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World's largest drone

DawgHammarskjold

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Aevum, a quiet, scrappy, and ambitious rocket-launch startup, unveiled the biggest drone in the world on Wednesday.


Called Ravn X, the fully autonomous vehicle is 80 feet long, has a wingspan of 60 feet, and stands 18 feet tall. It's not the largest unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) by size - the wings of Northrop Grumman's MQ-4C Triton stretch nearly 131 feet. But the Ravn X wins on mass, weighing 55,000 pounds when you include the rocket that will drop out of its belly in midair and shoot a satellite into space.

Despite its unusual size and mission, the drone isn't so different from your standard aircraft. It flies like a typical plane, and it and its rocket use Jet A, a very common kerosene-based fuel, says Jay Skylus, the CEO and founder of Aevum.

"We don't need a launch site. All we need is a runway that's one mile long and a hanger," Skylus told Business Insider. (Even small commercial airports have runways that easily meet that mark.)

 
I stand firm in my belief that future fighting craft will be designed to carry no human personnel. A massive amount of space, equipment, and restrictions on a planes flying ability goes into a design of every manned craft. An unmanned plane can carry more armaments, fly and turn faster, and if downed there is no loss of life. A kid eating Cheetos can sit at a screen and handle all the controls in perfect safety.

This may not be popular with die-hard traditionalists and fighter pilots in particular will bristle at the thought. But humans can only take so many G's, need oxygen, need space, need safety equipment, parachutes, ejector seats, glass bubbles to sit in. The argument against this is your plane can be hacked, and sometimes you need a human on the spot to make tough decisions. But the human on the ground can still make decisions at light speed, and there are easy redundant systems that you can install to destroy a plane if hacked.

That's the future IMHO
 
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