I’ve not had much experiences with donkeys beyond basically state fairs, but that does track with what I’ve heard about them…

… tend to be a fair deal more intelligent than the average horse, and yeah I have heard that they’ll actually stand and fight, more often than a horse, who will often just freak out and then run in some random direction, potentially directly into a tree.

You are aware that we’ve been shooting drones out the sky with lasers for about a decade now, right?

Not too long ago DHS/CBP freaked out over some balloons in Texas, thought they were cartel drones, shut down the airspace, burned them outta the sky with truck mounted lasers.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/us-military-used-laser-take-border-protection-drone-lawmakers-say-rcna260887

JPL got 80% microwave power transmission efficiency at ~1.5 km, 8 years ago.

Granted, that was a fixed land point to fixed land point test, but also, it was 8 years ago.

I’ll take 50% efficiency loss over 10% chance of ‘everything explodes and crashes’ any day.

You can’t make a reasonable microwave receiver lighter than solar film and efficiency peaks around 50% in FIXED installations

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/microwave-power-transmission

In JPL 30 kW power was transmitted for 1.54 km with reception conversion array having an efficiency of 80%

That was 8 years ago.

What I’m describing are… currently extremely active areas of research.

Microwave power transfer has been used for many applications since its inception by Maxwell. Wireless charging of EVs and UAV using microwave power are some of the widely researched examples.

you can easily assume less than a quarter (under 10%) when the target isn’t just moving, but is also changing angles and distance (you’d have to put the receiver on a gimbal like for cameras)

You should maybe look into the level of precision that things like Phalanx CIWS systems have at tracking a moving target, with the ability to throw bullets at it, and hit it.

Or basically any SPAAG type platform that throws rounds down range.

Or I dunno, MASERs used in deep space transmission.

Or all the research that has gone into developing tracking gimbal systems that do intentionally use lasers or some kind of DEW to shoot down small drones, or damage aircraft in flight, or burn out incoming missiles.

Hell of a lot easier to track a friendly aircraft.

and now it’s also interfering with flight (propeller airflow, unless you do weird propeller geometries or tilted body flight

Genuinely no clue what you are talking about.

Are you assuming only like, quadcopters here?

We’ve had RQ 4 drone aircraft the size of WW2 medium bomber planes, with jet engines, for 20 years now.

I’m fairly sure that a jet engine produces a considerable amount of consistent heat.

Do… you think aircraft engineers… do not know… how to handle… heat?

Shall I describe a ramjet to you?

Or maybe we could go with something like the Space Shuttle’s reentry tiles?

In conclusion, you are vastly uniformed as to the state of… not even state of the art technology, that would be incredibly relevant to this discussion.

That actually makes a ton of sense as well.

Yesh, a lot of seriously irradiated people would die basically vomiting and shitting themselves to death.

We don’t even have automated battery replacement working on the ground, while stationary.

Building aircraft with a whole bunch of their body and mass that significantly changes, in flight, is extremely expensive and difficult.

Its why the V22 Osprey is widely regarded as a death trap, why we stopped building swing wing F-14s.

… Have you ever tried to uh, remove your car’s rear seats, while on the highway, at 60 mph, and then also installed new seats, from a neaby car travelling alongside you?

Ok now do that with aircraft, at 15k feet, going 600 mph.

Yeah I’m sure that’ll be about as efficient as Elon Musk’s approach to designing the Starship+HeavyBooster.

Oh, ok.

Even though this entire post is… about how it is small enough to fit on a drone, and efficient enough to power it for 3 hours.

Ok.

Gotcha.

I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but densely packed explosive bombs and missiles and warheads tend to be pretty heavy.

… the entire problem with purely onboard solar powered vehicles of any kind is that they have to be absurdly lightweight, flimsy.

That isn’t practical.

It might be purely efficient, in a sense, but it isn’t very useful.

Being able to actually move stuff, that is practical.

Most transportation modes involve the ability to haul stuff.

You know, do work, aka the capacity to make stuff move.

You picking a fight that makes no sense to pick.

You can have solar and batteries be more stationary, and use microwaves to power things that are more mobile, this post is literally the proof of that concept… you can charge a battery with a any kind of power source.

Look heres another massive potential application of this, if you science fiction extend the accuracy/capability of this:

Plop a bunch of solar panels/batteries in the L1 point between the Earth and the sun.

Now, via a set of satellites in something like concentric orbits, you can get absurd amounts of power, beam it back along chains of satellites, snd then beam it to recieving stations on Earth. Or the Moon. Or orbital infrastructure.

Microwave transmission power loss will be waaaay less in space, because there’s no atmosphere.

Same with solar panel efficiency!

Solar Power + Microwave Transmission = Very Good, Actually.

There are people whose entire job it is, is to be a horse fluffer, to masturbate them prior to attempting to breed two of them, or to just get the stallions to splooge into essentially a gigantic fleshlight.

Holy shit.

Getting the ability to remote charge things via microwave… that are moving?

