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by missedthecue 1583 days ago
Of course, this only works if you spot the small fire quickly. By the time smoke is high up in the air, the fire has likely grown larger than this drone can handle.
2 comments

Yeah, I'd like to know how it's spotting these fires
Satellite fire detection can find ignitions pretty darn quick -- much quicker than I would expect.

Also, some ignitions come from known sources (e.g. powerline downing), and monitoring and localization already exists in some cases (PG&E).

Satellites do that.
Drones are horizontally scalable. Instead of one, 50 can go extinguish the fire.
You're going to need way more than 50, and they'll need to coordinate dropping on a wide flame front. Also, it's not clear what they're using as a retardant - powders and gasses are almost useless in wildland fires. You need water.

That said, what would be really useful is a surveillance drone we can send out when someone phones in a smoke report. 9 out of 10 times the call is nothing, but we still have to suit up, drive to the station, get in the engine, and go investigate.

That sounds like a scene straight out of factorio. I'm not sure whether that's delightful or concerning.
You're off by a few orders of magnitude. It's more like 50,000, and that would only work for a very small fire.

Water is heavy and it takes a lot of it to counteract the heat generated by a wildland fire. Which is why water is not the primary tool for fighting wildland fires: McLeods, chainsaws, and bulldozers are. Fuel removal along a one-dimensional perimeter is much easier than bringing in massive quantities of water across a huge two-dimensional area.

I thought we're talking about first 10 minutes of fire. Not firefighting after it has accelerated.