China made the best drones, now Anduril does
palmerluckey.com
palmerluckey.com
He's not wrong. A few years ago, I spent $399 for a point-and-shoot digital camera that took decent photos under decent lighting conditions. It supported resolutions up to 1920x1080 or so. DJI just sold me a camera for the same price that takes better photos. Also, it takes videos. Also, it fucking flies. It can fly for over 20 minutes, shoot a 1080p or 2.7K video two miles away, and find its own way back home. Uncle, already.
In a completely-unrelated anecdote, some other people in China just sold me a 3 GHz vector network analyzer with performance and features comparable to a $10,000 portable VNA model from Keysight. It cost $70, batteries included. (And in an amusing bit of irony, its Chinese designer is currently upset because some other Chinese people used its CC-licensed design and GPL-licensed firmware to undercut her own Tindie offering.)
Not many people will find the second example very meaningful, but quite a few people can appreciate the first one. If you haven't played with a quad yet and your toy budget can accommodate $399 (really $499, because you want the 'Fly More' kit), consider setting aside a Saturday afternoon to goof around with a Mavic Mini. It'll change your perspective on the evolution of consumer-accessible technology and on your own neighborhood.
I can see why the Powers that Be in the US are pulling out all the stops to hose China by any means necessary. This is what it must have felt like to watch the rise of Japan in the 1970s, as they turned a reputation for being a bunch of half-assed copycats into a world-class engineering culture.
(It should go without saying that none of this is an attempt to justify any political, military, economic, or social actions on the part of China's government. But it won't, so there, it's said.)
Skydio is great drone, but it is toy-sized plastic drone.
Specifications of the Ghost 4 are really impressive: 100 minutes flight time with couple pounds of payload powered by standard Li-ion batteries, rugged design and materials, low sound signature and thin visible profile, on-board AI, swarming, autonomy, etc.
> Ghost is a single-rotor aircraft. The mechanicals of the rotor system are harder to design and manufacture than a DJI-style quadcopter, and flight controls are harder to program, but the result is much lower aerodynamic disk loading that results in longer endurance (over 100 minutes with real mission payloads), near-silent acoustic signature, high max payload capacity (dozens of pounds), and high speed. Compare this with a DJI Inspire 2, a high-end offering that costs $3000 that can lumber around with a couple pounds for 24 to 27 minutes, props screaming.
> Ghost is autonomous, powered by an onboard AI Core that can perform 32 trillion operations per second.
At least it does not require a mandatory PID control to not fall out of the sky.
Very little math involved in control of a helicopter. A 3 actuator type with 1 actuator for each axis basically has no need for any control signal manipulation, and can be made fully analog.
And a helicopter can be made more or less statically stable by pure mechanics, and aerodynamics.
P.S.
It doesn't seem that the drone in question exist in anything, but CGI at the moment.
P.P.S.
And quite unsound CG at that. On some of their CG shots, a swashplate actuators are attached with their axis coincidal with that rotor..., and a tail rotor control yoke not attached to anything...
Ghost 4 is in development/entering production. Being military project, it is likely that publishing real photos would be difficult at this stage for various reasons. Same with giving real blueprints/CAD files to a 3D artist for marketing materials.
Even very first quads were for example easily makeable with existing toy parts, and plastic.
But with just a bit more efforts, single rotor craft take a lead from quads by a significant margin.
quad = difficult to develop software control loop
One is easier to replicate after initial development than the other. Heli crash also usually results in destruction of Rotor Head, the most expensive part. You could use an analogy of Carburetor versus EFI.
So far, this tech seems to be recon + defense oriented and not straight up slaughterbot killer drones etc.
If we aren't building it, someone else will - and I'd rather us have this than China etc. or some other authoritarian government.
> In June 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril, along with former Palantir Technologies executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens and Brian Schimpf, and early Oculus hardware lead Joe Chen.[40] (Anduril, like Palantir, is named after an object from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy writings.) In March 2018, Anduril began a pilot program for the U.S. government to detect illegal immigrants attempting to enter Texas from Mexico; the program led to 55 attempted entrants being caught in its first 12 days in operation.
This post is advertising for a drone company that sells surveillance equipment to the militarized federal police department in the US that is responsible for running the concentration camps in Texas.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentratio...
Here we have category of "person invents a definition that advances their political goals."
GP's point stands that invoking what is signified to most readers by "concentration camp" is in a different universe from what you're talking about.
You can call out, highlight, criticize and advocate against bad practices without sensationalizing the discourse.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp
No, that’s what they are. That’s what you call such a camp.
EG, here's the Auschwitz Memorial twitter account bio: https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum
> Official account EN. The Memorial preserves the site of the former German Nazi Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. You can help http://donate.auschwitz.org
You said the person "invents a definition", but that's easily refuted by looking in a dictionary.
concentration
7. attrib.: concentration camp, a camp where non-combatants of a district are accommodated, such as those instituted by Lord Kitchener during the South African War of 1899-1902; one for the internment of political prisoners, foreign nationals, etc., esp. as organized by the Nazi regime in Germany before and during the war of 1939-45; also fig.; concentration cell Electr., a cell whose difference of potential is due to the difference of concentration of the solutions in which the electrodes are immersed.
1901: J. Ellis in Hansard's Parl. Deb. Ser. iv. XC. 180 “The policy of placing the women and children confined in the concentration camps in South Africa, whose husbands and fathers are in the field, on reduced rations.”
1901: Contemp. Rev. Oct. 528 “Considerable controversy has taken place concerning the Concentration Camps.”
1930: O. Williams tr. P. Monelli's Toes Up iii. 210 “Those who returned from being prisoners were parked in a concentration camp under the guard of other soldiers.”
1934: Ann. Reg. 1933 173 “Germany..For dealing with the masses of prisoners special concentration camps were opened.”
1934: C. Lambert Music Ho! i. 52 “The purely fashionable change in the tastes of the concentration camp of intellectuals to whom Diaghileff played up.”
1935: B. Russell Relig. & Sci. x. 248 “In Germany and Russia,..those who openly disagree, even if they escape with their lives, are liable to forced labour in a concentration camp.”
1940: H. G. Wells Babes in Darkling Wood iii. i. 234 “The White Paper of Nazi atrocities in the concentration camps and elsewhere.”
1941: [see Aryanization b].
1943: [see Aryan a. 2].
1959: J. Braine Vodi v. 76 “He caught sight of his own arms, reduced almost to concentration-camp dimensions, the veins blue and obscenely swollen against the white skin.”
Edit: To clarify, I'm pointing out there is a huge, gigantic difference between trying to keep people out of a country, and trying to keep them in. Conflating the two is beyond dishonest.
The Nazis operated two types of camps.
They ran concentration camps, forced labour camps, and extermination camps.
https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-camps/types-of-cam...
> Separating concentration camps and extermination camps
> It is key to separate concentration camps from extermination camps.
> The aim of the Nazi concentration camps was to contain prisoners in one place. The administration of the camps had a distinct disregard for inmates’ lives and health, and as a result, tens of thousands of people perished within the camps.
> The aim of the Nazi extermination camps was to murder and annihilate all races deemed ‘degenerate’: primarily Jews but also Roma.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/concentration-camp
The topic is super partisan right now, but in the long run, the current U.S. detention centers near the southern border have a good chance of being considered concentration camps because of the intense and overt focus on the national origin and ethnicity of those detained. Immigrants of other ethnicities, even those without entry visas or other documentation problems, are not being similarly detained.
I would be more worried about current governments that are committing genocide with good old fashioned guns or chemical weapons. Drones are just one more tool in an existing arsenal.