Well, at least it'd boost the popularity of shotguns.
Zig Forums designs weapons
Oliver Morris
Mason Williams
Assuming it can even handle all the weight of cameras and any sort of ordinance (it can’t) you’be just built a drone that can only operate in absolute calm air where a slight breeze grounds your entire feet of useless shitfoam drones.
Lincoln Brooks
Cruise missiles like Tomahawk fly by GPS and if it's not available then its accuracy does to shit. Normal unguided missiles have literally no guidance, just some fixed stabilizer fins. The missiles that can control their own flight usually have homing warhead or GPS navigation, because inertial system alone is just not sufficient - in the 100 odd miles the missile might travel it may drift away from its intended target by as much as a mile. It's not a large fraction but it completely disqualifies it from being called "accurate", you not gonna hit a huge factory with it. To top it off, such missiles are expensive due to all the navigation and maneuvering hardware, marginal increase in accuracy is often not worth the price and you'd either go with a proper homing missile or a dumb unguided missile.
Loaded weight is about 10 kg so it works out to 4-5 kg/m^2 wing loading, cruise speed about 80 kmh, it'll do fine. It's computer controlled so it doesn't gives a shit about weather conditions or difficulty in piloting, it'll combat through any atmospheric turbulence and retarded aerodynamics. You wouldn't send it out in a thunderstorm but only because it wouldn't be able to see its targets in order to drop the bombs, and in that kind of weather its intended targets (aircraft group) wouldn't be operating anything either.
Nathan Perez
I'll check into it a little more before I make an ass of myself since you're probably right, but I remember talking with some engineers at Northrop about just that when I was an undergraduate because we had a laugh about how they pretended to run on GPS but the main navigation element was the gyroscope since it was independent of outside signals/couldn't be so easily altered. They were making bank on them at $10,000 for the "within 10 meters" units and a quarter million for the "within 5cm" units.
Zachary Young
Loaded weight is about 10 kg so it works out to 4-5 kg/m^2 wing loading, cruise speed about 80 kmh,
What size are we talking about? From your image I assumed ~40cm, wingspan. I don’t know shit about electric motors but I have a hard time believing it could get up to 80km/h
It’s still a styrofoam board essentially, any wind will blow it around, not turbulence as a plane, but actually flipping the ting upside down or throwing it in a cartwheel spin suddenly. A friend had some of those styrofoam gliders as a kid and while they had no propulsion or thrust and no mass the slightest wind would flip it just like if you threw a normal piece of sytrofoam packing in the wind.
Jaxson Torres
The gyro can only tell you the attitude, nothing else. If the rocket is blown off course by the winds or if it flies slightly sideways because thrusters and stabilizers aren't perfectly mounted, it's not gonna know. High grade accelerometers have something like 5-6 digits of precision, which is enough to clearly register your footsteps anywhere in the house. But they're not perfect and even if precision is high, the accuracy might be off, or it could be non-linear, in practice these systems are absolutely never bang-on at all times, they always have some error in measurement. So in a perfect world you just integrate your acceleration and you get your current position and speed as if you'd actually measured them. But in real life with real instruments the errors add up and your projected speed goes apeshit, and so does position. Your best bet is to do dynamic zeroing of the integrated acceleration and speed values, (you try to guess when the accelerometer is at rest so you reset acceleration to 0, eliminating accumulated error), but it's not always possible nor reliable, and you easily end up with drift fraction of over 1/100. Without such corrections, inertial systems are virtually unusable altogether.
It's 1x2 meter block cut in the curved teardrop shape. With just electric motors you could easily get up to 300 kmh but how long you will be able to fly at that speed (and how much distance can you cover) is a whole different story. Drag is a function of square of velocity - halving the speed quarters the drag and power requirements with it, so you double your flight range. Of course in real physics it's not exactly like that but factor of 1.41 of range increase for halving speed is a rule of thumb for low subsonic flight. Note that this doesn't applies to pistons and especially jets, only electric motors can maintain high efficiency in all power output ranges (through voltage adjustment).
As I said, it's computer controlled and it'll be able to simply CANCEL external attitude changing moments. That's how quadcopters and canard planes operate.
Kevin Richardson
I'm not disagreeing with your main point here but this statement is absolutely wrong. The entire purpose of a gyro is to tell how it's positioned and theoretically correct that. It specifically cannot tell altitude.
Justin Perez
Angled.
Jackson Martin
Also keep in mind that the instrument itself is never perfectly aligned, some few arcminutes of calibration angle deviation work out to pretty large position error over hundreds of miles of flight. That's why you need external markers for accurate navigation i.e. GPS and cameras.
Connor Morgan
My bad