These days, not much surfaces about the newest Star Wars game currently under production at DICE studios, but when it comes to the actual movie also in the works, Episode VII, producers find it much more difficult to keep everything under wraps. Apparently, the age of drones makes keeping large props out of the spotlight downright impossible, especially if the crew – like the Episode VII team – fails to even set up a more or less rudimentary drone shield.
Indeed, fans operating drone aircraft have spotted a number of interesting props at the scene of the shoot, about 50 miles outside of London. The said props were a half-finished Millenium Falcon, as well as an X-wing fighter. Although these bits of information don’t exactly say a whole lot about the story so they can be hardly considered spoilers, the producers would obviously prefer to keep such things out of the public eye, and to that end they did indeed consider setting up DroneShield, a drone-monitoring system meant to detect unwelcome buzzers based on their acoustic signature, and then to provide a warning, thus giving the team enough time to tarp over the telltale props.
Pinewood Studios have apparently ordered their DroneShield back in June in anticipation of the sort of drone-based snooping some super-fans are indeed well capable of, but due to export regulations, they still haven’t managed to actually set it up. The problem with DroneShield is that apparently, besides selling the system to various corporate entities, the company behind it also provides technology to the military. As such, the system is subject to harsher-than-normal export regulations. DroneShield isn’t fail-proof either: modified drones which emit an acoustic signature that isn’t present in the database of the system cannot be detected. Also, background noise may be a problem under certain circumstances.
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