> I assume this is what it was like in the World War I & II era watching tanks being developed.

A better analogy would be the airplane as it had dual civilian-military uses like the drone. Whereas a tank is solely a military use vehicle.

But the drone definitely has the ability to change war like the airplane did. Especially drone swarms backed by AI. You could buy 100,000 drones for the price of a single jet fighter. Imagine millions or even billions of drones fighting to take control over a city.

A tank is basically a tractor with a gun attached :)

Exactly this, an important part of the origin of the tank was the tractor made by the Holt company, which today is Caterpillar. The first German and French tanks in WWI were modified Holt tractors, and the unmodified machines saw widespread use for pulling artillery guns.

The reason for Caterpillar pivoting towards construction equipment after WWI is that they had essentially only made military equipment during the war, so their equipment gradually shifted towards larger and heavier machines. When peace came, their products were too heavy to be used as farm equipment, but perfect for construction.

You mean it's like artillery but more expensive and less effective?

Except that the shell can deliver itself through a house window, with no gun noise signature.

not my area, but it seems like states who use small drones have begun manufacturing their own

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-produce-one-mil...

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/construction-progresses...

^ not just ukraine but I think they're the farthest along this curve

DJI Drones have been used in Ukraine as reported by Yaroslav Trofimov

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ukraines-drone-spotters-on-fron...

and his book that just came out

I saw a video of a drone fly up to palestinians on a rooftop patio and tell them to leave their building. Looked like something out of a scifi movie.

I think the observer in that era was watching it change in the streets if they were lucky enough to survive.

How so? This thing is large and likely loud enough to be useless in any real warzone that we have nowadays.

You can hear Shahed 136s pretty clearly, and they still do a lot of damage.

I know from experience.

It's sad that the West doesn't at least set up a few new production lines for air defense rockets and help Ukraine eliminate the Russian drones (at least the big ones), missiles, helicopters and airplanes.

They should be designing a bolt-on guidance package and a booster stage for Hydra rockets using abundant cheap RISC-V processors and leveraging Ardupilot - not so ironically

> This thing is large and likely loud enough to be useless in any real warzone that we have nowadays

you realize we still use planes in combat right

You see any planes used in the Ukraine ?

According to recent reports, at least Russia is launching glide bombs from airplanes on a daily basis. They don’t do it over frontlines though, so not much footage available.

Military drone from 1964

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_D-21

Completely different type of drone with completely differing military applications.

It's so much cheaper than tanks though, as long you can get a satellite connection. Which means Elon is ideally positioned to compete with nation states if he wants to. I mean more than he already is. Scary dude.

He'll be more scary when he lives on Mars

Given the SpaceX unrivaled space launch powers Elon can deploy a number of Rods of God and play God.

Anti drone tech is evolving too and its not that far fetched to imagine auto sniper bots trained to shoot drones with image vision.

r/ukrainewarvideoreport

The 20th century is finally over and we're reverting to pre-Napoleonic model of military and technology - military technology as a meme and synonym for future civilian high-tech is no more; the flow of technologies reverses and increasingly more will become dual-role technologies with military applications because civilian versions will simply be milestones ahead of military head commits, and this will have implications on...

I was letting my old friend rubber-duck on me with these topics, I think 5 < x < 10 years ago. I don't know who he was quoting, sounds kind of right in retrospective.