2052, Somewhere in the Northern Atlantic. Shipmate Hendricks cant believe his eyes. He seems to have seen something nobody has seen for decades now. After the US-China war - when every drone, spacelaser and soldier was aimed at every last bird on earth in fear of it being an enemy drone - nobody thought there were any left alive. But out here right there in his visor he sees them clear as day, flying around this small rock in the sea without a care in the world. He hurries to the outboat, sets off towards the island, trying to get a picture with his phone the closer he comes. He struggles to get them in focus as the birds start to fly towards him. A quiet "pop" is all thats heard as Hendricks tumbles to the floor. Lying there, blood pooling around him, his phone now showing the picture he took, finally in focus - clearly showing the motors and metal wings of the drones...
Meet Petty Officer Thomas Hendricks. Twenty-six years old. A sailor by profession, a romantic by temperament, and, quite unbeknownst to himself, a man about to make a discovery of considerable scientific importance.
The place: a small island in the North Atlantic. The time: an age in which mankind has grown rather accustomed to the absence of certain things.
But Mr. Hendricks has just spotted something that ought not to be there. And he intends to investigate.
A brief excursion into natural history, with an unscheduled stop... in the Twilight Zone.
I imagine the true state of the art is pretty unbelievable right now. No way the current tech tree is actually stuck on 1990s quad copters with bombs strapped to them.
For one thing, fixed-wing (plane-shaped) drones are much more efficient. Quadcopters are only cool because of their maneuverability (compared to planes) and mechanical simplicity (compared to helicopters) which makes them a sweet spot for hobbyists, and photographers etc.
Fixed wings drones are much more efficient for big and heavy drones.
Their efficiency advantage drops quickly for diminishing sizes and weights.
That is why big birds use gliding whenever they can, but small birds and insects use almost only wing-powered flight.
Screw propellers are pretty much equivalent with wings whose rotation angle is not limited so they can rotate continuously around the body instead of having to reverse periodically the direction of rotation and the attack angles.
If an insect could carry something useful, we could enter sci fi technology with only a step or two removed from state of the art. There's been an appreciable amount of work programming fruit fly movement with various remote methods.
This is done by a YC startup (Ornadyne, Spring '26). Ten years ago I would not have believed the extent to which Silicon Valley has gone long on every technology that empowers surveillance, capital efficient lethality, tools states use to control people.
You (reader) don't have to do any of this. Your morality does not have to be based on what makes VCs hard.
I wonder if falconry can fill that detection gap. Trained birds are already used to manage wild bird populations at airports. Now time to stop fake birds.
I read somewhere that the French government was training golden eagles to attack drones. I've been out fishing and when I had a bite on my line a couple of eagles flew half a KM from a nearby bluff to come check out if I had snacks for them, birds are all about the snacks!
Could park a couple mockup chinese landing craft on the shores of taiwan and throw bread on them and show the seagulls. WWIII breaks out, you arm the seagulls.
I recently watched the Anime Lazarus, it features gull drones. We've done magnetic ship mines with dolphins, and mine sweeping with those giant rats, for all the wiz-bang of Arundel products, they ain't got nothing on the magisty of nature, too bad we even find ways to employ nature in our nefarious endeavors!
I'm assuming the real birds would be way more expensive and at high risk of enemy actions against them. A bird bomb smaller than a shotgun shell would be enough to take the bird down if you're suiciding the drone.
Fascinated with ornithopters—probably since reading "Dune", 45 or so years ago as a teenager.
(I may have been fascinated beforehand though—I had a small wind-up one as a kid.)
Kazuhiko Kakuta has a small YouTube channel where he experiments with ornithopter builds (and ornithopter adjacent craft): https://www.youtube.com/@BZH07614/videos
I remember once watching a bird in the distance through my binoculars and then how it inexplicably vanished into the distance, seemingly at great speed, not really flapping its wings. Seemed interesting, but I don’t go birdwatching enough to rule out my inexperience in looking at them properly. Maybe the binoculars had given me mild vertigo.
Instead of a full flapping wing thopter I wonder if something prop driven but with moving wings (for show, not propulsion) would be good enough for distant recon. Basically it would look like an RC plane with transparent plastic wings for lift and painted porous flapping wings underneath.
A lot of radar drone detection is looking for the Doppler signature of the prop. You'd need to use a shrouded edf but then flight times fall off a cliff
It’s possible, but it would look unnatural to the human eye - you could introduce variable motor speeds to try and mimic bird behaviour when flying in different directions and approaches but from my rabbit holing on the topic I’ve found effort required to get something similar but still not perfect would likely outweigh the effort required to just build it properly.
