FPV drone (Photo: Unsplash)

Smoothbore weapons are better than standard military weapons at shooting down both regular and fiber-optic FPV drones. This was stated by Igor Pushkarev, a serviceman of the 413th Battalion of the Armed Forces of Ukraine's Drone Systems Forces, in an interview with LIGA.net .

According to Pushkarov, this is due to the number of impact elements per unit of time that both types of weapons can provide.

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An automatic weapon fires 10 shots per second, but only provides 10 impacting elements flying towards the target. At the same time, a shotgun, from which three shots can be fired after training, releases about 500 impacting elements.

Similarly, pump-action and semi-automatic shotguns are inferior in rate of fire, but significantly win in the number of impacting elements.

"This is already a situation where our soldier is no longer prey for the enemy's FPV, now he is hunting it and will destroy it," Pushkarev said.

According to him, rifles are used not only by the military, but also by civilians.

"For cities that are under attack from enemy FPV drones, this form of protection can also be effective. Part of the population has already come to this. There is currently a significant shortage of smoothbore weapons; they are being taken apart not only by the military, but also by civilians, those who are under attack – Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, Sumy, Kharkiv," he said.

He emphasized that such weapons would strengthen mobile fire groups, as they would allow them to destroy both "Shaheds" and fiber optics.

  • The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine stated that FPV drones have become the main cause of civilian deaths and injuries. According to the mission's findings, Russians are deliberately targeting civilians with short-range "lethal" FPV drones, and these incidents have increased over the past year.