Feloni aero's Felon drones: Skynet's fantasy or battlefield reality?
The American company, Feloni Aero, has introduced a new drone series dubbed the Felon, drawing stark comparisons to the Skynet drones from the Terminator movies. These drones could potentially make their way to Ukraine should the US Department of Defense decide to purchase them. Let's delve into the details.
The Felony Aero company has unveiled the Felon family of armed drones, designed to eliminate enemy soldiers and destroy armored vehicles or tanks. The inaugural model, Felon 1.0, has a 5.56x45 mm NATO rifle. Its counterpart, the FelonX, can carry a single anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) Spike.
Felon drones: Turning terminator's dystopian vision into reality
The Felon drones are described as quadcopters that can remain airborne for 40 minutes and cover a distance of up to 12 miles from their control station. The Felon 1.0 drone weighs 5.5 pounds, including its battery, while the FelonX drone is slightly heavier at about 6.5 pounds. Nevertheless, both drones have a takeoff weight cap of 7.5 pounds.
While seemingly limiting, this weight allowance is sufficient to accommodate a severely pared-down AR-15 rifle with a 16.25-inch barrel and a modest ammunition supply. The scenario is less favorable for the Spike missile. In its most compact form, the SR version, capable of reaching targets up to 1.24 miles away, the missile and launcher together weigh 22 pounds, and even excluding the missile would only marginally reduce the overall payload weight.
The drones are designed to employ encrypted communication (Mesh network) amongst themselves, boast terrain mapping capabilities, yet rely on GPS navigation, which has been effectively jammed by Russian forces. For target detection and ballistic computations, the drones are equipped with an uncooled thermal imaging camera, boasting a 640×512 resolution, and a laser rangefinder with a maximum distance of 3937 feet.
While the concept is intriguing, its true efficacy can only be determined on the front lines, where it remains to be seen whether a swarm of such drones, outfitted with artificial intelligence algorithms for target identification and equipped with AR-15 rifles featuring two-axis stabilized firing modules, will prove successful or not.
