In the battle against FPV drones, Sweden’s Norma, part of the Beretta holding, has developed and initiated testing of a new 12 gauge shotgun cartr

Countering FPVs: Norma develops 12 gauge cartridge

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2025-01-11 22:30:04

In the battle against FPV drones, Sweden’s Norma, part of the Beretta holding, has developed and initiated testing of a new 12 gauge shotgun cartridge called Anti-Drone Long Effective Range (AD-LER) that is designed to provide a last line of defence against the weapons that have come to define the war in Ukraine.

The cartridge was recently used in a round of testing against ten real life FPVs (first person view drones) to explore the optimal shot to use and Paul Bradley, a ballistician, Sales and Portfolio Director at Hexagon, (a company within Beretta that provides technical assistance and sells the small arms ammunition from Norma, Swiss P and others), sat down with Calibre to talk through the development, and explain the ballistics behind countering FPVs.

“We realised that there were not a lot of cost effective kinetic solutions to the FPV problem for troops on the ground,” he told calibre on the 2nd December. “Missiles and lasers are good, but you need to consider the economic side of warfare, and a lot of these systems are not easily portable. There are electronic means, they are partially effective and sometimes they work, but it is a cat and mouse game. You can jam and take control of FPVs, but it is common for the enemy to develop a counter to that solution quite quickly. So we arrived at a list of requirements for a kinetic solution as a kind of last line of defence,” he explained.