Re:Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wil...
by kbenson on Saturday September 29, 2018 @04:30PM
(#18102625)
> it doesn’t include the batteries (biggest impact)
I suspected this (it wasn't spelled out, but became likely as I was researching). That said, I think it's somewhat mitigated by the fact long flights wouldn't really be necessary. Enough battery to fly the route and perform the end action, with some sufficient overhead (an additional 50-100% capacity?) would possibly be sufficient. A few minutes of flight time likely gets you quite far.
That said, it also works towards my point of specific areas that are tracked may be sufficient. If it's hard to fly a drone from miles away to avoid launch site detection and still have a delivery payload large enough to be useful, that's beneficial in itself.
> my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones.
Fair enough. I agree that actual deployment is probably either an additional $5k-$10 or some multiple of the base price, depending on how some items scale.
It leaves the question open as to whether the larger drones could still be useful though. Being able to fly a bomb up to a corner office in some building and detonate it, or quickly drop down to a motorcade someone has entered, might be a good return on investment even at $30 or more, depending on the target.
> just not personally experienced in this field
That's correct, and it's why I value your input on this, since you seem to have a lot of experience with the actual drone portion.
I don't mind being proven wrong, or shown evidence I'm wrong or off in calculations. I do mind just being told in wrong without new number or without specific objections provided as to my methodology, since I went through the effort to provide them in the first place. As such, I appreciate you providing some real numbers to specific models for this discussion.
> I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline.
I appreciate the offer (I really do!), but I'm worn out by this discussion at this point.
Additionally, I doubt we'll make much headway on the actual tracking system part of the discussion, there's too many variables, and too much variation in our different ideas of what those variables entail. As those variables stack and the differences multiply, the expected end values diverge too wildly.
Since I think neither of us have enough hard data to reduce enough of those variables to fairly static values without quite a bit of research on each (such as how many priority targets are there, how the military treats this topic, current state of the art video tracking techniques, the effect of weather on video tracking, etc, and truthfully that's a lot to invest in an internet discussion), it seems unlikely to be all that fruitful. :/
I suspected this (it wasn't spelled out, but became likely as I was researching). That said, I think it's somewhat mitigated by the fact long flights wouldn't really be necessary. Enough battery to fly the route and perform the end action, with some sufficient overhead (an additional 50-100% capacity?) would possibly be sufficient. A few minutes of flight time likely gets you quite far.
That said, it also works towards my point of specific areas that are tracked may be sufficient. If it's hard to fly a drone from miles away to avoid launch site detection and still have a delivery payload large enough to be useful, that's beneficial in itself.
> my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones.
Fair enough. I agree that actual deployment is probably either an additional $5k-$10 or some multiple of the base price, depending on how some items scale.
It leaves the question open as to whether the larger drones could still be useful though. Being able to fly a bomb up to a corner office in some building and detonate it, or quickly drop down to a motorcade someone has entered, might be a good return on investment even at $30 or more, depending on the target.
> just not personally experienced in this field
That's correct, and it's why I value your input on this, since you seem to have a lot of experience with the actual drone portion.
I don't mind being proven wrong, or shown evidence I'm wrong or off in calculations. I do mind just being told in wrong without new number or without specific objections provided as to my methodology, since I went through the effort to provide them in the first place. As such, I appreciate you providing some real numbers to specific models for this discussion.
> I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline.
I appreciate the offer (I really do!), but I'm worn out by this discussion at this point.
Additionally, I doubt we'll make much headway on the actual tracking system part of the discussion, there's too many variables, and too much variation in our different ideas of what those variables entail. As those variables stack and the differences multiply, the expected end values diverge too wildly.
Since I think neither of us have enough hard data to reduce enough of those variables to fairly static values without quite a bit of research on each (such as how many priority targets are there, how the military treats this topic, current state of the art video tracking techniques, the effect of weather on video tracking, etc, and truthfully that's a lot to invest in an internet discussion), it seems unlikely to be all that fruitful. :/