Greg Burch wrote:
> The range problem can be solved though, by delivering the birds as if they
> were munitions: drop a brace of them in a canister from the wings of an F-15
> cruising at 50,000 feet,
Or a drone launch, lower, slower and cheaper.
> opening and deploying its cargo of half a dozen folded-up
> reconnaissance drones. Hell, with the right design and materials, you could
> do it with an artillery shell.
Cool, now youre thinking. Since we have them semi-autonomous,
we could do a ballon carry and deploy.
> A slow, silent electric-powered motor sailor could keep a camera
> running up and down Afghan valleys for hours and hours in the hands of a
> skilful pilot.
Greg are you up to speed on the low-noise electric RCs? The local
club has a couple guys experimenting with them. Last I saw em they
were packing up, heading over to Mike Lorrey's place.
> I envision a clear dome on the plane's belly in which a pointable camera
> could be housed. Mass-produced, you could build such a bird for under $5k
> apiece. At DOD prices, I guess that means $100k.
For the first one. 4k apiece after that. The DoD has access to
economies of scale that would blow your mind. Their stuff is
no more expensive than commercial OTS, assuming it need not
have four 9s reliability, which these would not.
> But I agree with Barbara that we have to worry about the people and weapons
> that the bad guys already have pre-positioned in autonomous action cells in
> the West.
Which is why we have the RC drones to start with: to find those
guys and guns before sending troops into harms way. The war
gamers are all over these scenarios, and theyre about to wet their
pants with eagerness to try out all their toys developed over the last
few years. spike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Oct 12 2001 - 14:40:48 MDT