>I didn't pull that number out of my ass. It was actually a conservative number, based on what I saw some models as capable of I read your earlier source. And

>I didn't pull that number out of my ass. It was actually a conservative number, based on what I saw some models as capable of I read your earlier source. And I'm telling you that a list of drone maximum payloads pulled from the marketing websites of mostly small businesses isn't representative of the actual normal operating payloads of drones at those price points. Most drones can technically take off with a much higher weight than is actually practical to fly with. I'm not saying you can't find a gas powered drone with a 100 pound payload. What I am saying is that these drones aren’t remotely in the same category as consumer drones. >Not just hobby drones, all drones. I expect there to to be a lot of commercial drone usage in the future. If they are all licensed, then the costs are limited to applying towards the small hobby usage, but overall U.S. drone usage, which I expect to be substantial compared to hobby use. Then what is the point in regulating tiny drones with little capability to cause damage. Ultralight aircraft aren’t regulated like commercial jets. >Your counter of "it's off by a few orders of magnitude" is in my opinion not sufficiently explained by personnel and countermeasures, since a few order of magnitude is at a minimum 100x off This depends on what you’re trying to do. If your goal is just to make sure that commercial drones are licensed, then sure you could build a relatively cheap system. If your goal is just: Hey we keep seeing an unlicensed drone delivering pizzas. Alert the police to go out with direction finding equipment when they get the time, and see if they can find the operator, so that we can fine him. Then sure a few billion is doable. Red light cameras don’t deter terrorist from using truck bombs though. If we removed the requirement to have license plates tomorrow, we wouldn’t see a huge upswing in truck bombings. Stealing a license plate isn’t the bottleneck in the terrorists plan. So if your goal is to meaningfully deter determined attackers, you’ll need a system that’s much more robust. You’ll need enough extra trained personnel to rapidly respond to a relatively large percentage of every unauthorized drone alarm. You’ll need a very dense network of anti drone countermeasures (birds, guns whatever) in order to have a chance of responding in time. You’ll need vastly expanded radar coverage to detect drones flying too high to be detected by camera. And a camera network that is dense enough so that just flying behind building and trees isn’t an easy option. All of this will need to coordinated. >In 2018 the U.S. spent over $90 billion on transportation in the federal budget. That's in one year, and the DOT doesn’t operate anything close to the scale of the system we’re talking about.