I did say "Birds Aren't Real" is plausibly an intentionally ridiculous smokescreen ("all birds aren't real" being clearly farcical), quietly updrafted to obscure any social media reports of real camouflaged intelligence drones. The timing of the meme was very coincidental, happening right when such drones became technically possible IRL.
Probably, but only due to sheer laziness. It should be easy to distinguish electronics from birds at sufficiently close range. Plus I'm certain the physical behavior doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
In addition to that birds don't tend to emit much RF. And spectroscopy of the visible light from the materials comprising the body should be quite different unless the drones are covered in harvested genuine feathers.
It won’t fly further than a headline, never a practical one. The biggest issue remains (after solving the other two) in drones now is endurance, and unless a breakthrough battery technology changes that, all these cool concepts will never materialize.
What is that, technically speaking? Last year I was working for a company that inspects pipelines with drones. They automated land, recharge, on pedestals placed along a route.
I think that endurance is an intrinsic limitation of drones, but I take the opposite conclusion as you. Instead of it meaning drones will never catch on, it'll mean that military missions and consequently the size and structure of the state will adjust their form to suit what drones are good at, rather than drones not catching on. In other words, we'll get drones, but we'll lose nation-states, rather than keeping nation-states but having them fail to adopt drones.
Drones' ability to absolutely dominate the battlefield inside of ~200km is just too powerful. You'll end up with small regional powers that are basically impregnable to invasion, but also can't project power because the range of drones is too short. City-states, basically. And because the defining characteristic of a state is its monopoly on physical force, the structure of the state will adapt to the dominant military technology of the time.
Doesn't seem very likely. The Romans didn't struggle to project power far beyond the range of a spear.
The definition of a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not a statement about the military capabilities of the government, it's a statement about the relationship of the people with the state (that is, a state exists when people act like it has that right).
I am not so sure about that, before the whole weaponization of these drones, drone delivery was the hot topic, then changed to “last mile” delivery when dreams hit reality checks, then the whole “urban mobility” with all the connectivity and drones infra to land and take off, rally points, etc etc, and nothing really changed, connectivity is still a challenge, although there are plenty of work arounds (I am even building a platform that will solve a lot of nowadays drones flight issues), but the endurance? Nope, I remember we always hit this as the biggest showstopper in any mission, especially when these missions usually fly with no infra be it cellular or anything that could charge it. The only solution is scientists find a way to make lightweight high endurance batteries.
ok this wont win any green points but an RTG generator core will heat a gang of nitanol bands and drive an electric dynamo, it will also be reasonably small enought to fit in a bird sized form factor, and will be thermally hot like a biological.
This is the size and sort of drones a unit would use for scouting the local area. The range isn't great, but it is suitable for that and less conspicuous than the gas-powered drones used 15 or so years ago and the buzzing quadcopters of today.
> The O1 drone weighs 1 pound and can fly up to 10 kilometers, which is a little more than 6 miles, for over an hour, according to a company fact sheet.
Yes I did, I even built similar ones before, and an hour is barely a number in real scenarios or BVLOS (add preflight post flight check, etc), plus, when you add the connectivity part (anything to allow bvlos) or pro payloads that one hour becomes 10min unless you go fuel. Robotic world has alot of over hype monkey business, don’t trust any “fact” sheet. There’s a reason why balloons are used in some part of the world to carry these drones for long distance.
Gliding takes no energy, but it requires many sensors and a very clever control program. I do no think that anyone has built a drone capable of long-term gliding, yet (i.e. capable to recognize thermal currents and use them for ascending and also capable of gliding a long time without losing much altitude).
Nonetheless, it should possible for a flapping-wing drone to do some short-time gliding between intervals when it uses wing flapping to ascend to the initial height, in order to save some energy.
As a child, I made a few such gliders from balsa pieces.
However, a drone must carry some useful load and it would be much heavier than such a light glider, so it would lose altitude quickly while gliding.
Moreover, even a drone that is not intended to go far away, which could reach a nearby destination if launched from a big height or by towing, would still need a battery, some motors and control electronics to control the direction of flight, which would also increase its weight.
A drone that would be able to go very far by gliding would need a lot of sensors and very sophisticated control to take advantage of the air currents in order to avoid losing quickly the altitude and crashing down.
