PLA-1, 2 human operators, 12-24K trees per hour. Any Kenyan or Brazilian small forge can make PLA-1 bot. You just supply plastic cassettes with saplings. Besides, saplings are far superior in survivaal rates than seedlings.

I also manually planted lots of trees in different areas. Yes, you are right, when area is inaccessible and only manual planting is possible - drones may become helpful. But with 9 ha/day output, I am afraid it is cheaper to use human labour.

links or gtfo. jk, but seriously, are their links to studies and pictures? 12k saplings, in my mind, take up a lot of space.

Why just picture it in your mind, and not spend the trivial effort to actually work it out?

It's a square with 110 trees to a side. A rough overestimate at 20ft spacing gives us a guess of less than a quarter of a square mile per day, or maybe 75 square miles of saplings planted per year.

For comparison, the U.S. has something on the order of 3-3/4 million square miles of forest.

The machine that does it, not the end result. Im pretty comfortable imagining what a forest looks like, thanks. The Poster made comments that implied reforestation is a solved problem. Though my experience is anecdotal, i have to call bullshit. As someone else posted, flat places like each of his examples can be seeded relatively easy. But what about jungles, mountains, etc.? Hence my desire to see the device that can magically fix all the forests but for some unexplained reason is not being used in Africa, the Philippines, our Central America.

The truth is that if you can drive a big tree planting tank there, you can also walk there. RPV delivered seeds seem like they would be useful for places that are not so easy to get to.

Also, and you may know this, forests are not trees; forests are biomes that rely on trees to support complex webs of interrelated life forms from a micro- to macroscopic scale. A giant, soviet era thing that plants saplings in bally great blocks sounds good on paper, but i wonder how well it actually works.

I probably should have worded my original query more specifically and in a manner that the HN pedants are more comfortable with. My apologies.

Thank you, you made a very good point. ПЛА-1 and its later successor ПЛА-1А were intended to plant pine and spruce saplings. These are major forest species in the European part of the former Soviet Union. However, you put it right, forests are not plantations. Industrial forest plantations for pulp and paper, for wood (pine reaches the right size at the age of 75yrs), are _not_ exactly forests. They may look like forests, but the do not support that much biological species as the natural forest ecosystems. Thing is if the private property is sacred and there is private property on forest lands, biodiversity of natural forests will inevitably be sacrificed to achieve short-term profits. Its a ... natural process, if you can call greed natural. And these forest plantations must be planted in technologically efficient way. Drones are not bad if done right for right commercial species.

With more specificity, we begin to zero in on the nature of your OG comment. In truth, the devices you mentioned are an apples to aardvarks comparison. Ideally, and again anecdotally, reforestation should be a optimized process that replicates the natural occurrence thereof as much as is possible. Put another way, how do we do what the forest does but faster and in places the forest may not be able to? Rows and hedges can exist in nature, but IME clusters and sprays are more common. IF this company used actual Drones, not RPVs, i could imagine some bright person[s] coming up with different patterns for different species in different regions. Also, it would be swell to plant more than trees; a full stack solution seems best. And why stop at fixed biologicals? Drones that fly escort for bees; drones that go after certain invasive species during their mating seasons; drones that bury themselves like cicada grubs and come out when some biological imbalance trips their wake up sensors. With the entirety of biology as a play book, we as tricky primates have a lot of capability to construct and support our natural surroundings.

I am against industrial methods in anything, and this marginalizes me here in the West, and that is ok. People want to build money machines that crank out profit on a predictable schedule and that is fine in my book because i believe time will prove the error in that approach to living. If we want to get in the biology game, however, "crazy anarchists" and wierdos might have the upper hand in the idea arena, as trying to regiment everything, or even anything, in a massively complicated innately complex web of interaction that does not cease at any point is a fools errand.

...shit, i need a drone to come guide me back to my original point.

well, as you can see apples are doing better than aardwarks when thrown.

seriously, he throws around terms that bring up video games on google but no "planting bots" from 1970.

May I draw your attention that Google was made a little bit later, and the Internet too.

i am having a hard time believing you are serious. are you actually saying that reason their are no pictures is because your possibly fantastical tree tractor was made in the 70s and google was made in the 90s?

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=can...

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mus...

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=cot...

I provided enough evidence of its existence below. Besides I worked with its early model myself. Since when google and the internet became the proof of everything?

While i think you make an interesting if often neglected point about chickens and eggs, chicken coops have a much firmer chronology and use. I maintain that if there was such a device as you described, and i have my doubts, that i'd be able to find some sort of evidence online based on the coolness of gargantuan soviet era devicery.

So, before i write this off as a complete waste of time, can you link me to any pictures or descriptions or even (gasp) books wherein i could learn about the PLA-1 or its successor, the PLA-1A? Cyrillic or english is fine.

Repeatedly posted from below: http://goo.gl/RtVgTd <- Page 21, sorry for Russian source. It takes 4000 saplings at once, and goes at 6 km/hr, can plant every at 0.5m, gives you 12K saplings/hr. You have to recharge it with cassettes with saplings.