Neighborhood Tactical Superiority

The concept of Neighborhood Nuclear Superiority is outmoded at this point; the gardenhose tatical nuke for sure would get rid of the neighbor's pit bull but the unintended consequences factor would be unsuited for the new century:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyPwJrPQO3g

Nuclear weaponry is essentially outmoded at this point in time, both for our military and for resolving neighborhood disputes. We have lived into an age in which the most major weapon of war is a variant of the radio-controlled toy airplane. As in the case of the guy with the garden-hose adapter for the small tactical nuke in the old Lampoon commercial, the question arises as to how close an ordinary citizen could come to putting together his own predator drone, and what would that cost?

For starters, the airplane would be well under two hundred dollars:

http://www.nitroplanes.com/uav.html



with possibly another hundred fifty for radio gear, basically four or five simple servos, a receiver, a transmitter, and a motor controller. That stuff is all made in the Pacific rim now with costs a fraction of what they once were.

RC as a hobby turned some sort of a gigantic corner within the last six or seven years. Aircraft are now generally of EPO foam and not balsa wood, motors are LIPO powered electric and work without any of the grief of the old 2-strokes, and even the radios work now. Locking is via GUIDS and data packet xmission and not via channels.

Flying by sight would never produce the control you'd want for whacking the neighbor's pit bull of course, you'd need to see what the airplane sees and somehow get into the toy airplane itself. Check this out:

http://www.indoordomecamera.net/fpv-night-flying-rc-plane-night-vision-camera-real-time-flying-ez-glider

FPV stands for First Person View. You'd need a ham license for the fpv unit of course but that's become much simpler than it once was and cost is pretty far from being prohibitive.

The only real limit in this entire picture is human imagination.