An ordinary drone with flapping wings could glide only for very short time intervals, after which it would have to use powered flight to recover its altitude. Even so, its control would not be easy for avoiding the risk of flight instabilities at the transitions between wing-flapping and gliding.
I think battery life is a key limiter for this technology but how much time does it need? Something so small that can fly for fifteen minutes to collect intelligence et. al. might be sufficient. For example: a situation in which it is not safe to enter and detection would make it even less safe, ergo using something so tiny for only a few minutes could give valuable feedback to the user.
2052, Somewhere in the Northern Atlantic. Shipmate Hendricks cant believe his eyes. He seems to have seen something nobody has seen for decades now. After the US-China war - when every drone, spacelaser and soldier was aimed at every last bird on earth in fear of it being an enemy drone - nobody thought there were any left alive. But out here right there in his visor he sees them clear as day, flying around this small rock in the sea without a care in the world. He hurries to the outboat, sets off towards the island, trying to get a picture with his phone the closer he comes. He struggles to get them in focus as the birds start to fly towards him. A quiet "pop" is all thats heard as Hendricks tumbles to the floor. Lying there, blood pooling around him, his phone now showing the picture he took, finally in focus - clearly showing the motors and metal wings of the drones...
Would maybe make a decent twilight zone clip.
Hitchcock knew.
I knew how it would end.
Straight out of the world of Philip K Dick.
You inspired me:
Meet Petty Officer Thomas Hendricks. Twenty-six years old. A sailor by profession, a romantic by temperament, and, quite unbeknownst to himself, a man about to make a discovery of considerable scientific importance.
The place: a small island in the North Atlantic. The time: an age in which mankind has grown rather accustomed to the absence of certain things.
But Mr. Hendricks has just spotted something that ought not to be there. And he intends to investigate.
A brief excursion into natural history, with an unscheduled stop... in the Twilight Zone.
And of course the episode conclusion:
Petty Officer Thomas Hendricks. A young man who went looking for a small piece of yesterday, only to discover that tomorrow had arrived there first.
There is some consolation, perhaps, in knowing that the skies are not entirely empty. That certain things, once lost, can be made again.
Though one might reasonably question whether they've been missed for the right reasons.
A footnote to the natural history of the Twilight Zone.
I thought that his phone was livestreaming back to Google and they were going to shoot the birds nest with a missile.
This maybe harder to detect visually, but im sure Radar/Lidar systems will be improved to counter these.
For those who don't know, the CIA had a similar (unsuccessful) program in the 1960s, which was kept secret for decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_AQUILINE
I imagine the true state of the art is pretty unbelievable right now. No way the current tech tree is actually stuck on 1990s quad copters with bombs strapped to them.
For one thing, fixed-wing (plane-shaped) drones are much more efficient. Quadcopters are only cool because of their maneuverability (compared to planes) and mechanical simplicity (compared to helicopters) which makes them a sweet spot for hobbyists, and photographers etc.
Fixed wings drones are much more efficient for big and heavy drones.
Their efficiency advantage drops quickly for diminishing sizes and weights.
That is why big birds use gliding whenever they can, but small birds and insects use almost only wing-powered flight.
Screw propellers are pretty much equivalent with wings whose rotation angle is not limited so they can rotate continuously around the body instead of having to reverse periodically the direction of rotation and the attack angles.
Sweet spots... but also a whole new category called "mass(ed) precision".
If an insect could carry something useful, we could enter sci fi technology with only a step or two removed from state of the art. There's been an appreciable amount of work programming fruit fly movement with various remote methods.
2005 showing some movement using lasers and a fly engineered to be sensitive to them with the receptor hooked up to a biological response. https://www.science.org/content/article/remote-control-flies
2024 and we are now writing "Hello World" using a fly in Fig 4. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2426180122
We are hellbent on destroying the non-human natural world
As much as I like to be optimistic, I'm struggling to think of any positives to this technology.
it's main function is to breach security systems.
This is done by a YC startup (Ornadyne, Spring '26). Ten years ago I would not have believed the extent to which Silicon Valley has gone long on every technology that empowers surveillance, capital efficient lethality, tools states use to control people.
You (reader) don't have to do any of this. Your morality does not have to be based on what makes VCs hard.
I wonder if falconry can fill that detection gap. Trained birds are already used to manage wild bird populations at airports. Now time to stop fake birds.
I read somewhere that the French government was training golden eagles to attack drones. I've been out fishing and when I had a bite on my line a couple of eagles flew half a KM from a nearby bluff to come check out if I had snacks for them, birds are all about the snacks!
