@stormsweeper Yeah, there are lots of options. I think "field tested" or maybe better "field proven" comes as close to the specific nuance without suggesting anyone on the ops team got shot in the process. @gallego
@isaackuo I think with r&d time and volume to get the quirks out, tricopters might win — slightly more complex, but less battery (and thus more payload) for the same weight and perf envelope. I don't see much going further afield than that winning soon, though. @graydon@wonka@dr2chase@cstross
@isaackuo See up thread — an absolute minimum hardware cost terminal guidance package that e.g. might not even be able to handle a bounding box in a gps-denied environment, because good inertials are expensive and video terrain guidance is expensive at the resolution needed. @graydon@wonka@dr2chase@cstross
@isaackuo Definitely, with sufficient limitations. It feels like a lot of the lethality is down to the precision of fully-intelligent terminal guidance. As a jamming backup it's an on obvious win, but as a primary, it's less clear. @wonka@graydon@dr2chase@cstross
@isaackuo Yeah. I feel like the ground environment is a lot more complex, though — like, yes, if you're using this in the context of an initial push on a trench line or defense against the same, sure, but once you're in the middle of breaking through or reacting to contact in a disordered environment, or in basically any urban context at all, it's going to be a lot messier, especially if you're taking advantage of them as light standoff weapons and running them a couple km out @wonka@graydon@dr2chase@cstross
@wonka Not having effective iff or visual human confirmation means you turn your semi-autonomous munitions into fratecide machines.
Shockingly, there are reasons for many of these laws and reasons why states signed them that don't have anything to do with human rights, too. @graydon@dr2chase@cstross@isaackuo
@graydon The Geneva convention is pretty damn firm on the requirement to positively identify a target as a combatant, notwithstanding the massive criminal negligence we've seen from the US and Israel there, and even the Israelis are still meticulously faking a paper trail. I think there will be a lot of hesitancy to implement something that dumb, and even if you did, you'd need to implement serious IFF systems in them, which adds cost and attack surface. IFF hardware is usually pretty heavily protected with self-destroy-on-tamper devices etc, which is hard to do when you need it on munitions you're buying by the 100k, not to mention key distribution, etc. It's not that this is impossible, but it's neither cheap nor easy. Yes, folks outside of conventional militaries may do this stuff anyway, but it's not a straightforward set of choices even there — human in the loop solves a ton. @dr2chase@cstross@isaackuo
Thinking about security, failure, change, art, and living. Recruiting barbarians; complicate your narratives. Fractional CISO to startups via Systems Structure Ltd. HEL/NYC/LON