DARPA orders 'Katana' monoblade nano-copter Famed Pentagon crazytech bureau DARPA has handed out half a million greenbacks to buy a tiny one-bladed robot helicopter slightly bigger than a coin, dubbed "Katana" and apparently intended for "indoor military missions". DARPA - renowned for being of the dungeon laboratory school of science rather than the ivory tower one - …
...big fuckoff nets over buildings. Can you imagine the impact of these things once they get civilianised? A paparazzi's dream, never mind all the nefarious uses our wonderful police forces will dream up. I look forward to the first court case for damages when some C-List celeb is smacked in the face by a badly piloted nanocopter.
Agreed. Given that (for example) a Merlin (EH101) - a fair-sized helicopter - has a main rotor 18.6m in diameter, and (for eample) a UK 5p - a small coin - is 18mm in diameter, then "milli" seems like the appropriate prefix. This baby is about 1000th the size of a helicopter.
Of course, if you then scale all three dimensions by 1/1000 you get a billionth of the *volume* (in the same way that a millilitre is 1000th of a litre, but a cube occupying a millilitre is 10mm on a side, while a cube of 1litre is 100mm on each side), so perhaps "nano" is remarkably accurate...
Helicopter icon, because that's about actual size for the Katana
"*In old-time Japan the Katana was the long sword of the Samurai warrior, of course."
Incorrect. Or, at least, partially inaccurate.
The Katana was the standard sword (and almost always paired with an identical wakizashi/short sword)used by Samurai, correct, but it was not a long sword. The Japanese longsword is the nodachi, but was mainly an infantry/field weapon (and not used often anyway as it was far more difficult to forge, required significantly more strength and dexterity to wield, and was at least equally matched in capability by the naginata and nagamaki).
So, yes it was the sword most commonly identified with Samurai, but it was not a long sword.
The definition of nano was changed after the release of a product from a company named Apple - please update your dictionaries.
@Katana - If a samurai has only two swords, and the wakizashi is his short sword, then the katana, by process of elimination, is the samurai's long sword. ^_^
You think they will be in danger of hitting the celebs' *faces*?
Given the interests of the paparazzi, I suspect the first incident will involve one of them flying too fast in the upskirtwards direction outside a club.
El Reg - please replace the icon radio buttons with checkboxes, I should be able to have Paris + black helicopter as well for this one.
Triple-bladed disk, sat on a stick, with a hefty pull it'd fly about 50-75 metres.
Got 'em from (sob) Woolies at about a quid a throw. No propane, so little carbon footprint. Some methane, when I fouled my pants as a car ran over it...
Slap a nano-camera and transmitter on it - winner!
Hope the manufacturers aren't looking to patent this - the one I had surely qualifies as "prior art", as does a sycamore seed.
A local UAV company has built a rather neat tactical tool in the form of a small electric plane (about 18" wingspan) that carries a bomb designed to take out annoying infantry positions. Its flown from a hand-held controller that's a bit like a PSP. A nice idea except for two things...
-- It might give the wrong people the wrong ideas
-- Flying a model plane using this kind of link is really difficult. They have hired a prominent local modeler to try to train people but I don't know how successful he'll be. The plane will really need some serious smarts (and guidance kit) to be controllable which might make it a bit expensive for everyday use (and the extra kit detracts from the payload).
So we'll have a fun micro-heli to play with. I'll get out my fly-swatter.
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