On Tuesday this week, the Royal Navy ship HMS Mersey launched something unusual from its gun deck off England's southern coast—a cheap drone made using a 3-D printer.
The three-kilogram craft with an airplane-style design was launched by a three-meter catapult and autonomously flew between a few preprogrammed waypoints for five minutes before being piloted to a safe belly landing on a pebbly beach.
The cheap drone had been printed on shore and then assembled on the ship. The test was meant to demonstrate how more-or-less disposable drones that could, in a pinch, be printed onboard might cut costs and let a crew adapt quickly to a new mission, for example after a natural disaster.
How much do you want to bet they'll be primarily used to spy on chicks tanning naked on yachts?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gringer on Saturday July 25 2015, @02:08AM
This story summary has reminded me of Carrier Command:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Command [wikipedia.org]
You make remote-controlled vehicles on your carrier, and control islands by sending the vehicles to islands to install automated production facilities.
Ask me about Sequencing DNA in front of Linus Torvalds [youtube.com]