Smaller drones with worse optics should be cheaply producible. With large numbers of such drones, lower altitude surveillance with greater redundancy of coverag

Smaller drones with worse optics should be cheaply producible. With large numbers of such drones, lower altitude surveillance with greater redundancy of coverage would become affordable. The computational costs associated with patching together the key-hole views provided by a swarm of fungible drones could be offloaded to ground-based computational resources. In my opinion, the result will be a net shift towards favoring many small cheap drones coupled with fancy off-board image processing. Though, one or two large expensive drones capturing monolithic images with great onboard optics should remain the better option for some situations.