3 ms·
> I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then. Yup, long stare
by woodman 8y ago
> I've seen live demonstrations in the mid 1980s (as in, a system protecting borders), and I bet the state of the art has advanced since then.
Yup, long stare SAR hooked up to a DVR was a thing over 10 years ago - it could cover a lot of ground (like a large Iraqi city) with a resolution that would easily detect this drone.
- candiodari 8y agoAre these the overhead not-quite-satellites you're talking about ? That would require a drone every 5 km or so. Not - one drone. A drone in the air 24/7 every 5km for a border ~2000 km long.
- beagle3 8y agoThe system I saw 30 years ago were more ground based and covered tens to hundreds of KMs. But even if you need a drone every 5km (you don't). That's all of 400 drones, 800 if you want to have pairs doing charge-work duty. For an 2000km border guarding operation, that's really not much. An order of magnitude or two cheaper than the fence they would guard.
- candiodari 8y agoHow did that ground based system solve the horizon problem ? Drones don't fly very high, so you'd need one of these systems, say at 50 meters drone height, ~ every 50km. That's probably worse than those drones watching from above, seeing as you'd need actual infrastructure at every interval. And, that'd be fixed infrastructure, with fixed blind spots.
- beagle3 8y agoI don't know exactly how it worked (beyond IIRC that it was a SAR = Synthetic Aperature Radar), but I know for sure that it worked perfectly well.
- woodman 8y agoGround stations and aerostats.