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Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

anduril.com

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Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#151

Post by ansible »

danbruc wrote: post #147
ansible wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get where you are coming from. In the last two decades, the USA and allies have spent trillions of dollars increasing the suffering and death in Iraq and Afghanistan, and didn't even gain much geopolitical advantage in return. A giant waste of time, money, and human life. Had we not invaded them, there might be a million more Iraqis alive today. Afghanistan would still be a failed state though. The 2014 invasion of…

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> This is what got us the Ukraine war in the first place, an uncompromising hard line against a weak Russia because the USA was in the position to do so. Russia opposed each NATO expansion but did nothing in the end and it was the same gamble with Ukraine, hoping that Russia will once more do nothing.

Ah, the classic "The West forced Russia to invade Ukraine. Like the government in Ukraine didn't have any legitimate reason to align itself with the West after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014.

Have you heard the rhetoric coming from Putin and the Kremlin? About how Ukraine doesn't have a legitimate national or ethnic identity of their own, and how the territory of Ukraine should just be a part of Russia. And how the Ukrainians (who are really just Russians, really) don't deserve to self-govern?

Going on right now in occupied Ukraine, the Russians are actively purging all Ukrainian language and culture. Only the Russian language will be taught in schools.

Yes, the West is totally to blame here. Totally.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#153

Post by tamimio »

adastra22 wrote: post #61
goalonetwo wrote: post #47

The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we are not), you realize that you really just help to kill people.

You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that humanity is not an intrinsically violent species, and that if we all held hands and sang Kumbaya we'd be able to get along peaceably and without need for defensive tools. Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the pr…

Same goes with other nations, it sounds nice from your perspective but not so much when others do it too, you think you’re enforcing “peace” but reality is completely different, for that reason MIC exists and thrive for these “peaceful” wars, that we all know they are far from being peaceful. Sure, it’s naive to think that everyone will halt offensive/defensive work, but trying to justify it that it’s to protect the “herd” and bring “peace” is far more naive, there are no wolves, it’s another dogs and other herd too, it’s always about dominance and power struggles.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#154

Post by tamimio »

goalonetwo wrote: post #47

The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we are not), you realize that you really just help to kill people.

As someone who work in drones and robotics, it’s one of the reasons I always request the end goals not just the project objectives, also, nothing is weaponized, I would prefer to sleep well at night knowing I only hurt flies in my life.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#155

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

omnimus wrote: post #131
nulld3v wrote: post #73

It feels like someone copied this company verbatim out of a cyberpunk world and pasted it in our world. Everything is cyberpunk, down to the name, logo, design style and products. Unbelievably cool, but it also terrifies me.

Aesthetics turns out to be pretty powerful even for things like war. This must really attract gamer engineers. There was once certain army that used clothes by Hugo Boss that also looked super cool and i am sure many people loved how they looked in them.

Today they wear Prada.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/kadyrov-chec...

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#156

Post by brainerazer »

zmgsabst wrote: post #105
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US army has helped stop the russians from killing me and my friends in Ukraine. The russians launch missiles and drones at civilians, like me. Last October, I was sitting at my kitchen table, writing Haskell and working on my startup, when outside my kitchen window the local air defence successfully blasted a Shahed 136 out of the air. Both the missile trail and the cloud from the explosion hung in the air for se…

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Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#157

Post by tamimio »

It would be more impressive if it landed back to the nest, which is something we achieved last year in a PoC. That being said, I don’t see any technical specs.. the problem (or advantage however you see it) with drones, is the easy access plus the effectiveness in the “defense” aspect, so that fancy looking drone is useful against fighter jets for example (and definitely cheaper), but you can imagine someone with $200 fpv suicide drone immediately hitting the nest before it even launches, so your drone got droned, and by a cheaper one, with the ability to send a swarm of them launched from some house’s balcony.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#158

Post by dbspin »

adastra22 wrote: post #61
goalonetwo wrote: post #47

The whole defense industry leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Once you peel the narrative that we are supposed to be the good guys (hint: in some/most cases, we are not), you realize that you really just help to kill people.

You can stick your head in the sand and pretend that humanity is not an intrinsically violent species, and that if we all held hands and sang Kumbaya we'd be able to get along peaceably and without need for defensive tools. Or you can wake up to the reality that a strong defensive, and sometimes offensive capability is required in order to enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted, and be part of the pr…

> enforce the state of peace that we all take for granted

The majority of the worlds population do not take peace for granted. The question is, to what extend has US hegemony extended war and violence, and to what extent has it depleted it (compared to the available alternatives). Clearly enormous loss of life has occurred in places like Latin America, Iran, South East Asia Cuba etc due to US led toppling of democratic leaders and installation of often brutal dictators. But the overall balance of suffering is difficult if not impossible to calculate. Is Pax Americana a net good? Hard to say. But we can trivially reject the jingoistic 'a few good men' narrative of brutes manning the barricades of peace.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#159

Post by mschuster91 »

fastball wrote: post #40
memonkey wrote: post #32

Why? Why is this a thing? ..."and destroy a wide variety of aerial threats"... Okay, but what/who is the root problem that created this company to solve this issue? The either real or perceived threats that the United States and its media affiliations have concocted has really put a tamper on its own ability to make policy decisions that benefit its own peoples. We are spending BILLIONS of dollars on wars in other co…

We are already spending money on this type of problem. Realistically, this looks like a more cost-effective solution. So you have it completely backwards – this being a thing might actually unlock more funds for domestic issues. Of course it probably won't work out this way because the DoD doesn't just say "We bought a bunch of Anduril Roadrunner's instead of $4m Patriot missiles [or whatever] this year, so we don't…

> Just look at SpaceX – before SpaceX, NASA had the ability to send stuff to space. But post-SpaceX, they can send more payloads at a cheaper cost. Isn't that better?

They're now at the whim of an exceedingly eccentric billionaire for their space flight stuff. If Musk one day says he doesn't want to put up satellites that can be used to threaten Russia, NASA can't do anything about it, at least immediately (as they can't just rebuild their payload to fit into ULA rockets). We've already seen that play out with Starlink.

The world pre-SpaceX wasn't good either as NASA was mostly (ab)used by Congress to distribute pork, but now I think the pendulum has swung to the other side way too far - now Congress has zero control short of emergency nationalization over SpaceX.

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