Next gen UAVs

[ericire12]

It aint the SR-71, but wow! Thats gonna be some useful CIA stuff right there. 

Atricle here:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/aircraft-lands-on-side-of-wall-vertically.html

[fightingquaker13]

Sometimes I don't know whether to be proud or scared spitless at our military technology. I mean, its great if we're reminding some beared barbarians from East where-in-the-hell exactly who is in charge. Not so great if a future admistration abrogates the Constitution and hard choices have to made. How do you fight or protect against something like that? You just don't, it will call in the GPS guided bombs and you lose, every time.
FQ13

[nupe]

I hate to say it, but the hobby store that I work at durring the school year carries just about every thing you would need to build that plane.  Aside from the auto pilot system that is, but stick a couple of electrical engineers and computer science guys in a room for a couple of months and that would be pretty well worked out.  With the looks of the battery pack and electronics that thing is using they would probably get about 10 mins of flight time out of it and it wouldn't be moving real fast.  Plus those profile foamies cannot handle much for wind. 

[Solus]

I bet payload is gonna be limited.

Any video gear, GPS receiver and even a minimal transmitter might be an overload. 

[jnevis]

I hate to say it, but the hobby store that I work at durring the school year carries just about every thing you would need to build that plane.  Aside from the auto pilot system that is, but stick a couple of electrical engineers and computer science guys in a room for a couple of months and that would be pretty well worked out.  With the looks of the battery pack and electronics that thing is using they would probably get about 10 mins of flight time out of it and it wouldn't be moving real fast.  Plus those profile foamies cannot handle much for wind. 

Doesn't take months, maybe a week or so.

Just to really mess with your head, if you're seeing it on Discovery there are two or three generations beyond in the field.

[Sponsor]

[tombogan03884]

Doesn't take months, maybe a week or so.

Just to really mess with your head, if you're seeing it on Discovery there are two or three generations beyond in the field.

I know this is true, when the Harrier vertical take off plane got popular with the public it had been in service with the Marines for nearly 10 years and the English had been using them even longer.