Slop.

you see they get it from the sky, like the clouds, they don't need to bring it up

Honestly that's probably best case scenario, as we would already have thousands of ready drones in the imitate vicinity. Even if emptied from previous efforts, the drones would instantly know the loss of one or more drones need to be doused, and we can deploy another 10000 or so to solve the problem quickly and cheaply.

I don't know all the details/specifics but USA wildland fire crews do have drone crews that use drones for mapping purposes- to aid direction of resources on ground, and monitor conditions. As you would imagine there are extensive bureaucratic procedures for any event where a done goes down/loses control/etc, it does happen- but my understanding is that it is never/rarely catastrophic failure.

I mean....good? Fight fire with fire, duh.

it's lithium battery would be absolutely devistating fuel for the fires because those things are near impossible to put out.

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.

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

They really are that stupid

No no that's just a plane, we need a bunch of drones capable of carrying 2 cups of water each all controlled by some AI bullshit in a datacenter that is currently on fire.

Removed-dant

I'm not 100%, but I'm fairly sure you're allowed to bypass the slur filter in situations where it throws false positives.

Lmao

8.33 lbs per gallon, 480 lbs of water is about 57 gallons

USAian nonsense.

Metric. 1 kilogram = 1 litre

The thing that would probably get cheaper is pilot costs. At least here, a pilots licence is about 200 times a commercial drone licence, and I assume insurance costs would come down due to not actually putting people in the air.

There's also an advantage to having more eyes in the sky to spot smaller fires breaking out, and potentially putting them out with a smaller payload.

I can see it having its uses, but the main use would be selling drones.

if they got paid then to them it wasn't wrong