That’s been basically sci fi nonsense, at a practical level, for a long time.

Anybody remember the Microwave Power stations in SimCity 2000?

If you could actually get this tech working, it has an incredible number of potential applications.

You can have solar panels and batteries on the ground, and use them to charge the microwave emitter, which can then charge the aircraft, which now does not need to carry solar panels and as much batteries, and thus has increased payload / range.

Dinner and a show?

5 stars.

So there is actually a semi-valid reason to find a lot of skeletons in bathrooms and not other places, in a post US nuclear apocalypse:

A fair number of buildings are most structurally sound around the bathroom, because those room walls tend to be stronger/reinforced compared to other walls, to be able to handle all the plumbing.

Bathrooms also tend to be located closer to the inside of the building, for basically the same reason.

So, its pretty reasonable that if you heard the sirens go off, had only a minute or two… yeah, sheltering in the bathroom would be the optimal strategy, if you don’t have a basement/cellar.

Horses are very often dumb idiot assholes.

Much more so than dogs.

Yes, they’re very, incredibly useful.

Not really great ‘friend’ material though, more like you cajole them into helping you, and they maybe kind of trust you, sort of.

Wolves that we domesticated into dogs literally evolved into having eyebrow and other facial muscles that allow them to convey emotion much more analgously to how humans do.

Occasionally creates a mess of horrific liquids in unexpected places

Will wake you up at random times with inexplicable noises

Will only accept extremely specific kinds of ‘food’

Will have an existential crisis when another of its kind is introduced to the home environment

Is constantly spying on you (look up printer tracking dots)

The entire AAA video game industry right now is basically freaking out, panicking and financially imploding right now, after at least a solid decade of mainly figuring out how to waste an enormous amount of money…

While all trying to be the next big live service game.

A live service game isn’t so much a game as it is a platform itself, a cash shop for in game content, a social media platform in itself.

(See Roblox for an extremely problematic but successful version of pulling this off)

These people all failed miserably at this, such that Ubisoft imploded, EA got bought out by Saudi Blood Money, Unity itself is imploding as an organization, MSFT switched its gaming division into pure wealth extraction mode before they shut it down in ~5 years and just act as IP liscensing overlords… etc.

They all tried to establish vertically integrated businesses, and despise that they can’t come close to matching Valve, the most competent horizontally built business in the entire industry.

And yes, the ‘video game industry’ includes nearly all ‘video game journalists’.

These people are with few exceptions, allergic to doing any actual investigative journalism, they’re mostly just paid to manipulate the flow of discourse around video games, as a form of marketing.

You can do way more performance than that for not much more money, if you’re willing to try something unorthodox in a different way:

AOOSTAR Gem 12 Max Mini PC

$580 ($550 for Amazon simps)

CPU: Ryzen 7 8745HS ( 8C / 16T / base 3.8 Ghz / max 5.10 Ghz)

(approximately multi thread performance equivalent to a Ryzen 5 9600 AM5 socket)

RAM: 24 GB DDR5

SSD: 1TB

Power: Max draw 70w (on its own)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GGB5L9P7/?psc=0

XFX RX 9070 OC (16 GB GDDR6)

$640

Power: ~220w

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXLBTL4B/?psc=1

EG01 OCulink eGPU Dock

$100

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0G1STZM7H/?psc=1

ASRock PRO-650 G PSU

$50

Power: 650w (way more than what you need)

Gold Rated

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FSTL4VDZ/?psc=1

Total pretax cost: ~$1370

Cost %: +~17% compared to Playnix

50% more RAM, also its DDR5

100% more SSD capacity

GPU 3DBenchmark = +~60%

OCuLink is at worst gonna knock 5%-10% off of performance/fps, compared to similar hardware just connected directly via PCIe 16.

… should basically crush almost anything at 1440p, if you turn off RT when you want higher fps.

Or you can maybe find a cheaper 9070, or perhaps go with a 500w PSU, which is still more than enough, to lower that total cost a bit.

DREDD (2012)

The more modern Judge Dredd movie.

Mainly features Karl Urban’s chin, as Judge Dredd.

He never takes off the helmet. Before Hollywood had even discovered Pedro Pascal / Mando.

Its essentially a near perfect action movie.

Not really meaningful commentary on society, arguably is copaganda…

… but it is a very competent ‘dumb’ action movie, punctuated with extreme violence and one-liner quips, actually does have decent characters and even some character development!

I so very badly want this to be real.

sigh

Time to retrieve the nozzle.

Oh so we are mass producing punchable faces now eh?

Having just one wasn’t enough, Sam?

Hope the next molotov finds its mark.

A whole bunch of people called out basically all the ‘text messages’ as obviously bullshit, when they were made public.

Because they don’t at all sound like two 20 something dorks talking to each other, they sound like a 45 yo cop, using cop lingo, and extremely overwrought language from baby’s first romance novel, to approximate a conversation that two 20 something dorks might have.