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Tech & Builds
How Drone Thermal Cameras Work: Microbolometers, Wavebands, and Physical Limits
Thermal imaging drones detect emitted infrared radiation rather than reflected light, making them useful in darkness, smoke, and fog. This explainer covers the physics of microbolometer sensors, LWIR vs. MWIR tradeoffs, resolution limits, radiometric accuracy, and where the technology falls short.
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Defense & Combat
Air-Launched Effects and Drone Motherships: How Stacking Range Reshapes Aerial Warfare
Air-launched effects (ALE) divorce mission risk from platform cost by stacking a mothership's standoff range on top of a drone's own reach — letting aircraft dispense swarms deep inside defended airspace without entering it. From DARPA's Gremlins to China's Jiutian, the concept is going mainstream.
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Defense & Combat
Wing Loong and Rainbow: China's MALE Drone Arsenal Explained
China's AVIC and CASC have placed combat-capable MALE drones in more than a dozen countries Washington would never supply. Here's how the Wing Loong and Rainbow (CH) families compare, what they've done in combat, and why they keep winning export contracts.
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Defense & Combat
MQ-1C Gray Eagle: The Army's Only MALE Drone, Caught Between Congress and Obsolescence
The MQ-1C Gray Eagle is the U.S. Army's sole medium-altitude long-endurance drone — a Predator descendant rebuilt around Army logistics, manned-unmanned teaming, and ground-force integration. Now Congress and Army leadership are openly fighting over whether it has a future.
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Defense & Combat
IAI Heron and Heron TP (Eitan): Inside Israel's Dominant MALE/HALE Drone Dynasty
From a fiberglass Scout that dismantled Syrian SAM batteries in 1982 to a 26-meter turboprop platform operating above commercial airspace today, Israel's Heron family traces the arc of modern persistent ISR — and why Israel controlled 61% of global drone exports for three decades.
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Defense & Combat
The ZALA Lancet: Inside Russia's Most Effective Loitering Munition
From its distinctive double-X wing geometry to the contested AI claims and the container-launched Product-53 successor, a technical breakdown of the loitering munition that has hunted more Western-supplied artillery in Ukraine than any other single Russian system.
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Defense & Combat
MQ-25 Stingray: How the Navy's First Carrier Drone Solves a Decades-Old Tanker Problem
The MQ-25A Stingray is the U.S. Navy's first operational carrier-based unmanned aircraft — a purpose-built aerial tanker that doubles the combat radius of F/A-18s and F-35Cs while freeing multiple fighters per air wing from buddy-tanker duty.
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Defense & Combat
Pocket ISR: How Nano and Micro Drones Rewired Squad-Level Reconnaissance
From a 16-gram helicopter checking walls in Afghanistan to a 70-gram system with thermal imaging deployed across 50 countries, nano-UAS technology has pushed intelligence collection down to the fire team — and the next frontier is autonomous swarms constrained by battery physics.
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Defense & Combat
Russia's Orlan-10: The Drone That Tells Artillery Where to Shoot
The Orlan-10 has been Russia's most-deployed tactical UAV since the 2014 Donbas conflict — a catapult-launched reconnaissance and artillery-spotting platform built almost entirely from Western and Chinese components, now surging out of a sanctioned St. Petersburg factory at 53 times its pre-war rate.
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Defense & Combat
RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-4C Triton: America's Eyes at 60,000 Feet, Explained
The RQ-4 Global Hawk and MQ-4C Triton are the U.S. military's primary high-altitude, long-endurance ISR platforms — one headed for retirement after a decade of Congressional standoffs, the other cementing its role as the Navy's maritime surveillance backbone through the 2030s.
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Defense & Combat
Beyond the TB2: Turkey's Akinci and Aksungur Redefine the UCAV Export Tier
The Bayraktar TB2 put Turkey on the drone map, but two larger platforms—Baykar's Akinci UCAV and TAI's Aksungur—represent the next tier of Turkish strike capability, now operating in more than a dozen countries and carrying cruise missiles and air-launched drones.
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Tech & Builds
Who Pulls the Trigger? The AI Targeting and Autonomous Weapons Debate, Explained
From DoD Directive 3000.09's misunderstood three-tier framework to Ukraine's jamming-resistant FPV drones, this explainer maps the legal, ethical, and battlefield fault lines in the global debate over lethal autonomous weapons.
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