UK MOD To Spend 20 Million On Toy Size Spy Drones 44
garymortimer writes "The Ministry of Defense (MOD) is making 20 million pounds available for Nano UAS. This is the second story this week in which military organizations seem to be looking for small multicopters. A market to date that has been ignored by the big defense contractors and a space owned by small start ups. No doubt some of those small start ups will soon become big defense contractors!"
Or be bought by big defense contractors... (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt some of those small start ups will soon become big defense contractors!"
Or they'll be bought by big defense contractors, and the existing big defense contractors will continue to be the big defense contractors....
On a tangental note... (Score:5, Insightful)
On a tangental note, I enjoy flying radio control helicopters, I have three of them (a "micro sized" heli, T-Rex 250, with a rotor disc of about 25 cm diameter, weighing about 350g), a 500-size and a 600-size (which weighs about 2.5kg, IIRC with a rotor diameter of 1.6 metres), all of them are collective pitch and extremely agile (they are all aerobatic models). All of them are electric too.
What worries me a little is that the wider political world will see the small drones, which don't look an awful lot different to a model RC heli, then start invoking the "terrorism!" bogeyman and trying to ban/restrict the RC flying we do or making us go through a painful registration process to be able to buy parts or helis. It won't take a huge leap of imagination for some politician to think that my T-Rex 600 could be some sort of threat to a public figure if fitted with an FPV (first person view) system, and then we have yet another avenue of pleasure closed off due to the war-on-terror :-(