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Microdrone Spy Planes
glinden writes "BBC News is reporting that Israel is now deploying microdrone spy planes. These planes have a wingspan of 13 inches (33 cm), can be carried in a backpack, can be launched by a single soldier, and can even fly through windows. The next step in the drone wars?"
Check out the Scientific American Frontiers episode on flight: Flying Free (2001)
http://www.pbs.org/saf/1109/index.html
There's a lot of cool stuff related to similar projects.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
NOVA ran a show a few months ago about the development and deployment of unmanned military aircraft. They have some interesting items here.
You can get one pretty easily.s .html
http://www.rcmodels.com/airplanes-toy-rc-airplane
The one in the picture even looks sort of the same.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
This country isn't in the UN member list.
What kind of government does this Palestine have? Who is its head of state?
Slashdot Moderation: From positive to terrible in 2 "insightful" posts.
For those of you who, like me, are fascinated by these things, check out The UAV forum lotsa neat discussion, information, and links.
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
Hey if you gave the Palestinians billions of US$ a year in military aid maybe they would.
Then they wouldn't have to "manually" deliver the bombs either.
You seem unaware of the billions in aid the the EU and other Arab nations give to the Palestinians.
Ugh. It is well known that Israel is often ahead of the U.S. in developing new military technology. I think you should be asking whether the planes you saw employed by the U.S. army were bought from Israel. Although the U.S. was the first to experiment with drones during Vietnam, it is Israel that created the first incredibly succesfull drones which inspired the united states UAV program. At the time it was embarassing to the DOD that Israel's tiny budget could accomplish what they had spent billions on and failed. This is what is meant when people say that the money pumped into Israel more than pays for itself with the intelligence and technology they provide.
That is the same retarded logic used in banning non-lethal, although permanent injury causing weapons like laser dazzler's and other high-tech weaponry.
What retarded logic? All I said was this will be used in the current conflict, and that it has both positive and negative potential.
I must not be getting your point, because I agree that it is better to disable a soldier than to kill them... at least it is an option.
On a less human note, it is occasionally more desirable to wound than kill. For instance, in the civil war many generals told their soldiers to inflict non-lethal wounds. It wasn't out of brotherly love, but the fact that a wounded soldier takes one or two good soldiers to drag him off the field to the medic tent. That means you removed three men from the fighting with one shot.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
As an avid R/C pilot for many years. I don't think using an aircraft with a 13 inch wingspan is going to do much good. These planes are extremely suceptable to wind. I have a 1/2a pilon racer with a 24" wingspan and an .049 engine. It can only be flown when the wind is less than 15 mph. In a place where mountains, hills and thermals abound I doubt their plane will be much use.
Btw the 1/2a racer has been clocked at over 90 mph. These things scream.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Been done. The version at this link... Link Comes with fixed pitch, but can be upgraded to full collective (he's talking about collective pitch on a helicopter blade, not the Borg you Star Trek watching clod.) These things can do wild aerobatics, inverted flight, whatever you want. Putting a GPS receiver on it might be a bit of a challenge, as they will hardly lift anything...I imagine they could carry a grenade, too though.
Of Course it is designed to Explode, and to destroy the entire family - Dad, Mom, Grandma, Grandpa, the kids, etc. It is also designed to turn anyone who survives into a person dedicated to revenge upon the people who support the military which directed the thing into the living room in the first place. What a wonderful weapon to advance state-driven terrorism and take us all one more step away from any home we'll ever live in a peaceful world!
And you get 4 points for being funny... What a sick bunch of bastards!
A few people have pointed out that this thing looks like a model airplane. Thats because it is. The body structure is directly copied from the RC modeling world.
The reason this model airplane technology is seeing millitary applications is because of two technologies.
1) li-poly batterys. Very light and has a high energy density.
2) Brushless motors. These are far and away more efficient than the older technology brushed motors. They also happen to be dead silent in the air - the only noise you can hear comes from the prop.
Electic flight has finally matured in the last two years. Flight times have gone from 5-8 min just a few years ago to todays hour plus flight times (put a couple li-poly packs in parallel and your good to go.
batteries can be had here:
http://www.hobby-lobby.com/kokam.htm
off the shelf planes can be bought here:
www.gws.com.tw
www.hobby-lobby.com/
discussion fourums here:
www.rcgroups.com/
Russians use something like this, too, against Chechen insurgents (calling them "rebels" is fundamentally wrong). Their drone is called "Pchela" it's quite a bit bigger and requires at least two soldiers to launch (from what I've seen on TV).
Here's some info:
A Pchela (remotely piloted reconnaissance drone that provides television surveillance of ground targets) weighs 130 kilograms (loaded), has an operational range of 110 to 150 kilometers, can fly at altitudes ranging from 100 meters to 3 kilometers, and cruises at speeds from 11- to 150 kilometers an hour. Combat-recorded range: 55 kilometers. Its flight endurance is 2 hours (it needs 20 liters of gasoline for this). Its power plant is piston plus two solid rockets takeoff boosters (power at 32hp). Onboard of the Russian drone are a video camera, a still camera, a mapping camera, and a secure radio. It uses a parachute for landing. Pchela is probably equal in capability to many Western UAV in the same class. However, it is a slower, tactical unmanned aerial vehicle than, for example, the Russian the 800-kilometer-per-hour Reis UAV.