Could park a couple mockup chinese landing craft on the shores of taiwan and throw bread on them and show the seagulls. WWIII breaks out, you arm the seagulls.
I recently watched the Anime Lazarus, it features gull drones. We've done magnetic ship mines with dolphins, and mine sweeping with those giant rats, for all the wiz-bang of Arundel products, they ain't got nothing on the magisty of nature, too bad we even find ways to employ nature in our nefarious endeavors!
I'm assuming the real birds would be way more expensive and at high risk of enemy actions against them. A bird bomb smaller than a shotgun shell would be enough to take the bird down if you're suiciding the drone.
Ornithopter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-BklB99ybM
Fascinated with ornithopters—probably since reading "Dune", 45 or so years ago as a teenager.
(I may have been fascinated beforehand though—I had a small wind-up one as a kid.)
Kazuhiko Kakuta has a small YouTube channel where he experiments with ornithopter builds (and ornithopter adjacent craft): https://www.youtube.com/@BZH07614/videos
I remember once watching a bird in the distance through my binoculars and then how it inexplicably vanished into the distance, seemingly at great speed, not really flapping its wings. Seemed interesting, but I don’t go birdwatching enough to rule out my inexperience in looking at them properly. Maybe the binoculars had given me mild vertigo.
It reached the edge of the simulation distance, and was unloaded to increase performance.
Needs better LOD handling to reduce pop-in. Please file a bug report.
Instead of a full flapping wing thopter I wonder if something prop driven but with moving wings (for show, not propulsion) would be good enough for distant recon. Basically it would look like an RC plane with transparent plastic wings for lift and painted porous flapping wings underneath.
A lot of radar drone detection is looking for the Doppler signature of the prop. You'd need to use a shrouded edf but then flight times fall off a cliff
E.g., this one https://www.robinradar.com/products/iris-radar Interestingly, the same company also has an "avian radar" https://www.robinradar.com/products/max-radar
It’s possible, but it would look unnatural to the human eye - you could introduce variable motor speeds to try and mimic bird behaviour when flying in different directions and approaches but from my rabbit holing on the topic I’ve found effort required to get something similar but still not perfect would likely outweigh the effort required to just build it properly.
Metal Gear Solid
Birds Aren't Real
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real
Can't say they didn't try to warn us.
I did say "Birds Aren't Real" is plausibly an intentionally ridiculous smokescreen ("all birds aren't real" being clearly farcical), quietly updrafted to obscure any social media reports of real camouflaged intelligence drones. The timing of the meme was very coincidental, happening right when such drones became technically possible IRL.
Naturally, folks reacted like it was a joke. ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34364597
> Birds Aren't Real
Explain what I ate at Chick-Fil-A :o)
CIA meat with tracking sensors.
dinosaur meat
"Birds aren't real" was before its time
I'm lucky enough to be employed in the robotics space.
It's not that all birds aren't real.
But some birds definitely aren't real.
Feels like the end-game is that anti-drone defense turrets are just going to shoot down anything that looks like a bird as well.
I worry that it’s easier to build an automated turret that shoots anybody, than it is to build a turret that shoots only enemies.
Probably, but only due to sheer laziness. It should be easy to distinguish electronics from birds at sufficiently close range. Plus I'm certain the physical behavior doesn't hold up to close scrutiny.
Oh god, they're going to kill all the birds, aren't they? I wish I was joking.
If only there were other spectra that trivially distinguish birds from drones
Are you referring to thermal imaging?
In addition to that birds don't tend to emit much RF. And spectroscopy of the visible light from the materials comprising the body should be quite different unless the drones are covered in harvested genuine feathers.
This should be perfidy against animals.
Birds are not real
Claude, this time do shoot at birds, make no mistakes.
It won’t fly further than a headline, never a practical one. The biggest issue remains (after solving the other two) in drones now is endurance, and unless a breakthrough battery technology changes that, all these cool concepts will never materialize.
Power line perch recharging is the solution.
Bread crumb refueling
What is that, technically speaking? Last year I was working for a company that inspects pipelines with drones. They automated land, recharge, on pedestals placed along a route.
Technically speaking, I believe that was a joke.
The powerline perch stuff does actually work. I’m glad someone else mentioned it here already.
Ha! Touche.
So the weird old lady in the park really does work for the CIA!
