Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and land on a moving target

Re:Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and la... by beagle3 on Sunday May 27, 2018 @06:43AM (#17166357)

The system I saw 30 years ago were more ground based and covered tens to hundreds of KMs.

But even if you need a drone every 5km (you don't). That's all of 400 drones, 800 if you want to have pairs doing charge-work duty. For an 2000km border guarding operation, that's really not much. An order of magnitude or two cheaper than the fence they would guard.

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Re:Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and la... by candiodari on Sunday May 27, 2018 @12:35PM (#17167689)

How did that ground based system solve the horizon problem ? Drones don't fly very high, so you'd need one of these systems, say at 50 meters drone height, ~ every 50km.

That's probably worse than those drones watching from above, seeing as you'd need actual infrastructure at every interval. And, that'd be fixed infrastructure, with fixed blind spots.

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Re:Drones that can haul a 20-pound load for 500 miles and la... by beagle3 on Sunday May 27, 2018 @01:42PM (#17168073)

I don't know exactly how it worked (beyond IIRC that it was a SAR = Synthetic Aperature Radar), but I know for sure that it worked perfectly well.

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