Silent Flyer – A Birdlike Drone
silentflyer.tech
silentflyer.tech
In fact, I can't think of a single such company which ended up successful.
If it does pan out, Birds Aren't Real [1-3] could finally become reality.
[1] https://birdsarentreal.com/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_mcindoe_birds_aren_t_real_ho...
Maybe some investors will be interested in the names behind the company, but nobody in the police/surveillance market cares. They want to see how closely it looks/sounds like a real bird, how long the battery lasts, etc. I expect that savvy investors realize that too, and probably aren’t chomping at the bit to invest in a company that goes public without at least a prototype to show off.
If you want to fool a cassual observer, say a soldier glancing upwards occasionally, then shape it like a soaring hawk. But dont bother with flapping wings. Just use a transparent prop. About 1000 feet nobody will tell the difference.
Depends. Not every part of the Ukraine front has state of the art EWAR capabilities (on either side), and is infested with drones.
That said, it's still not that useful IMO simply because soldiers can't really notice normal quadrocopter drones when they're flying high anyway, or even if they can there's so many of them because they're so cheap that it doesn't matter if the drone doesn't make a return trip.
Agreed that bird-like-but-soaring would be a better fit -- I can't see flapping as needed at all
Still, its more likely faster flying screemer drones from hell will get even better to not make this thing useful.
Like, when I saw the Screamers movie from a rented VHS cassette many years ago, I would not think I would see it happen in reality- but even more deadly! Like sure, in the movie those killer robots were autonomous and self replicating.
But they still had just a tiny buzz saw & had to jump from the ground to gut soft targets like infantrymen.
They didn't fly at you at 200 km/h with a HEAT warhead that can kill a modern main battle tank by single well placed hit!
To do that you don’t even need a working drone, just presentations and flashy advertising.
Flying a transparent kite is not cheaper than not flying anything at all.
The other thing with a transparent kite (or any other physical thing) is that it is concrete. Your adversary looks at it, laughs and figures out 15 things to counter it. But if you succesfully hint the idea that you have a bird shaped drone in their mind without showing any example they will drive themselves mad by paranoia. Because then any bird can be a spy, and the fact that they haven’t found a single one yet is just further proof how stealthy these things are!
Your constituents usually don't have radars
i.e. large slow wings are more efficient than small, fast wings; large slow propellors are more efficient than small, fast propellors. Two large flapping wings are more efficient than four small, fast propellers.
Someone always ends up being first to succeed, and until that point others look in that direction and decide to pursue safer paths.
This is not true. Here is a video of a bird-like drone:
Would love to be proven wrong with an actual video, but there's nothing on the site but rendered animations. If they had something to show, they'd show it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3vm-Yq6xiSk
The 3D renders don't look much more ambitious than this.
After a little more digging, they do have videos of prototypes in their 'news' section, it's odd that these are not easily findable via the home page: https://www.silentflyer.tech/testing-its-wings/
Nowadays we are at 'its so simple and cheap we can make toys' stage https://zing.store/collections/go-go-bird
One of the toys in flight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDihDrdPBqo
Other than that no I don't think I've seen a bird truly hover not upwind (i.e. static in 3 dimensions, not an artifact of parallax from me also moving
/s