Here's my home built one with gopro & 2-axis camera stabilisation gimbal.
Please, apply some imagination. Aerial dispersion of anthrax or some other extremely potent substance would be easy. I could drop radioactive isotopes on crowds of people, enough might be inhaled/soaked into skin for problems. Even dropping 1.5kg of decent explosive with an altitude fuse would cause quite a bit of mess. And in fact, even if all I did was drop flour, if I dropped it onto, say, a football crowd they'd stampede due to panic and create the casualties for me. The thing about terrorists is that they all appear to be fucking stupid. I'm glad people like me would never dream of doing such things, else we'd all be completely and utterly fucked.
Well...it's hard to say really. The oldest component on that quad is probably the battery which is 3 years old. Summing all the money spent would probably get to about 3-4k, but I've destroyed a few and upgraded virtually every component multiple times. To build that particular quad from scratch would cost about a grand (not including the camera).
Nets I guess
That's the last thing I shot
That's the last thing I shot
Two caveats: not my camera (used a gopro 3 instead of my gopro 2) and it's not entirely the same quadcopter as I destroyed it at the end of that trip
Oh and that quad didnt have the camera gimbal on the new one, either, so it's completely unstabilised footage.
Depends where you are. Where I am in London (where I almost never fly except for quick tests) I'm limited to 400m due to being under the Heathrow approach airspace zone, even though it's ten miles away.
Considerably easier than old school RC gear. That quad in the photo can fly itself, keeping within a flight corridor a couple of metres across over distances of several miles. The paradigm to fly them is that the default state is hover with some amount of drift. You then instruct is to tip in a given direction and it will drop slightly and move in that direction. Increasing throttle increases climb rate or horizontal speed. You can turn the auto stuff off and fly in acrobatic mode where you control the rate of rotation about each axis, which lets you do amazing tricks but is more like flying an old heli in terms of difficulty.
At least they won't destroy pubs when they crash to the ground.Or non-existent.
The basic ideas you brought up are not rocket science eh, Chilly? Terrorism is *easy*
Anyway. Get used to the drones - the police are going to be using them to spy on all of us as a matter of course pretty soon. That's reflected in the fact that a shitload of United States police authorities have already applied for licences to run drone fleets.
Drones with hi-rez facial recognition cameras + total internet surveillance = government has 1984-style authoritarian monitoring for our "safety" sewn up.
Tony Blair long ago mooted putting cameras into peoples houses so social services could intervene if they didn't like the look of the parenting going on...
