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Hawt_Dawg_II t1_jcf3wo1 wrote

Reply to comment by TheArmoredKitten in Zipline’s new drones release tethered mini-drones for precision package deliveries - These drone deliveries drop down from up to 300 feet high in a tethered ‘droid’ with its own propellers to target small landing zones like a table. by speckz

I mean you could say that about any precision guided system cause weapons were just the first ones to adopt that. You can't really make a good robot without using military tech.

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spooky_cicero t1_jcf77ov wrote

This is MIC brain poison, there’s no intrinsic reason that the military has to have the best tech

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Hawt_Dawg_II t1_jcf9gjy wrote

Idk what MIC means but the first computer was litterally an anti-air targetting system.

I know MIL-SPEC usually just means cheap and durable materials but you can't deny that war economy is one of the biggest driving factors behind a lot of technical development.

War created phones, gps, drones, and, as i said, computers in general.

Sure they don't always have the best but they usually did have the first.

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spooky_cicero t1_jcfj5d3 wrote

I guess I just wish it wasn’t the case but yeah, the military gets all the R&D funding so they get/make the cool & useful stuff

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TheChaosBug t1_jcfase1 wrote

The military has an extreme motivation and a ton of liquidity in funding, of course its going to drive a ton of technology production and research, it has done so throughout all of human history even without a MIC economy.

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TheArmoredKitten t1_jcf74zd wrote

Ok, but this is literally a loitering cluster mission with individual bomblet targeting capacity. Why would you need a mail delivery system to be airborne with dynamic target selection capacity? Mail and packages are a pretty freaking heavy payload, and mailboxes are a well established and predictable receptacle.

If you wanted to automate mail delivery efficiently, you would just automate a mail truck. Maybe they didn't mean it, but this thing is literally meant to deploy munitions.

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Hawt_Dawg_II t1_jcf93og wrote

I mean i guess yeah, same way a schoolbus is just a light armoured personel carrier.

Flight is way faster than following traffic.

Dynamic targeting is necessary cause a lot of people don't have mailboxes that take packages and skipping those saves you having to develop some kind of tactile device to even use mailboxes in the first place(that would be even more difficult and scary for you, imagine if they could open doors😱).

UAVs were first developed for military use, you can draw paralels to that market from any drone, that doesn't suddenly make it scary.

There's way cheaper and more efficient ways to makes combat UAVs than first developing a whole civil version and then suddenly adopting it for other purposes. That's unnecessarily complicated.

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Jerome_Long_Meat t1_jcs9de6 wrote

It’s to reduce time and reduce traffic. An automated mail truck is incredibly inefficient compared to this.

Also, don’t know what you’re smoking if you think a country is going to delivers bombs via a drone with a long ass rope attached to it.

There’s artillery that can be precisely guided within a few feet of the target, firing off from 20+ miles away. Drones have precision bombs that can also land within a foot or so of the intended target. With bombs there’s little need to be any more precise than that.

There’s no weaponized application for this.

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