I recall that in the beginnings of World War I, planes were primarily used as surveillance tools. So the germans and french would send their planes above a battlefield, and the pilots would see each other, sometimes even wave at each as they passed by.
A little bit later someone brought a shotgun on one of the planes and the rest is literal history.
I'm very curious as to what the reaction was of the first pilot that was shot at. My guess is he was probably be thinking more "Wow, what an asshole," than he would be thinking that the aggressor's action makes sense in the context of war.
That probably was their reaction considering it's usually the governments that have issues with each other, not the people. For instance, I have no problem with Russians or Chinese, I think in general they're nice people, as with any population, but our governments have problems with each other and that causes us to fight.
I get we're, for the most part, fighting the ideologies of the other country, but it's a real shame we can't live in peace. It's the few bad apples - the greedy, the criminals, the oppressors, the deceiving - that ruin it for everybody.
The version of this I heard is that the first air-to-air shots were fired during the Border War (US / Mexico) in around 1911 or 1912. Somebody unloaded his six-shooter and didn't hit a darn thing.
Just before WWI, Caproni designed an airplane with a machine gun mounted above the propeller [0], but the military wasn't that interested in it. It wasn't until the invention of the interrupter gear (credited in part to Roland Garros and part to Anthony Fokker) that air-to-air combat got to be really deadly, on account of pilots being able to fire accurately at other aircraft.
Before, Machine guns were either mounted outside the propeller circle (which made aiming harder) or propellers had deflectors on the back which made them less efficient.
Ehhh.... Reminds me of the story about when the Soviets were cloning the B-29 to make the Tu-4. Supposedly Stalin ordered an exact copy of the American bomber, and so the copies were made exact down to the bullet holes.
Seems it would be equally effective, and a lot less weight, to just drape a bunch of monofilament lines below rather than a full-on net. Those would get tangled in the "bad" drone's rotors well enough, I'd reckon.
Running steel cable or nets, instead of monofilament wire, is pretty much SOP for denying an area from rotorcraft. There's a pretty cool article on Wikipedia about prison escapes by helicopter [1] that explains how this is often implemented in high-security correctional facilities.
This is beyond funny/awesome to me. Apologies that this doesnt add anything to the discussion other than my own feelings about the comic-like start to the anime-style-cyberpunk-future we have all been subconsciously building for the last 70 years....
Do checkout: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/1155690... which is linked in that same article. It makes me wonder if these drone-catching techniques will be focused on Fukushima/nuclear related protests or fly-overs to get independent radiation measurements.
The only next counter-logical (criminal) course of action I can think of is counter thieves using drones with nets to catch the police drones with nets.
Or laser immolation? Or a cloud of little wires to clog the propellers? Magnetic attack? Helium balloon defense? As someone said above: Begun, the drone wars have.
Watching this gave me a distinct "the future is now" feeling. Odd-shaped hovering craft designed to take down other hovering crafts would look at home in most scifi movies.
A little bit later someone brought a shotgun on one of the planes and the rest is literal history.