I'm on mobile and didn't watch the video, but a commercial airliner travels something like 500mph, 8 lbs of drone is pretty damaging at that speed. I know they take significant precautions against eg birds.
They do abuse engines a lot for testing (http://www.gereports.com/post/101784637445/where-jet-engines...) and the golf ball hail seems pretty challenging. I doubt an R/C drone is going to give the engine much trouble. Not that it couldn't damage the engine, just that it wouldn't take out the airplane.
Personally I think the drone discussion is more about the safety concerns they aren't talking about rather than what they do talk about. A lot of security scenarios are compromised if you can accurately deliver a small amount of payload from the air into an arbitrary space.
I think the FAA would do well to allow property owners, or their designated agents, a free hand to do what ever they want to drones over their property at altitudes below 400'. Whether it is shoot them out of the sky, or capture them with nets and resell them on the used drone market. Drone pilots would self limit their flying activities at that point I suspect.
Frozen turkeys almost completely disintegrate, they're mostly water. Drones have components that won't completely disintegrate, and those pieces can cause significant nozzle or turbine blade damage. An engine loss in turbine powered aircraft isn't exactly routine, but shouldn't result in the loss of the aircraft. It's still considered an emergency though. And a huge amount of air traffic isn't turbine powered, it's smaller general aviation aircraft with normally aspirated engines.
Agree but you can't have it both ways, a propeller plane is going to destroy the drone with a prop strike or the drone will bounce off the wing or vertical stabilizer. Any jet engine that ingests a drone will contain the damage to the engine itself (expensive, but again probably not the loss of an aircraft). And that is the "funny" part about the drone conversation in the press, it is highly unlikely that you'll ever bring down an airplane with a hobby (< 10lbs) drone. You can with a 1/10 scale jet powered model airplane, and those have been flying "unregulated" for over a decade. So why drones?
And I think it is the other things that hobby drones can do which is the actual target of regulation. Photographing sunbathing movie stars as a fairly banal example, but much more severe scenarios as well. And giving the property owners immunity from prosecution for destroying somebodies drone over their property would pretty much quench a lot of those (and create some interesting new markets like net guns)
Composite propellers aren't assured of surviving a drone strike. If any propeller were to crack essentially anywhere along its length, you're talking about tens of thousands of pounds of shearing force in operation. If the propeller separates, the imbalance very easily could cause the engine to dismount. If the engine departs the plane, the plane is no longer properly weight & balanced and will not be glidable, it will tail spin into the ground uncontrollable. So I completely reject the "is going to destroy the drone" comment.
Read FAR 33 and 35, and then also do a simple Google search about engine containment failures. They can be catastrophic despite the design and testing done. So I reject the "will contain" comment.
The difference with drones and hobby model aircraft is a moron can get and keep a drone airborne, model airplanes have analog input by a human and if you don't know how to fly "by the stick" with such airplanes, it's an expensive mistake very quickly.
In theory I have little problem with the idea of property owners being able to destroy overflying drones, but in practice this is covering vigilantism and is not compatible with civil society.
Inevitably there will have to be some regulation requiring drones to identify themselves (there's a color coded flashing LED proposal, that's like a license plate); from which police can look up the owner and operator and current flight plan; and then issue directly to the operator in real time either an order to cease current operation (return to home) or reveal operator location/ID.
We just can't have people shooting things out of the sky, and having them drop on someone's dog or kid in the back yard. It'll start neighborhood feuds that will not end well at all.
You miss my point completely. Radio controlled aircraft all have a similar threat profile to commercial and private aviation. That has been true before the big drone explosion. Drones don't pose any more threat than any other R/C plane[1].
And yet there has been a concerted effort to call out drones as a threat, so why? And the only reason that comes up is that drones in the form of quad/hex/octa copters can do things that regular R/C planes can not, and those things are threatening to people and privacy on the ground, not the air. So why not talk about the real problem instead of this "made up" problem?
[1] Ok so balsa or styrofoam gliders are probably not on anyone's list of threats.
The major danger of birds is that they travel in flocks, which greatly increases the probability of multiple-ingestion events taking out all engines.
I agree that a drone hitting an airplane could be awful, but the linked video shows a ~8ft across multicopter shearing the winglet off of an airliner, which is a comically implausible bit of scare-mongering.
Don't endangered species contribute some portion of new pharmaceuticals each year? Didn't we just finish unraveling the complex dynamics of a bee's flight, which our previous models couldn't explain?
My impression was always that the study of ecology and such is a big driver for technology, and by extension the economy and quality of life.
My point stands. A non-endangered species is equally likely to yield useful insight as an endangered one.
