DescentBB

Headline for this vid is "First-Person Drone Racing Is An Awesome New Sport That Will Make You Vomit"

https://digg.com/video/first-person-drone-racing-help

and my first thought was, "vomit? Haven't any of you people ever played descent?"

That is so much like Descent. I'm sure any Descent pilot would master drones easily. All I need is to configure my 3D Pro to fly the drone

Wait till they start doing it with full blown collective pitch RC helicopters, which can do everything a quadcopter can do normally, plus backwards and upside down too... They are as close as you can get to a Pyro in real life, the only limitation they have that the Pyro doesn't is that the rotors have to be oriented horizontally to generate lift so you can't hover sideways, but you can hover upside down and slide/turn/roll in any direction. I guess you could call it 5.5 degrees of freedom.

Damn, that' s f*cking brill! I would like to control this drone) You can fly anywhere! Do you want one, you want to with your friends... Really cool

So how long before someone sets up a building you can fly in and you can mount some sort of a laser to shoot with that will register hits against a opponent?

I hate to think of the power to weight ratio of that.
It seems to go from maybe 35kph to a dead stop in about 2m. That's about 20G. I'm amazed those props are holding together. A friend of mine developing high-speed drones says he's having issues because his props are snapping due to centrifgal force calculated to be about 50G's (at the tips)

A descent pilot could handle the vertigo and perspective jumps, but I don't know if every descent pilot has the reaction times to keep up with it.

I wonder how many motors and props making that video took?

@woodchip:
They've done airsoft from drones. Unfortunately lasers have power limitations.

woodchip wrote:So how long before someone sets up a building you can fly in and you can mount some sort of a laser to shoot with that will register hits against a opponent?

My suspicion is that they will have a version with actual weapons and let the drones fight each other to the death. A very EXPENSIVE sport...

Kilarin wrote:My suspicion is that they will have a version with actual weapons and let the drones fight each other to the death. A very EXPENSIVE sport...

I was gonna say "too heavy", but then there was this:

Drone racing is nothing like descent. It's nowhere near challenging enough to be like descent.