Kevin Freels wrote:
This is a nice, productive thread, but one thing in missing - infrastructure.
When my father was building mini-RPVs in our living room in the 1970's for the Israelis, he was also figuring out how to use them. Low-cost was inherent in his concept. He could turn a profit selling them for a few thousand each. They were essentially light-weight wooden planes powered by lawn mower engines, and could heft a 75 kg payload. As the ideas morphed into Pentagon procurement, the vehicle requirements became gold-plated, and the price tag went up 200x or more. I haven't looked at the specifics of the current generation of drones to see how useful the add-on requirements are, but there's clearly great value in having many thousands of throw-away drones. The simplest warfare use is to carry 75 kg of explosives, fly around until you spot something more valuable, and then crash into it. The sticky point for your enemy is that a SAM or AAM to shoot it down could itself cost more than the drone. There are also civilian uses that fold into our thread. There are many search and rescue scenarios where it is too dangerous to send a flight crew out, where one could instead load a drone with 75 kg of emergency supplies. Perhaps we could take the comm ideas and add an assistance component, a la a network of long-duration blimps that serve as airborne hangers for a drone fleet. Just add uniforms, jerky movement, and Lady Penelope, and we have an international rescue operation. -- David Lubkin. _______________________________________________ extropy-chat mailing list extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.leitl.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE [demime 1.01d removed an attachment of type application/pgp-signature which had a name of signature.asc]