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The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

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Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#91

Post by Rebelgecko »

jacobwilliamroy wrote: post #59
drusepth wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some notable ones off the top of my head include the Internet, GPS, computer mice (and basically the foundation of UI that uses them), onion routing, and prosthetic limbs. Compare DARPA's $3B budget to e.g. the DoD's $650-700B budget. You can argue that either or both should be spending some portion of their budget on "the people" in a myriad of ways, but that argument gets way too close to personal politics for an e…

With the exception of prosthetic limbs, so far those technologies have proven to be net negatives for humanity, only accelerating our suicide: GPS: Nuclear missile guidance system Internet: distributed nuclear missile command and control system Computer mice: windows Onion routing: fbi honeypot, enabled multiple violent insurgencies in northern africa and southwest asia. And the list of actual successful darpa projec…

I don't think those are very good examples. My internet must be defective. I haven't been able to launch a single nuclear missile from it.

Same for GPS-- compare the number of deaths from GPS guided nuclear missiles (0) to the number of lives saved by GPS (through more efficient farming, turn by turn directions, E911, etc)

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#92

Post by dbspin »

crocodiletears wrote: post #77
AniseAbyss wrote: post #51

The things you can do when you don't have to tackle child poverty or provide healthcare for all. Its probably because of my Euro socialist identity but all I see is wasteful spending.

This is why I believe the US should withdraw from NATO, and many of our other foreign military engagements. We could service our population's worst off so much better if we cut our global footprint to the bare minimum required to secure our most core interests (napkin math, but at ~150 billion usd, overseas bases make up ~20% of the DoD's budget[0]). Even reallocating those expenses by a quarter would be a tremendous…

Do you genuinely believe that whats holding back spending on social services in the US is the necessity of maintaining its military? That seems naive in the extreme.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#93

Post by ghaff »

tasogare wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)

Have a look at MSR.

What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#94

Post by taneq »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
oblio wrote: post #11

I wonder what they could do with modern computers and modern materials science. They would at least save a bunch of weight for the computers carried.

I would not be surprised if Boston Dynamics scaled up their dog to truck size rather sooner than later.

They did one the size of a large horse, but for the complexity and cost, it unfortunately didn’t seem to have much practical benefit over a semiautonomous 6-wheeler.

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#95

Post by [deleted] »

tasogare wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much real research, as opposed to early-stage product development, has ever happened at corporations? We can easily name a few specific examples (Bell Labs, Xerox PARC) presumably because they weren't the norm. (And there were doubtless some others at companies that weren't as aligned with what's thought of as today's tech industry such as DuPont.)

Have a look at MSR.

[deleted]

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#96

Post by pedrosorio »

ghaff wrote: post #93
tasogare wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have a look at MSR.

What about them? They make nice gear. They've done some nice innovation around some of the gear they make. That seems different from pumping multi-millions of dollars into research that may never have direct commercial value--unless you're talking about a different MSR.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Research

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#97

Post by [deleted] »

larkeith wrote: post #15
gojomo wrote: post #2

Only millions? Amazing! To actually deliver a physical, one-of-a-kind, working vehicle of that scale & novel function, for low-digit millions, seems pretty impressive to me - especially if the effort documented enough of their choices/discoveries/limitations to help inform later efforts.

$5m by 1985, with another $3.5m earmarked [1]. Accounting generously for inflation, that's $25m today [2]. It would be interesting to know what the price would look like if they tried the same thing today. [1] https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1985/11/4/the-pentagon-f... [2] https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1981-to-present-valu...

[deleted]

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#98

Post by mulmen »

foobarbecue wrote: post #14

I know someone who worked on a big radial hexapod robot for dod recently, and he said everyone involved in the project felt it was pointless (hexapods are just not a good platform for doing much of anything), but it was well-funded so they did their best.

Do researchers feel the same responsibility as defense attorneys to act on their client’s behalf?

Re: The US Army spent millions developing giant, six-legged walking trucks in 1980s

#100

Post by bigiain »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #9

485lb payload. Regardless of the design, it makes sense why they scrapped it.

These days delivering that sort of payload with a hexacopter is only a "stupidly expensive hobby grade" project.

(Though I'm not aware of any homebuilt multi rotors up in the 485lb plus a ~170lb pilot range. Yet.)

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