[dctoedt]

> If increasing reliability and versatility makes the drone last 10 times longer and costs 10 times more -- it's not worth it in the long run: it's goal to trigger the first IED it can find, anyway.

Google's approach to building server farms was likewise to buy hardware that was ultra-cheap because it had failed to meet manufacturing specs. Google expected a certain percentage of hard disks, etc., to fail, and simply swapped them out when they did. That resulted in a significantly lower TCO. (So says Steven Levy in in his recent book In the Plex.)

[saraid216]

While this is a legit perspective, there is a meaningful difference in that Google can throw out their failed hardware without any real risk of having it return to haunt them, but broken toy trucks means either handing materiel to the enemy or having extra useless weight to carry around.

You might be able to tweak specifics to account for this, but you also might not.

[DannoHung]

The solution is to have force redundancy and to make each individual element completely disposable (and detonatable).

[yummyfajitas]

(and detonatable)

No way terrorist types could misuse that one.

[DannoHung]

No, I mean if the gear can't be recovered you tell it to self-destruct.