251–260 of 275 posts
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Why even use drug mules if you can just drone everything over the border?
Their carry weight is absolute shit and ferrying over 10 doses isn't really worthwhile
In the case of the mule, the carry weight is relative to shit.
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> the drone... proceeded northwest at high speed and climbing, with the helo and another LE helo in trail. The copter began to climb and flew out of the TUS area about 50 miles to the northwest of town into the middle of nowhere desert out by the mine west of KAVQ. It was last seen climbing through 14,000’ and into the undercast, where it disappeared. > the mystery craft was essentially playing with them by repeatedl…
To my memory; these things have been repeatedly popping up in the southern US; Arizona and Texas. Maybe not for under $1k. But under any price? Is it physically possible? Yes. We're not talking about a hobbyist guy in his garage here. We're talking about either US Military accidentally caught in a game of cat and mouse with local law enforcement, or more likely: drug cartels. Both organizations operate heavily in the…
This is a real UAV that is military grade.
It was either the actual military (it was first discovered just outside of an AirForce base) or a drug cartel that got their hands on a drone. Military Grade drones are pretty available at this point to any group with enough means (money). For example the Elbit Hermes 450[1] is a long-endurance tactical drone that has been sold to many countries outside of the big militaries. For example Georgia (the country), Azerbaijan, North Macedonia, The Philippines, Zambia, Botswana, Thailand, and even Mexico, Brazil, Columbia. Columbia bought a ton of drones from Elbit in the range of "tens of millions of dollars". The benefit of the Hermes 450 is the cost, it is supposed to cost only around $1M, which makes it very affordable for countries without massive military budgets like the US. I don't think it is a stretch that a drug cartel bought one ($1M is a small price to pay if it can save a single $10M drug run from being captured), or that they bought it from another country like Georgia or Columbia.
They are satellite controlled and have a 20 hours flight time, meaning it could have easily flown from a long ways away.
Oh and even the US Customs and Border Patrol own two of these same drones. Which I find also interesting.
These helicopter pilots were either chasing a drug cartel drone like this or a USAF drone. Because they first spotted it nearby the Air Force base, it seems to me that most likely it was actually an Air Force drone (most likly a MQ-1 Predator drone) that was conducting a training simulation near the base when it was discovered by the helo pilots. Then it just proceeded to play around with them. The one pilot talked about how it would fly in front of the helicopter and then maneuver to get behind it and follow it, staying in the helicopter's shadow. That sounds like a military move. I bet this whole thing started off as a training mission and then went off course and they decided to train on the helicopter pilots. They even said that the average speed of the drone was an estimated 70 knots. Well the MQ-1 UAV has a cruising speed of... surprise, surprise... 70 knots!
> I would have to imagine it was larger than a quadcopter, and I guarantee you it was nothing like a quadcopter from how long it was up - it has to be satellite-driven because there’s no line-of-sight, there’s no cell phone coverage that could have dealt with that, so it has to be satellite-driven, which is pretty freakin’ sophisticated.” So, setting aside this claim that there’s no line of sight, my bet is these guy…
Assuming that the story is true, the thing that rules out a traditional quadcopter is the fact that it was flying for an hour. You can make quads fast or long range/endurance, but AFAIK, nobody is even close to making a quad that can do 100mph for an hour. The battery weight for that kind of flight time would be too heavy for the quad to fly.
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I fly FPV drones too and the batteries suck and this thing seemed to have 40+ minutes of flight time. Even top of the DJI drones (which are not exactly freestyle/racy) would top out at around 30 minutes. Not implying aliens, but I wish we had that kind of battery technology in my Nazgul5, if it's a drone they've seen.
Hydrocarbons have 100 times the energy density. We have the technology.
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Sounds like something a 4g modem could handle trivially.
4g modems connect to 4g towers. 4g towers transmit downward to users in the city below them. They do not transmit upward. That is why if you leave you phone turned on during a commercial flight, it will stop working after take off anyway. The towers don't send signal upward. You might still collect some residual signal for a little bit if you are near a tower and directly above it for a thousand feet or so, but not a…
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Um. What do you think the grid of wires in the window of your microwave is for? Its a faraday cage to keep you from being cooked.
If you pump enough power at the shielding, a) some of it will get through and b) the shielding itself will get very hot from induced eddy currents.
Problem is you’re fighting path loss which is exponential with distance, whereas the power of your emitter is scaling linearly.
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Why is Google allowing lists to be built?
Well, once you get past the loaded allow part, if you read their mission statement, you will note it is their actual mission: "Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/mission/
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Why even use drug mules if you can just drone everything over the border?
Their carry weight is absolute shit and ferrying over 10 doses isn't really worthwhile