Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." -- John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Caesar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friedrich Nietzsche
"A kind Providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancour, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate."--Edmund Burke
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”--General Sir Charles Napier
"Μολὼν λαβέ" -- Leonidas
"Blogito Ergo Sum" -- Neptunus Lex
Lex, the late Paul McCready built up a company called Aerovironment. Aerovironment built a lot of drones for the military in various sizes (mostly small) over the last 15 years. Several of their employees are/were world class aeromodellers. They had a Russian–
Andrukov, designing propellers. He was a world class Wakefield (rubber model) flyer. I’ve seen them recruiting for talent at model aviation trade shows. A little bit of shade tree engineering, or “suck it and see” in the mix doesn’t hurt when you are dealing with small drones. My own particular favorite of their aircraft that I’ve seen was something called the “Black Widow”. I saw it back in 2000. It was about the size and shape of a 250 page paper back book, carried a color TV transmitter,
could fly for 20 to 30 minutes, and was air piston launched from what looked like a Halliburton metal briefcase. If you were a Lieutenant of Infantry and wanted to look around a corner to see what was there without getting one of your riflemen shot up, it was just the ticket. It never went into production–but other Aerovironment products were bought by the military in fairly significant quantities.
My father used to build remote controlled airplanes – from 10 inches to quadra scale (like 8 ft wing spans with a chain saw motor). The club guys used to sit around and talk about putting in downward looking video cams for buzzing beach babes, which was certainly one step up from the booster cam I used to shoot in my Estes rockets. Since 90% were retired O-5s and O-6s the talk invariably turned to “why not use for local scouting, or carry a thermite grenade to other side of hill and drop on arty posit.” or other military applications. These days it ain’t hard to imagine somebody using RC and loading it up with a bio-aerosol, some C-4, or other stuff and having a nice terrorist toy. Can you imagine sitting off LAX and flying something like that loaded with buckshot into path of approaching or departing airliner and then going “bang”? I certainly hope the jammers are active. Another good app there, heh?
This reminds me of a buddy who spent WEEKS tearing apart a Playstation 2 and re-soldering the chips, then reprogramming it to be the flight control computer for a UAV. It also had a really good target recognition software and got a UAV within a foot of it’s target.
One of the NAVAIR types remarked, “We’ll that’s great. You took our money and gave us a UAV that doesn’t do anything new. And now we have to figure out a way to track all the PS2 shipments into the Middle East!”