Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

TheArmoredKitten t1_jcf74zd wrote

Reply to comment by Hawt_Dawg_II 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

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.

−5

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.

8

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.

1