Comments on: Is a $20,000 FPV a viable weapon?

By: Spin Drift

Spin Drift — Tue, 29 Oct 2024 02:01:38 +0000

Ok, had student engineers design an autonomous drone that could transport 5kg 15 klicks by entering GPS coordinates to get to the vicinity and then use lidar and thermal sensors to home in and deliver to target. It was set and forget delivery for UPS/Amazon packages. Auto return to preset coordinates. Drone cost of under $2000. Double the range for one way trip. $20,000 can get 10 of these to arrive at a single area. 100 lb of C4 is a tight local. Terrorists rejoice. Imagine what this would do at the Rose Bowl. This uses all off the shelf parts.

It’s what nightmares are made of.

By: T. Beholder

T. Beholder — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:39:45 +0000

America today seems incapable of taking the, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to get the job done,” approach when it comes to weapon design.

IMO it’s much simpler. That’s a subset of the “bogus metrics” problem.

The product usually is not selected for military purpose, but for bragging and money washing purpose. They may sneak in good old Pentagon Pricing for nuts and bolts and toilet seats, but they need to somehow justify the price at the big picture level.

If so, an acceptable for the bureaucrats system should have a higher-than-ever number in some parameter, no matter how pointless in practice. Or it should have some gimmick that makes the semi-literate journalists go ZOMG. Preferably both.

By: Sneed

Sneed — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 21:46:56 +0000

4 of 5 Slavic homebrew FPVs miss easy targets on a good day. Few have thermal cameras, encryption, safe fuzes, or jamming resistant radios. Manual piloting prevents swarming and ensures if the pilot team dies the whole unit is screwed.

IOW, they’re junk. What Western soldier would want to carry 5x the amount of junk when he could get something which reliably does what it says on the label?

By: Phileas Frogg

Phileas Frogg — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 13:16:57 +0000

Perhaps it was the influx of so many Germans into our society, or a result of our funding and investment structures, but America today seems incapable of taking the, “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be good enough to get the job done,” approach when it comes to weapon design.

America’s rivals don’t seem to suffer from this problem at anywhere near the same rate. Maybe our ruling class is just too myopic and focused on capital over manufacturing…but that would be to engage in an unfair ethnic stereotype…