They must have been tempted to write "Kamikaze drones". Anyway, interesting development, I wonder why it hasn't been popular to use cardboard so far. Maybe cardboard weighs more, cutting in to payload capability?
Misleading headline, not sure if the article is misleading because it is paywalled, but so far, these are drones used as targets for anti-drone practice.
> The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield
Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.
One scary aspect of drones is that they can loiter around an area. Unlike shelling or traditional missiles, you can spam an enemy city with drones and they can remain operational and waiting, until people emerge from their bunkers. And soon enough (some psychopath is vibecoding it this very second for sure) drone control will be surrendered to some LLM based system to make the final life/death decision.
Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken. You just get blown up even if you are clearly cornered, and helpless and in a traditional setting you'd have surrendered your weapon and became a POW.
I actually am not super worried about "robot killing machines." The trigger is "pulled" when the commander decides to deploy them. A pilot fires a missile or drops a "smart" bomb and it's guided onto it's target. I hardly see this as being any different.
Much like a shell that gets fired, after the gun goes off there's no way to make the bullet come back. Same with a rifle for that matter? Autonomous hunter-killer robots that look for things that appear to be the enemy are almost certainly better than what we have now...
If you're fighting a war, a machine that "kills everything that looks like a human with more than 65% accuracy" in a region that is run off of a series of Haar Cascades would probably be better than shelling the region into oblivion.
I don't know, I get the hate and reticence to give decision making over to the robot, but... maybe the real answer is we should stop having wars?
The airframe is the cheapest part of the drone though. You can make it out of Balsa wood and foam like traditional "model planes" and there won't be any major performance differences. Modern CAD is very good at simulating stress on the frame and as long as your engine's powerful enough, most materials should hold up fine at those scales for single use (anything smaller than than a Cessna basically).
if another country towed a raft full of thousands of cheap drone off a US coast and launched them into the country we have absolutely no defense
they could take out all water and power utilities on the entire east coast over 24 hours
our million dollar missiles would be useless even if Whiskey-Pete was more than willing to use them over crowded cities
North Korea, Russia, China, et al
and considering we've depleted a decade's worth of weapons and half of the fleet is overseas, we're pretty darn vulnerable right now thanks to those in power
I wonder how far away we are from "dirty drones" where they don't even need a bomb, just radioactive material or toxic chemicals as dust
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[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] threadKid: What started it?
Col: I don't know two toughest Kids on the Block I guess sooner or later they're going to fight.
Kid: That simple?
Col: Maybe somebody just forgot what it was like.
Kid: Well who is on our side?
Col: 600 million screaming Chinese.
Kid: Last I heard there were a billion screaming Chinese.
Col: There were.
Red Dawn.
Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.
EDIT: The company that makes them first pitched them to the ADF in 2018: https://www.sypaq.com.au/news/sypaq-wins-for-the-cardboard-d...
Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken. You just get blown up even if you are clearly cornered, and helpless and in a traditional setting you'd have surrendered your weapon and became a POW.
Much like a shell that gets fired, after the gun goes off there's no way to make the bullet come back. Same with a rifle for that matter? Autonomous hunter-killer robots that look for things that appear to be the enemy are almost certainly better than what we have now...
If you're fighting a war, a machine that "kills everything that looks like a human with more than 65% accuracy" in a region that is run off of a series of Haar Cascades would probably be better than shelling the region into oblivion.
I don't know, I get the hate and reticence to give decision making over to the robot, but... maybe the real answer is we should stop having wars?
they could take out all water and power utilities on the entire east coast over 24 hours
our million dollar missiles would be useless even if Whiskey-Pete was more than willing to use them over crowded cities
North Korea, Russia, China, et al
and considering we've depleted a decade's worth of weapons and half of the fleet is overseas, we're pretty darn vulnerable right now thanks to those in power
I wonder how far away we are from "dirty drones" where they don't even need a bomb, just radioactive material or toxic chemicals as dust