this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2025
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Only the dumbest motherfuckers get rich and powerful in the US it seems.
Ignoring the cringe inducing AI image, there are a few obvious problems with this idea:
Water is heavy and a liquid and it's movements would throw off a drone balance very easily.
A drone army of 10,000 isn't big enough to carry the water required. You would need millions of drones to even make a dent in the fire.
If even one of those millions of drones were to crash, it's lithium battery would be absolutely devistating fuel for the fires because those things are near impossible to put out.
Sometimes I wonder if these guys are actually this stupid of if they're pretending.
This is very tangential since a tiny drone would have burned up long before firefighters could reach it to do any sort of mitigation, but with EVs becoming more of a thing and them bursting into fire being a huge problem, fire departments have actually studied the problem and worked out how to effectively suppress that kind of lithium battery fire: hose down the chassis to cool it enough for someone in bunker gear to cut into the battery compartment, puncture the battery compartment in several places to create a corridor through it (so steam can escape without building up pressure) while water continues to be sprayed to keep it cool enough for them to work, then insert a hose directly into the battery compartment and keep a steady flow of water for several hours until the batteries have discharged and cooled below their ignition point. Turns out lithium car batteries are a lot less reactive than previously thought and you just have to cool them off and get all the stored charge out of them which is a lot faster and uses less water than was previously believed (previous methods were things like "drop the entire vehicle into a modified shipping container full of water and leave it there for two days"), and if done quickly can mean most of the cells inside the compartment never even ignite in the first place.
I saw a video of a fire department testing and comparing different approaches a couple of months ago, and it was very interesting in a "dry recording of raw data" sort of way.
Easy peasy!
That's just some unamerican bullshit right there. You're in the US, SHOOT IT WITH A GUN! Militarize our boys in red!
This had me curious enough to do the napkin math
A single water bomber has about 6,140kg of water/suppressant payload. A single heavy-lift cargo hexacopter drone has a payload capacity of 8.7kg
It would take 706 drones to exceed one water bomber, but they would naturally be far more spread out and thus far less effective. There is at least 4 water bombers I've seen deployed to California, so at 2,800+ drones, it would be one of the single largest drone performances ever and probably about as effective as pissing on it
I guess you could remote pilot a water bomber and call it a drone but that seems pointless. With multiple drones using that little water the heat from the fire would evaporate I would guess all of it. You'd get a nice steam cloud at best. Probably fuck up a lot of drones in the process what with the heat they're flying over and all that steam, neither are great for electronics that aren't nearly as well protected as on a damn plane and also on a plane aren't absolutely essential, at least the plane becomes a glider
That is for sure the biggest thing, why drone? Using drones doesn't have any benefit let alone the potential downsides. I guess maybe using them for closer recon for where best to send the planes isn't the worst idea.
I think a decent amount of people think of technology like it works in civ or like Pokémon evolutions, manned plane is lower on the tech chain than drone so when drone is unlocked it replaces all your plane units with drones and drones are better than planes in every category. It seems to be a very linear and fatalistic fantasy. Technology is just applied science and it's silly to believe that the end result of newer science is gonna replace our already existing solutions to already solved problems. Scientists aren't working on solved problems.
I wanna play some of those kinda games but also my job is incredibly logistics based. Working expo in a kitchen is amazingly similar to playing Papers Please but also cooking. Sorta enjoying solving these kinda things under pressure is why I'm good as hell at it but it means I'm less inclined towards it in my free time
and if they go haywire like the last big drone show in the US did, then you're just creating even more fires
They really are that stupid