by Alacon » Sun May 04, 2014 10:22 am
I may not be able to help much with most airsoft questions, but here I can help out.
The biggest thing is stable sensors on the UAV, with the basic rotary wings you get a mounted sensor and you actively have to fly it , which is a pain when you prefer to be playing.
Fixed wing is even harder to maintain, you still have to fly it, have a movable sensor and areas to take off/land. Most of these are bigger than anyone would like, most of the size limitations set by weather, wind mostly.
Price is something that will always be unavoidable in situations like this, most of the military capabilities are incredibly expensive on top of huge wait times.
So really that would break down into 2 options from my point of view at least.
Quadrotor UAV.
You can do awesome things even with some limited programming knowledge you can get tracking sensors with telemetry, and antonymous flight. that being said it's expensive still, but upgrade-able in increments with maybe a couple hours of station time.
Blimp.
This is really where its at for airsoft in my opinion, a tethered blimp will take away most of the issues you would normally have. it floats on it's own, can hold a bigger payload for an almost infinite station time. you can get up above the treeline, or put it in a decent place to get a good view of the battlefield. you can run a wire down for sensor power, giving the ability yo mount a much much cheaper CCTV type camera that you can still control and run it yo a ground station. running this config you also have the option to run Wifi transmit from the blimp, meaning with a basic connecting you have the ability to give anyone who has a cell phone/tablet access to that video.
Hope that helps out