3 ms·

I think the advantage is it can hover and perform a pinpoint landing.

by dghughes 12y ago

bsder 12y ago
Why land? You'd be better off simply dropping the cargo. It's not like it would hurt drugs. So, take off in spot 1, trace out an arc, drop the package at some point (which would be so small as to be really hard to detect), land/crash in spot 2 a long way away. If the drone is cheap enough, just throw it away.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. Then head over and essentially become a guided bomb. Even with a 1:5 glide you could get many (50km?) km over and fall directly to the pickup site. A toy version of an ICBM. A quick search shows people doing the same thing for fun, so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods. Perhaps the risk and cost is all about the pickup and 2kg is just as much work to get as 200. I suppose if the craft had a real detachable payload, it'd be really like a bomb. Perhaps complete with fake drops to act as countermeasures to surveillance.
  - bsder 12y ago
    > Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. High is visible and traceable. Unpowered glide is also traceable. Anything which stays in view too long is going to get filmed with by someone with a cellphone and a GPS. Low and fast wins. You want to stay low and cover a long curved path (preferably whose radius changes) so that the release of the payload is invisible and really hard to trace (a 40 mile path over a sparsely populated forest would be really hard to track). > so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods I suspect more profitable is the answer to why it isn't done. Why pay $10,000 for a drone when you can pay $5,000 for a human mule that you need at either end anyhow?

3 ms·

I think the advantage is it can hover and perform a pinpoint landing.

by dghughes 12y ago

I think the advantage is it can hover and perform a pinpoint landing.

bsder 12y ago
Why land? You'd be better off simply dropping the cargo. It's not like it would hurt drugs. So, take off in spot 1, trace out an arc, drop the package at some point (which would be so small as to be really hard to detect), land/crash in spot 2 a long way away. If the drone is cheap enough, just throw it away.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. Then head over and essentially become a guided bomb. Even with a 1:5 glide you could get many (50km?) km over and fall directly to the pickup site. A toy version of an ICBM. A quick search shows people doing the same thing for fun, so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods. Perhaps the risk and cost is all about the pickup and 2kg is just as much work to get as 200. I suppose if the craft had a real detachable payload, it'd be really like a bomb. Perhaps complete with fake drops to act as countermeasures to surveillance.
  - bsder 12y ago
    > Use a weather balloon or rocket or something and go high on the Mexican side. High is visible and traceable. Unpowered glide is also traceable. Anything which stays in view too long is going to get filmed with by someone with a cellphone and a GPS. Low and fast wins. You want to stay low and cover a long curved path (preferably whose radius changes) so that the release of the payload is invisible and really hard to trace (a 40 mile path over a sparsely populated forest would be really hard to track). > so this must be used or not have enough payload capacity to make it more profitable than other methods I suspect more profitable is the answer to why it isn't done. Why pay $10,000 for a drone when you can pay $5,000 for a human mule that you need at either end anyhow?