I think that endurance is an intrinsic limitation of drones, but I take the opposite conclusion as you. Instead of it meaning drones will never catch on, it'll mean that military missions and consequently the size and structure of the state will adjust their form to suit what drones are good at, rather than drones not catching on. In other words, we'll get drones, but we'll lose nation-states, rather than keeping nation-states but having them fail to adopt drones.
Drones' ability to absolutely dominate the battlefield inside of ~200km is just too powerful. You'll end up with small regional powers that are basically impregnable to invasion, but also can't project power because the range of drones is too short. City-states, basically. And because the defining characteristic of a state is its monopoly on physical force, the structure of the state will adapt to the dominant military technology of the time.
Doesn't seem very likely. The Romans didn't struggle to project power far beyond the range of a spear.
The definition of a state is a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It's not a statement about the military capabilities of the government, it's a statement about the relationship of the people with the state (that is, a state exists when people act like it has that right).
I am not so sure about that, before the whole weaponization of these drones, drone delivery was the hot topic, then changed to “last mile” delivery when dreams hit reality checks, then the whole “urban mobility” with all the connectivity and drones infra to land and take off, rally points, etc etc, and nothing really changed, connectivity is still a challenge, although there are plenty of work arounds (I am even building a platform that will solve a lot of nowadays drones flight issues), but the endurance? Nope, I remember we always hit this as the biggest showstopper in any mission, especially when these missions usually fly with no infra be it cellular or anything that could charge it. The only solution is scientists find a way to make lightweight high endurance batteries.
Fuel cells can provide autonomy similar to real birds, but for now they remain too expensive.
ok this wont win any green points but an RTG generator core will heat a gang of nitanol bands and drive an electric dynamo, it will also be reasonably small enought to fit in a bird sized form factor, and will be thermally hot like a biological.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Radioisotope_thermoelectr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
This is the size and sort of drones a unit would use for scouting the local area. The range isn't great, but it is suitable for that and less conspicuous than the gas-powered drones used 15 or so years ago and the buzzing quadcopters of today.
Did you fly further than the headline?
> The O1 drone weighs 1 pound and can fly up to 10 kilometers, which is a little more than 6 miles, for over an hour, according to a company fact sheet.
Yes I did, I even built similar ones before, and an hour is barely a number in real scenarios or BVLOS (add preflight post flight check, etc), plus, when you add the connectivity part (anything to allow bvlos) or pro payloads that one hour becomes 10min unless you go fuel. Robotic world has alot of over hype monkey business, don’t trust any “fact” sheet. There’s a reason why balloons are used in some part of the world to carry these drones for long distance.
Are you sure what you built was SOA? How long ago was that? How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?
> How do you know it is not an hour with useful payload?
Until they present a much more specific claim (and preferably also supporting evidence) the prevailing assumption is that it's exaggerated bullshit.
These are winged drones. Gliding takes no energy. Maybe you're confusing drones with quadcopters?
Gliding takes no energy, but it requires many sensors and a very clever control program. I do no think that anyone has built a drone capable of long-term gliding, yet (i.e. capable to recognize thermal currents and use them for ascending and also capable of gliding a long time without losing much altitude).
Nonetheless, it should possible for a flapping-wing drone to do some short-time gliding between intervals when it uses wing flapping to ascend to the initial height, in order to save some energy.
Materials
To make this glider you need:
1 x balsa piece of 3.2 x 76 x 914 mm (1/8" x 3" x 36")
2 x balsa smaller pieces of 3.2 x 10 x 914 mm (1/8" x 2/5" x 36")
Hot glue
Metal (or plastic) ruller
As a child, I made a few such gliders from balsa pieces.
However, a drone must carry some useful load and it would be much heavier than such a light glider, so it would lose altitude quickly while gliding.
Moreover, even a drone that is not intended to go far away, which could reach a nearby destination if launched from a big height or by towing, would still need a battery, some motors and control electronics to control the direction of flight, which would also increase its weight.
A drone that would be able to go very far by gliding would need a lot of sensors and very sophisticated control to take advantage of the air currents in order to avoid losing quickly the altitude and crashing down.
An ordinary drone with flapping wings could glide only for very short time intervals, after which it would have to use powered flight to recover its altitude. Even so, its control would not be easy for avoiding the risk of flight instabilities at the transitions between wing-flapping and gliding.
I think battery life is a key limiter for this technology but how much time does it need? Something so small that can fly for fifteen minutes to collect intelligence et. al. might be sufficient. For example: a situation in which it is not safe to enter and detection would make it even less safe, ergo using something so tiny for only a few minutes could give valuable feedback to the user.