China claims to have turbine-powered drone carrying 200kg payload

"the Royal Navy's PR about how its warships' radars can track improbable numbers of cricket balls doing improbable things, like travelling at Mach 3"

Being able to track them, and being able to stop them, are two entirely different problems.

Best Korea has a hamster powered drone capable of carrying a payload that can take out the internet.

According to fox news who are the bastion of accurate and unbiased news reporting.

It's a sad day in the UK as we no longer get to see that "news" channel.

People should be free to decide for themselves what is propaganda

Calling a news source propaganda is a political opinion, rather than fact.

You could say that vast majority of western news outlets are propaganda. Because they all have advertisements, which is commercial propaganda designed to influence people's behavior.

And of course, there is lots of political propaganda in western news outlets too. Because most of them take sides in political issues, rather than just report on what's going on.

It's true that there lots of propaganda everywhere. But to call China's news sources propagandist, while claiming that you are better than them is a form of hypocrisy.

What is a 'drone'?

"The claim of having a drone capable of carrying a 200kg payload is quite a stretch, ...

Last month the Financial Times reported that JD.com operates, by its own account, 60 drone routes in remote areas of the Sichuan, Jiangsu and Shaanxi provinces. These are said to operate along pre-programmed flight corridors"

Given the use of flight corridors and remote areas, I suspect the drones being referred to are unmanned aircraft. As for questions of size, I'm sure if someone is prepared to pay, Boeing would deliver a 747 drone...

Bah

Ancient news. The US military has been experimenting with 'drones' capable of delivering large amounts of explosives for nearly 100 years now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kettering_Bug and they have one capable of delivering 450 kg right now, though admittedly only once per 'drone'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile) The Chinese have a long way to go if they mean to catch up.

Am I missing something?

Isn't this technology that has been around for a great while already? I really do not see the technical challenge here. Making a small and cheap enough drone that runs on batteries, sure we had to make good enough batteries first. Making large stuff fly we have figured out ages ago, and autonomous we have done for decades.

Sure, there are many more hurdles to overcome like reliability and degrees of autonomy, but actually just getting something to take of, go in a straight line and then land can't be that hard. There are probably a lot of choppers out there that could fly on their own to some degree if you tweak the software and allow them.

Or am I missing something fundamentally here?

Duck!

And next! Amazon will be delivering sofas by air.

Tin helmets, anyone?

Seriously, getting hit by 200 KG from any height would ruin your whole day!

Safety and reliability on drones makes IoT look like a mature technology..

We finally have the technology

to, via the air, deliver a standard American person 200km. What an age to be alive.

200 kg is 440 lbs., good enough to carry 2 average adults. Think autonomous air taxis. That has a much higher value than delivering goods.

Not a gas turbine?

"JD.com has created a drone with a "hybrid gas-electric engine"

Somehow that doesn't sound much like a gas turbine to me, I tried to find the Xinhua article but so far nothing, I would like to see more info as Gas-electric sounds like a gasoline engine driving electric rotors via a generator/batteries. Still don't see how it could freight 200kgs though, it must be a monster.

Think flying Prius!

The open skies of enterprise

The possibilities for ransomlair are humongous. Please pay us $5 a month not to be on the noisy flight path. Please pay us $1000 so that our non-exploding but pointy 200 kg cargo may not fall on your roof or through your window. This is almost as good as smart meters!

China has a drone capable of carrying 200kg. I'm sure the US could turn a B52 into a drone if they really wanted and it'll carry 31500kg.

Is it really all that big a deal that China has made a bigger than average remote control plane?

How effective can commercial-grade drones actually be?

Fundamentally, it feels like there would be a lot of issues around converting a commercial drone into a weapon.

First, navigation. GPS can be spoofed, downgraded or even disabled altogether, and is no real use against moving targets. Remote steering is possible, but can be jammed and is subject to lag - and unless you have some form of swarming technology, you need one warm body per drone. In theory, you could give a drone optical sensors and image recognition technology, or even have someone plant a beacon for a drone to home in on, but even those are subject to spoofing and jamming.

Then, there's range. A quick glance at Google indicates that commercial drone control range generally tops out at around 1km - though there is mention of one with a 7km range. Equally, flight time tops out at 15-30 minutes. I'd guess that this gas-turbine fuelled beastie may be capable of much more, but even then, it's unlikely to compare to a dedicated missile platform.

And there's more: commercial drones aren't designed to have a low radar profile, they're not designed for flying in adverse weather, they don't have systems redundancy, they don't have any defensive capabilities, they only have short range collision avoidance sensors, they're unarmored, they're not EMP hardened, etc.

Some of these things can be addressed as technology improves, or even retro-fitted on, but fundamentally, there's significant differences between the capabilities required for military and commercial activities.

Personally I think commercial-grade drones will take on a much smaller scale role - e.g. acting as disposable, short range scouts during infantry actions - if you're not too worried about making your presence known, they're perfect for city clearances and building searches. It's even possible that they could be used as beacons for their larger and more heavily armed military cousins...

3.4m long?

The gas-turbine motor alone is 3.4m long? Does this "drone" happen to have a human pilot and a couple of machine guns too :)

The gas-turbine engine in Rover's experimental turbine car was tiny, smaller than a petrol engine and produced a hundred and something horsepower.

Maybe they mean the entire craft is 3.4m long?

Careful!

News outlets like Russia Today and the Xinhua are obviously going to present stories that present their countries in a favorable light but as the BBC figured out almost a century ago the essence of credibility is to only present stories that are more or less factually correct. So I'd assume that this oversized quadcopter does exist and it probably works. The technological hurdle they've got to overcome is being able to rapidly adjust the thrust on each propeller, its how you keep the thing stable. This is pretty straightforward with a lightweight device with responsive electrically powered motors but it won't scale too well. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if they were the only people working on this.

If you look at the amount of high end work coming out of China (rather than the latest sneaker knock-offs) then you'll see some pretty sophisticated work going on in that country. We should resist the temptation to smirk because we're so superior.....