircraft on takeoff, but that's already controlled and monitored airspace.
- getting enough drones to be a large attack isn't trivial even with readily available parts in small numbers. There's already systems in place to monitor large orders of potentially dangerous materials like fertilizer or smoke detectors.
- coordinating hundreds of thousands of drones is actually pretty hard to do in a clandestine way. Sanctioned drone shows have problems occasionally while not having to hide and having to avoid countermeasures.
- Drone countermeasures already exist and are deployed for large events like the Superbowl. Target selection to be big enough but still insecure is also difficult. Security is more of a priority for iconic places and not all of it is theater.
oh boy, imagine this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
Lol I guessed what it was before clicking on it, that video never gets old, just like the dissidents that gets killed.
Oh that hurts to read.
I've already given up on FPV freestyle as a hobby, since it's getting ever heavier regulated and the authorities have very little understanding or tolerance when it comes to bending the rules. It was fun while it lasted.