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Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

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Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#191

Post by ansible »

marcusverus wrote: post #177
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…

> Nope! It turns out there is still a need for the USA to be an unrivaled global superpower, and for the rest of NATO to get its ass in gear and modernize. This doesn’t make sense to me. Russia remains a backwater with a GDP the size of Italy. They are not a significant threat to US interests, any more than Italy could possibly hope to be. If anything, a strong America just lends a false sense of security to countrie…

> If anything, a strong America just lends a false sense of security to countries like Ukraine, which might be better off understating that they must see to their own safety and security.

Name a full member of NATO who has been invaded. Go ahead, I'll wait.

Even without NATO membership, China currently isn't occupying Taiwan. Guess why.

> Historically speaking, few of America’s international adventures have had a beneficial outcome. Pretending that the world ‘needs’ our meddling is a stretch. We need to be able to defend ourselves and to ramp for war quickly. The rest is pork for the military industrial complex.

Did you even read the first part of my comment? Do I sound like an apologist for the USA's recent foreign policy?

There is a lot of pork spent for the USA's military. Cost overruns and unnecessary systems abound. That doesn't obviate the need for a strong military to keep the peace for ourselves and our allies.

The world is different now than it was 100 years ago. Many counties have at least a few nuclear weapons. We can't afford to let things spin out of control. We need stability, and NATO provides a lot of that.

Name the last time a NATO country invaded another NATO member. Oh, wait, that never happened, and never will happen. That's called stability.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#192

Post by danbruc »

mcphage wrote: post #185
danbruc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced is not true and I did not say that, Russia could also have decided not to invaded. I also did not say that Ukraine has no reasons to want to join NATO, they have and they most likely had them long before 2014. But none of that even addresses my argument, Russia opposed NATO expansion, Russia threatened severe consequences, NATO gave no signs that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO or entered any kind of…

> We can debate all day long […] whether Russia should have any say in which alliances Ukraine enters What the fuck? How can you debate on that at all, let alone all day? Does Russia own Ukraine? No. So does Russia have any say in which alliances Ukraine enters? Absolutely not.

The US government has warned Solomon Islands it will “respond accordingly” if its security agreement with China leads to a Chinese military presence in the Pacific island nation.

Does the USA own Solomon Islands? It is just a reality that powerful nations try to exert influence over other states, whether you like it or not. We can discuss how good or bad that is but it certainly not only Russia that thinks it has some say in what other countries can or can not do.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#193

Post by kanwisher »

throwaway234a wrote: post #146
Roritharr wrote: post #25

Anduril is one of these companies I would leave my own startup for to work for. I love what they are doing.

It's not that great. I would know, I work there. The marketing is the shit though. It makes all the tech look like it's the greatest thing ever. The mentality here at this company is hack hack hack and the quality of the product reflect this. Don't expect German engineered precision. Expect products with poor quality, poor reliability and a failure rate that is very very high. What is good about this company is that…

UI for spacex rockets in the ship is html and JavaScript. There is zero issue having a front end be in something easy to hack on

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#194

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

lawxls wrote: post #189
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How else do you propose we stop russian soldiers from raping, torturing, and murdering in Ukraine? If you have better ideas, please do let us know. The friends I have on the front line would certainly prefer to be at home with their families over Christmas rather than sitting in a trench, staving off frostbite and bullets.

[flagged]

Get your whataboutism and your enthusiasm for russian terrorism out of here.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#195

Post by lawxls »

charcircuit wrote: post #60
qup wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a drone tipped with high explosives? I gotta know, what kind of online shops do you frequent?

I would expect the explosives to be sold separately. So it's more like buying a drone equipped with jet engines.

and software to intercept air targets via subscription payments I guess?

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#196

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

omnimus wrote: post #184
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today they wear Prada. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/kadyrov-chec...

Isn't this a bit different? Like anyone can get whatever brand. But its very different when company willingly creates and produces designs for skull army.

Yes, it is different. My comment was made rather tongue in cheek.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#197

Post by kanwisher »

mschuster91 wrote: post #159
fastball wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

Before this literally congress had to beg the Russians for space engines. And we were at the whim of a nation state that we are enemies with. I’ll take free market capitalism any day.

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#198

Post by ElectronCharge »

doikor wrote: post #77
remarkEon wrote: post #24

So the emergency services use-cases seem obvious and straightforward, but rare. Can't be that big of a market for that, at least for repeat customers. Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd figure that those emergency services organizations would buy 2-3 and keep one in the field and the balance in inventory. The armed HE variant, that one does not seem that straightforward to me because I don't quite see how this is b…

I think the armed variants advantage is that you can launch 5 and call the rest back once you get a hit on the target. Shooting down modern/future hypersonic or stealth missiles is hard and there is no guarantee you will take it down with just one. So this way you can recover the rest once you get a hit.

It’s not going to intercept a hypersonic missile, and I doubt it can reliably intercept a supersonic missile. Subsonic stealthy targets it should have a chance against, since its seeker is EO/IR based, not radar.

I think the primary use for the armed variant will be anti-drone, with decent capability against subsonic manned platforms. That said, it would probably also work well against unarmored ground targets…

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#199

Post by ElectronCharge »

steve_gh wrote: post #67
adastra22 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Don't know who said it, but: Every country gets an army. The only question is: whose?

Reminding me of an old joke:

Why are the streets of Paris lined with trees? So the German soldiers can march in the shade!

;-)

Re: Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

#200

Post by danbruc »

koonsolo wrote: post #187
danbruc wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced is not true and I did not say that, Russia could also have decided not to invaded. I also did not say that Ukraine has no reasons to want to join NATO, they have and they most likely had them long before 2014. But none of that even addresses my argument, Russia opposed NATO expansion, Russia threatened severe consequences, NATO gave no signs that Ukraine would not be allowed to join NATO or entered any kind of…

> But none of that even addresses my argument, Russia opposed NATO expansion. Let's be real here: Russia wants Ukraine to be "under their influence", preferably the same way Belarus is, and Chechnya. They want Ukraine to be their puppet state. Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 because the population already gave clear indications that they wanted to move closer to the West. Russia was losing their grip on Ukraine. That'…

And NATO wanted it under their influence, I mean that is just the game of geopolitics.
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