Though I realise that I have made a weak argument and that I do have a, perhaps unreasonable, bias towards not expending effort to preserve endangered species. In my mind preservation of endangered species is hoarding on a larger scale: someday this species may be useful to us, so let us keep it around.
education is still really valuable, if one chooses the right field.
Employment rates and salaries for geologists, metallurgical engineers, pharmacists, one can go from poverty to well off in the span of a single generation with the right college degree.
That isn't to say there is no problem. I doubt that history will look at this disparity kindly. Perhaps better education about education, and what options and powers are available to us in general, would be wise.
Moreover, if sun dies, how Mars/Venus will help us? They are in our solar system. Is n't it?
So we need not worry. Moreover if death is natural process, then some alternative star may born by that time. As of now, Science may not be that much advanced to capture new star.
But that won't give a reason to destroy/pollute earth and move on. Can you guarantee it won't happen to Mars or Venus?
mars and venus are the first step. we aren't going to jump out of the solar system on our first try. we will be lucky if we don't have a lot of failures in that endeavor, even after the experience and materials we gain from the solar system.
>Moreover if death is natural process
humans are also a natural process.
>some alternative star may born by that time.
you mean a new star is going to come to our solar system before the sun dies? I think I must be misunderstanding. If not, that's asinine.
I don't really get how you can call it fearmongering. who is supposed to be afraid? most people only think as far ahead as two generations. the only people who are disturbed by your strange brand of environmentalism are people who think hundreds of years into the future, ie other environmentalists.
your billions figure is also a gross overestimate. our timeline is not so generous.
and don't forget that life took (actually) billions of years to evolve. what are you trying to protect on mars and venus that is more important than that?
there isn't any reason to suspect that a small company doing one thing better will walk all over AAA, that's hyperbole. AAA's culture is good enough and their other large advantages give them their market share.
What are the advantages AAA studios have? There are no patents or secret know-hows, there is only reputation they have built themselves. If you have a superior process why cannot you do the same? For example, a small company id Software started developing games in C when everyone else had been doing Assembler and pretty soon not just established itself as a AAA studio but effected everyone else to switch to C as well. This is how a superior process works in the games industry.
Shitloads of money. Massive institutional knowledge of public relations and marketing. Direct lines to Sony and Microsoft. Every kind of benefit of economy of scale you could want.
You seem to be confusing publishers and studios. If you are so good with development practices you can sign the same contract other AAA studios do and get the same access to the benefits of economy of scale you attributed to studios.
Um. Publishers own the majority of these studios (or they self-publish, generally after a spinoff or long working relationship under a publisher). That's why those advantages apply to them. Otherwise, how exactly do you propose to "sign the same contract" without having money in the first place to build the infrastructure and already having spent a shitload of money to be in a position to be considered for it?
It's not like the idea of a barrier to entry is a new concept.
Some studios are owned by publishers, some are not. The statement I argued was made about every AAA studio, BTW. But if you cannot compete with a publisher owned studio then go after ones that are independant like Epic or Bungie or Insomniac or Arena or Telltale or Riot etc. etc. If you want how it's done look no further than Respawn. The studio was just founded in 2010 , signed a publishing contract without long relationship with the publisher and infrastructure, shipped a game already. It is how almost every AAA studio started (there are few studios that had been seeded by publishers, but as far as I know, none if them exist now).
It's pure meritocracy here, if you are good then getting a publishing deal is not a problem.
So you have a list of studios that all either got big when the barriers to entry were much, much lower than they are now (Insomniac did not spend a hundred million dollars on Spyro the frigging Dragon) or were founded by people with significant industry contacts and kicked off with direct lines to Sony and Microsoft and to publishers right in hand because of who they are? Are you sure you're proving what you think you're proving?
The core of an "AAA studio" is a big fat wallet. It's essentially definitional. You're not actually saying anything with respect to them in any of your posts.
So who were Riot's founders? Who were Media Molecule founders? Did the barriers for entry suddenly rise between 2008 and now? From what I see it's much easier to publish a game even for consoles. There are tons of indies doing that regularly. In 2008 you had to have a secured office and 20K in cache to get a devkit, today you can get a loaner at home if you cannot manage 2K price.
AAA do get a lot of money but it's the effect of them making games that sell well. There are dozens of startups in SF that cannot make even mobile games with their piles of cash and hundreds people. Money do not make you a AAA studio.
I don't know what you have in mind. In order for me, or anyone else who bases his/her judgement on fact, to give you an answer which you'll be able to recognize as right, you'll need to point out a concrete problem or question that contains facts that can be independently verified, rather than something abstract and hypothetical.
