I wonder if these devices could ever become powerful enough to be mounted on missiles and thrown at helicopters or planes and have them drop out of the sky - or mounting them on Growlers! Could be interesting as an alternative to explosives
That technology already exists and is being tested in a military setting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGAk5gRD-t0. Not sure if those ones have explosive on it but I'm sure it isn't harder to implement it.
I was thinking that this was a good opportunity for the military industrial complex to ride the hype and make some money by developing an anti-balloon weapon system. Based on my preliminary research of watching youtube videos of people popping party balloons with 1 watt lasers, a scaled up version may be an option, though an anti-balloon missile modeled after a lawn dart also seems intuitive.
Put a pistol on it, or an explosive charge and you've got something the military would probably be interested in.
There's no denying this is cool, but there's also no denying that this type of technology could be used for very evil stuff. Launch one of these with a GPS a mile or so from a target and you've got an automated nasty.
Not to hard to think of counter measures. I suspect some kind of silly string ack ack could probably do bad things to those rotors. Mini "Barrage Balloons" with Monofilament lines and netting might come into vogue in certain circles...
Perhaps it can be used to drop water balloons full of Gatorade on parched travellers. Or, to extend the earlier concept, miniaturised atom bombs on beatniks.
I'm imagining something far less obviously threatening (balloon rather than a destroyer) and far less explicitly damaging (maybe a liquid or gas that would mix with the missile impact, and rain down barely noticeable granular substance that, oops, contaminates farm land).
I can appreciate this is quite far fetched given that the material would need to drop such a distance rather than completely disperse with wind, and not be super obvious about it (e.g., pellets).
I think having what essentially would be small robot controlled fire-bombs flying through the skies would be a tough sell. Even if you managed to make them as safe as possible it's not exactly the kind of thing people would be eager to approve.
Putting ~500lbs of explosives in it might be cool, it would probably be more aerodynamically stable at speed than those fpv quad copters and the vertical takeoff capability and increased range compared to a quad slinging a mortar round seem interesting.. though something engineered for that specific purpose rather than to carry a human occupant would probably be more fit.
Interesting read, although the derived applications are not great. ^^
Now for more military applications, I think some of the calculations might break down due to weight. Missiles/shell can be in the order of hundreds of pounds, with the heavier ones above a ton.
The use case for military being more oriented toward heavy vehicles, tanks and buildings, I don't think a few pounds of explosive would be anywhere near enough. The plane would have to increase in size (structure and fuel) in similar proportions to the load it has to carry, certainly negating a lot of the efficiency.
Well, if we streamline a model plane as a one off directed explosive, that will eventually be a missile and long range ballistic missiles are not a novelty.
Awesome, I thought of shaped charges as well, but trying to keep the post short.
I assumed the goal was to have something similar to the model plane and particularly its incredibly range and efficiency. 1 gallon for 1000 miles. The plane shape and aerodynamics certainly help the efficiency.
However if there was an explosive charge to carry, the charge certainly can't improve the plane structure or aerodynamics (hence reducing the efficiency of the plane overall) and I'm not sure the charge could be shaped and mounted in the most optimal way (reducing the efficiently of the explosive itself).
So while the model plane might be incredibly efficient at flying, I question whether it could be anywhere near as good for the new purpose.
Cant v just catch missiles mid air in a device that can contain explosion and launch it far away into space and let it explode thr or if possible dismantle.
Yes, although for terrorism purposes why is this tactially useful given the high cost and complexity? It's not particularly easy to build a 3km/s railgun in your garage, and the power storage ends up being hugely bulky.
Conventional terrorist attacks involving homemade explosives, firearms, mortars, and even rockets have been quite cost-effective enough. I'm more worried about someone combining quadcopters and explosives.
reply