Water is a lot heavier than you think, Randy.
you see they get it from the sky, like the clouds, they don’t need to bring it up
It was so funny watching Josh Johsnons video about how rural people are skeptical of city people because “they dont know where water comes from.”
And then 24 hours later trumps saying the the answer to the fires is to use rain that comes from heaven.
Kinda wild to read, given how cities naturally crop up along bodies of water.
And have since the time we invented cities
Thanks for proving my point lol most cities are on bodies of saltwater or rivers and that’s for trade not water. 2 biggest cities in the country are completely reliant on bringing in water from a long ways outside the city. And outside of reservoirs for the cities the vast majority of drinking water is ground water.
I guess I’m a tad biased as a midwesterner. Lotta lakes to drink from here.
Literally about 1g per mL, these people think water weights what, exactly?
g
ml
These units mean nothing to me. I’ll need you to translate them to burgers per beer bottle.
Your average beer bottle contains 355 mL of beer. Let’s assume a quarter-pound burger.
4 oz = 113.398 g
113.398 g / 355 mL = a whopping 3.131 burgers per beer bottle.
What if helicopter, but, uh, it’s small? Lots of small helicopters!
Side note, anyone else love that with generative AI computers are finally able to produce shitty CGI renders but worse? Like that picture looks like something that would show up in like a mid '00s “science channel” “”“documentary”“” about hypothetical tech that’s really just a commercial for some arms dealer, but it’s all mangled and fucked up because it can’t even make a shitty CGI render right anymore.
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:
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Water is heavy and a liquid and it’s movements would throw off a drone balance very easily.
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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.
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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.
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.
Easy peasy!
someone in bunker gear to cut into the battery compartment, puncture the battery compartment in several places
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
If you really wanted to maybe a fleet of Predator drones with their payload swapped out for water tanks could work, but it just seems to me that automatic piloting is a solution searching for a problem here. It’s not that we can’t dump the water on the fire it’s that we’re low on water for many reasons and low on firefighters for many more and the rate and size of wildfires are increasing every year for a third bunch of reasons.
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.
when drone is unlocked it replaces all your plane units with drones
made me think of Factorio where I tried to swap my first factory to all drones and it was a terrible idea
Satisfactory gets the same idea across interestingly enough. Drones are good for small amounts of finished product cuz they can take it wherever without clogging up your railroads, but other than that they’re kinda useless.
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
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wot if a single one crashes and its lithium-ion battery goes off in a wilderness area that already has extreme fire conditions?
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.
Those 10,000 then fly blind into an area with high winds that creates its own weather system, can melt them, and that flings flaming particles for miles through the air. That’s playing Russian roulette with 10,000 more rounds in the
gun.If you’re playing Russian roulette with that gun at least the bullet would be aimed away
Our only other options are
, 
, or automatic rifles. Apart from the gun that changes your gender none of them are adequate for Russian roulette.
This is a false comparison, with the trivial axiom that less than half the drones are “loaded chambers”, to use your metaphor, we could simply plot the asymptotic trend and find the number of drones at which it would be statistically impossible for the fires to not be covered. I’ve already spent all my image generation credits, so I can’t provide a visual, but trust the logic is sound.
How many drones make it statistically impossible?
The point about fleet maintenance wasn’t really covered and “build more” doesn’t seem as logically sound to me as you present it.
Edit: if we’re upping capacity significantly wouldn’t it also reason to increase the air fleet size of normal water tankers instead? I can’t see how this is an improvement over such a vehicle. 10k things to go wrong and maintain.
deploy another 10000 or so to solve the problem quickly and cheaply.
I think you underestimate the cost of 10,000 drones and the infrastructure required to maintain them and refill them with water after every sortie.
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.
What if:
Also, flying a small drone with wind speed reaching 100kmh
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.
Please bro, think of the potential growth bro, think of the synergy bro please bro machine learning bro
machine learning
The market demands you to rephrase this as AI
some AI bullshit in a datacenter that is currently on fire.
of its own making!
One step from
They had 747s to dump water (not technically water but I’m calling it water to avoid waltzing around the slur filter) to carry 70,000 liters of water to fight fires. I’d be shocked if a single drone could even carry 1 liter of water. They don’t have these anymore because the 747 was owned by a private company who went under and sold it to an airline.
Removed-dant
You’re telling me a fire removed this dant?
Get Sremovedhorpe’d, bozo
I’m not 100%, but I’m fairly sure you’re allowed to bypass the slur filter in situations where it throws false positives.
deleted by creator
Fire slower-downer
Each one dropping 10oz of Perrier
1/100 of them falls, adding their batteries to the fire.
Lmao
What if we fired a squirt gun at a nuclear bomb
then you’d have a squirtculear bomb
but what if you made a nuclear bomb that sprayed water instead of fire?
drone piss
Some quick searching shows that the heavy duty cargo drones top out at about 480 lbs of payload. At 8.33 lbs per gallon, 480 lbs of water is about 57 gallons. According the Wikipedia the smaller end of aerial firefighting planes hold about 800 gallons. So you’d need 15-16 of the most heavy-duty drones to match the output of one plane, and of course it’s simpler and quicker to refill one large tank than fiddling with 16 smaller ones.
8.33 lbs per gallon, 480 lbs of water is about 57 gallons
USAian nonsense.
Metric. 1 kilogram = 1 litre
This reminds me of a kettle I saw once that had temperature controls for boiling water labelled in fucking Fahrenheit.
Kilograms were invented by fr*nch aristocrats in order to kkkolonize indigenous units of measurement all across the world.
As opposed to the Imperial system (yes that’s its name) of pounds and ounces and gallons and ounces. It’s a shame that Napoleon lost at Trafalgar.
It wasn’t good when the *nglish did it either, for the record, but Soviet revisionism started when they got rid of the arshin.
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.
this is ignoring that the planes already barely have an impact on controlling the fires
Also, fixed-wing aircraft can still take off even if their thrust-to-weight ratio is less than 1, because they generate lift from forward motion.
Basically you sacrifice accuracy for capacity, but with the unpredictability of winds over wildfires, I doubt how much accuracy you’d truly gain using a drone.
Could you hypothetically use a drone plane (instead of a quadcopter?)? (Or a drone helicopter) (ignore the silly rich man image in OP)
I don’t think there’s a particular reason why you couldn’t equip a 737 with the remote controls of a Predator drone and fly it like that, but the question is would moving the pilot from the cockpit to a ground-based control center be worth the cost of R&Ding such a system.
Potentially 100 liters of capacity if the pilot weighs 100 kilos.
Which the computer systems would probably weigh a bit but I think that’d be marginal in comparison
Surely such a system already exists to test new plane prototypes?
nope, drones if anything were first developed to fly the old planes as target practice
Just use a train except now its a plane.
Imagine publicly admitting you don’t understand water is heavy.
Imagine not truly understanding the reason water flows downhill is because it’s heavy
Well, quite unfortunate timing on that post: https://www.nbcnews.com/video/firefighting-aircraft-hit-by-drone-228950085731
Alright I got an idea. See those FPV drones used in Ukraine? Same principle but instead of strapping an old RPG-7 warhead to it we put small water balloons and then we smash the drone into the fire. That’ll work out just fine.
Everything but solving the core issues plz