More info available at:
http://ufo.psu.ru/eng/dagestan.html
NATO soldiers are not allowed to use shotguns, hollowpoint bullets, or anti-personnel lasers, because, perversely, they might leave the target alive. The 5.56mm rounds fired from an M16 are required to be jacketed to reduce their chance of tearing off an arm or leg, making nonlethal injuries more treatable.
Um, wrong.
First, shotguns *are* currently used by military security patrols. They're not used by field troops because of the extremely short range. In WWI, they were used in trench warfare.
Second, hollowpoints are *more* destructive, not less. Solid rounds tend to punch through, damaging only those things directly in path, and many times imparting only a fraction of their energy into the target. Hollow points #1 expand to a wider path, and #2 impart more of their energy (usually all of it) into the target, due to the greater surface area. This causes far greater damage.
As for 5.56 mm rounds being required to be jacketed, actually, *all* small-arms rounds are required to be jacketed, from long before the 5.56 was even on the drawing board. (Pre-dates the Geneva convention.) The 5.56mm is most dangerous due to the incredible *velocity* (up to 3,200fps) it carries. When hitting a solid body, a hypersonic shock wave follows the projectile, creating damage far removed from the actual path of the projectile. A hit in the thigh has been known to cause thrombosis of the major arteries well up into the abdomen and chest. (Fluids transmit shock waves *very* efficiently.) Also, that same hit, in the meat of the thigh, where the projectile itself never impacted the bone, can easily pulverize the femur, from the shock waves alone.
No comment on the lasers, that's out of my area of expertise.
And yes, I *have* taken several courses on wound ballistics.
I don't believe that the Palestinians' tactic of murdering civilians is ever justified in any circumstance, and in general I find myself to the right of the people I know on this subject; I would call myself "pro-Israel." Nevertheless, the basic fact is that Israel is the occupier, "Palestine" is the occupied. Even Ariel Sharon has acknowledged this. They don't call them "the occupied terroritories" for nothing. I daresay the Israelis would be more than happy to sign a peace treaty right now, considering that they are currently in possession of the land that is in dispute.
Regarding the grandparent post, there's no need for anything as baroque as poison darts. Sheik Ahmed Yassin was killed by Hellfire missiles launched by an Apache. Hellfires are laser-guided, so there was either an IDF soldier on the scene or a remote drone like the one in the article. It's easy to imagine the Apache being replaced by a highflying Predator or other unmanned craft, with target designation being performed by a drone. Gregg Easterbrook blogged about this today.
Completely incorrect. The inconvenient fact that there were all these people already there is why the Zionists had to engage in a campaign of ethnic cleansing in 1948, and why the "right to return" has been an issue.
Let's get the history straight. At the end of WWI, with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations decision to place Palestine under the administration of Great Britain. The British double-crossed the Arab population living there and made the Balfour Declaration, commiting Britian to the establishment of Jewish homeland in Palestine. (As with current U.S. support, the primary motivation was strategic interests in the area.)
In the early 20th century there were around 50,000 Jewish settlers living in the region, constituting perhaps 10% of the population. The remaining 90% of the population was, oddly enough. not very pleased at having foreign colonial powers come in and take over. (It should be noted that before WWI, the Jews and Arabs in the region got along reasonably peacefully. It was Zionists outside Palestine who worked for the Balfour Declaration.)
During the 1920s, thanks to British policies about 100,000 Jewish immigrants arrived - a substantial number in a region with a population of about 750,000. The Jewish population more than doubled, rising to over 17%, and tensions began to rise.
In the 1930s, the Nazis began their reign of terror, and many Jews who escaped came to Palestine. By 1939 the Jewish population was over 445,000, out of a total of about 1,500,000 - nearly 30 per cent. By 1947, the total population of Palestine was 1,850,000, including 608,000 Jews.
The large Jewish population in the region at the time of the parition was only the result of decades of concerted effort by the British and by Zionist organizations.
It's a very popular myth that there was this vast empty space on the map that the Jewish refugees from WWII could occupy. The truth is that there were plenty of people aready living there, getting screwed over by the British Empire's form of Zionism.
(And indeed, the Jews have been victims in this too, a reasonable desire for a homeland twisted and warped by British and American politics, so that instead of slowly and peacefully building a independant nation, today the "Jewish homeland" is an unsustainable enterprise, existing only because of the support of the United States.)
Israel is Jewish state. Orthodox Judaism is the only legally recognized form of Judaism, and has considerable authority, with control over marriages, burials, and decisions over "who's a Jew". It takes great twisting of the language to regard that as secular.
It takes greater twisting to re
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