Maybe for some facets of warfare however they will be used for transporting humans in places that planes can not land and where VTOL would pick up fod foreign object damage into the engines.
Drones can be used in conjunction with FLIR to detect wildfire hot-spots, but they can not put out the hot-spots. Drones are not useful for fighting forest fires by carrying large containers of water as they are not powerful enough. Water is very heavy. Fighting wildfires will still be human piloted aircraft including jets, cargo planes, prop planes, helicopters for quite some time.
timonoko•1h ago
What was the scifi-story where they explored some planet with electric helicopters. They had several hectars on thinfilm solar panels, which they spread on the fields every other day. This does not sound Scifi at all now.
timonoko•1h ago
Based on your description, the story you're likely thinking of is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
The scenario you describe is a key element of the book's early colonization efforts. The colonists use electric vehicles and helicopters for exploration on Mars, and they power them by deploying vast, flexible sheets of thin-film solar cells. They would spread these out on the Martian plains to recharge their equipment, a process that was essential for their survival and mobility.
Your observation that "This does not sound Scifi at all now" is spot-on. Red Mars, published in 1992, was a pioneering work of "hard science fiction" that focused on plausible, realistic future technologies. At the time, thin-film solar panels and advanced electric helicopters were speculative concepts. However, with the development of real-world technology like the flexible solar panels used on the International Space Station and the success of NASA's Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, the line between Robinson's fiction and our reality has become much blurrier.
Bender•1h ago
Maybe for some facets of warfare however they will be used for transporting humans in places that planes can not land and where VTOL would pick up fod foreign object damage into the engines.
Drones can be used in conjunction with FLIR to detect wildfire hot-spots, but they can not put out the hot-spots. Drones are not useful for fighting forest fires by carrying large containers of water as they are not powerful enough. Water is very heavy. Fighting wildfires will still be human piloted aircraft including jets, cargo planes, prop planes, helicopters for quite some time.