22 thoughts on “Tiny Fast Drones”

  1. How about really strong fans in the area of protection?
    How do these mini drones handle heavy rain or just plain old smoke? I suppose there is always netting…

  2. I’m having a hard time believing this. Something that small has little volume for energy storage, and the drag of those drones at 300 MPH will require quite a bit of energy to maintain the velocity.

    1. Right. I doubt “mosquito-sized” drones have enough juice to get to 300 mph, let alone do it for any significant amount of time. Plus, what, with beating wings? Pull the other one, it’s got bells on.

      That doesn’t mean I don’t agree with the main point. Small fast drones have all kinds of negative implications.

  3. Having read more of the article, even more so. What it really is is “some of them are really tiny, some are really fast” and so on. The 300+mph ones weigh 3.5lb and the motors are water-cooled. There’s no way the insect-sized ones are fast or have any meaningful flight time. I wouldn’t be surprised if they just exist to deliver a microphone somewhere. And then there’s a 6 inch 1.2 ounce drone that has 30 minutes of flight time.

    Etc., etc.

  4. So far, all the very small “drones” I’ve seen were tethered. There just isn’t any way to put the controller, batteries, motors, sensors on such a small thing. Even working with bare chips, the controller is several mm on a side, a camera would be bigger and heavier. Maybe, some time it can be all integrated in a package small enough to be compared to a mosquito, but not yet.

    The bigger and medium sized are a real problem. They have optically tethered drones that can unwind 20km of fiber and are immune to simple jamming. On the other hand, the Ukrainians can follow the fiber back to neutralize the controller.

    The even bigger problem is that we have to use megabuck missles to shoot down kilobuck drones. It will take a lot of getting used to for for the military establishment that doesn’t even acknowledge that the battle field now has over the horizon weapons that can target individual soldiers for cheap.

  5. When I was at DARPA, I got an earful from a contractor who told me what he really wanted to work on: a bee (a natural, biological bee) equipped with a chip that could control the bee’s movements, and return all kinds of signal intelligence – including audio and video. I found it interesting, if a bit far-fetched. Yesterday I heard that the Chinese have perfected that very thing.

    1. Yes, but did he properly pitch this idea by answering the What, How, Who questions of the Heilmeier Catechism?

  6. – very small drones with very limited flight radius.
    – very fast drones that are large (3.5 lbs.) and likely incredibly noisy.
    – largish drones (easily visible if they’re within listening or striking range) with a long endurance.
    – un-jammable drones because they’re controlled by fiber optic cable which unwinds, but are limited in what they can carry other than the cable.

    The headline prompts you to think that these capabilities are all in one drone, but they aren’t. Pick (at most) one.

    And they’re not combining those capabilities in one drone any time soon, since they work directly against each other.

    1. Yes, they are conflating all of these different types of drones then claiming they are all being used in Ukraine

    1. Wow, does that bring home memories! I read one or so Danny Dunn books when I was a kid, and have been trying to remember his name for the past 30 years. The one I remember was “Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine”, which in retrospect is amazingly prophetic.

      2. I remember the “Homework Machine” as well.
        Danny Dunn was a younger version of Tom Swift IIRC.

        Very prophetic. Nowadays, this story would be viewed as a documentary. The only thing missed in the late 50’s was the fact that computers would be networked and computation provided as a service. But then again you have to cut the author a lot of slack given the technology of the time…

      3. The thing about the “Homework Machine”, is that those kids did far more work getting their school textbooks into Dad’s computer than their assignments would have required had they just done their homework.

        Even as a kid, when I read the story for the first time, I realized this. (I think in the story, even their teacher did!).

        Now if Dad had already put those textbooks in first, NOW you have a Grok(able) story…

        1. It is like people using ai to do CAD. By the time you articulate to ai what you want it to do, you could have learned how to do the CAD yourself.

  8. There’s really not anything drones do that model airplanes weren’t already doing. Even FPV drones started out as a cool thing to add to a model airplanes so they could dogfight or give you the pilot’s view from your P-51 model.

    So far as I know, the fastest RC model jet hit 451 mph. It’s one of the hobby micro-turbines in a Concorde style wing.

    1. Which is why the authorities are trying to end the R/C model airplane hobby with all sorts of restrictions.

  10. The USA needs robust manufacturing of commercial drones, especially motors, cameras, and flight control.

Comments are closed.