Struggling with manpower shortages, overwhelming odds and uneven international assistance, Ukraine hopes to find a strategic edge against Russia in an abandoned warehouse or a factory basement.
An ecosystem of laboratories in hundreds of secret workshops is leveraging innovation to create a robot army that Ukraine hopes will kill Russian troops and save its own wounded soldiers and civilians.
Defense startups across Ukraine — about 250 according to industry estimates — are creating the killing machines at secret locations that typically look like rural car repair shops.
Employees at a startup run by entrepreneur Andrii Denysenko can put together an unmanned ground vehicle called the Odyssey in four days at a shed used by the company. Its most important feature is the price tag: $35,000, or roughly 10% of the cost of an imported model.
Does anyone remember BattleBots?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BattleBots
The British version was much better, IMO.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_Wars_(TV_series)
Also, I attended a live robot battle event at DragonCon around the same time. It was lots of fun.
Despite it obviously being hugely popular (those crowds! Those smelly, smelly crowds!), I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen or heard somebody mention DragonCon “in the wild”.
It was a lot less commercial back in the 90s. And you could do things like just walk up to a celebrity to shake their hand and say hi and not get charged any money for it.
Yeah, those days are gone. I haven’t been in years, but I’m sure they still have good panels and such. But nothing is free and everything has a line.
I went to Indy ComiCon last year and that was bad enough. Never again.
Yeah, my last con was PAX West some…6(?) years ago. Don’t see myself attending another. I did get some really fantastic dice there, though. Jade. I love jade. And a nice art print. Still, I’ve just kind of had enough of them now that they’re all so crowded and expensive.