Water cannons can be used to disperse a crowd of rioting people or unfortunatley sometimes on people legitimately protesting…they can also be used to put out fires or to stop pirates boarding a ship. What am I rambling on about? Well look at the context, technology has many benefits. Dont be surprised if urgent organs for transplant are delivered by drones in the future, this is why improvements in design like this are good for everyone.

I agree marcoop, this tech does have fantastic potential. However at the moment the main use of drones is to bomb innocent people in Afghanistan. I’m all for technological progress but that shouldn’t stop us from condemning abhorrent practices such as this.

You realise the drones being uses in Afghanistan are enormous? The size of a car at least?

The drones the subject of this article are the size of a briefcase.

But hell yea. Rabble rabble rabble.

I agree, imagine the sound of a drone, a robot, flying over then BOOM your family or village is dead. Unfortunately you’d probably get a greater reaction out of people if you asked them how they feel about Simon Cowell’s effect on the music industry than you would if you asked them about the despair of the Afghan war ‘collateral damage’

I imagine it wouldn’t be too much of an effort to upscale the tech.

If you understand physics you would realise that all objects, regardless of size, are subject to the same force of gravity, 9.8 m/s. Therefore an ant sized drone will fall to earth at the same rate as an elephant sized drone.

Rabble, rabble, rabble

If you actually understood physics you’d understand that an ant sized drone would take significantly longer to drop to the earth than an elephant sized drone due to atmospheric resistance. Newton’s gravity equation only works in a vacuum.

This article is about helicopter type drones. The drones in Afghanistan are jet engined or turbo prop. If this was an article about the rumba autonomous Hoover would you be going on about American drones?

Atmospheric resistance is unrelated to the mass of a body it is acting upon, rather the shape of the body. A spherical body weighing 1g will accelerate at the same rate as a spherical body of 1000kg under the influence of gravity.

That being said, i do concede your point about the drones in use in Afghanistan being of a different type to the drone in this video.

In a vacuum. Not in the atmosphere. A ping pong ball would take longer to fall than a cannonball because it’s more susceptible to wind and air etc.

Even if you’re talking about two spherical objects the same size, a 1g ping pong ball would take longer to fall than a ball the same size made of lead because the lead ball is less susceptible to the force of air.

But you were still talking about an any sizes object and an elephant sized object.