#cheap flights Australia

[theflightshubaustralia]

Book Cheap Air Tickets from Australia - The Flightshub Australia

Looking to book cheap air tickets from Australia? The FlightsHub Australia offers unbeatable deals on domestic and international flights. Whether you're flying to Sydney, Melbourne, New York, or London, we provide affordable options with reliable service. Trust The FlightsHub Australia to help you save on your next trip, with seamless booking and expert travel advice every step of the way.

[traveljunctioncanada]

Europe offers an array of breathtaking summer destinations perfect for every type of traveler. Santorini, Greece, is famed for its stunning sunsets, white-washed buildings, and crystal-clear waters. The Amalfi Coast in Italy captivates with its dramatic cliffs, charming villages, and delectable cuisine. Barcelona, Spain, combines rich history, vibrant culture, and beautiful beaches. Croatia's Dalmatian Coast, with its pristine islands and medieval cities like Dubrovnik, is a sun-soaked paradise. Lastly, the French Riviera, with its glamorous resorts, azure seas, and luxurious lifestyle, is the ultimate summer escape. Each of these destinations promises unforgettable experiences.

[shaabtrip]

[jediaxis1o1]

Wonder what 2025 will bring us??? 🤔

[tourhawker]

"Discover the stunning scenery and rich culture of New Zealand! 🌿✨ Embark on unforgettable adventures and make memories to last a lifetime!

[bookviaus]

Looking for Cheap Flights to Australia from USA at affordable prices? Get the best deals on air tickets with Bookviaus, No extra hidden charges. Book Now. Whether you're booking one-way or round-trip cheap flights to Australia from USA, here are some tips from the pros to help you save money and enjoy your flight.

[myticketstoindiaaustralia]

Find cheap Sydney to Ahmedabad flights deals at MyTicketsToIndia Australia. Book your tickets now and save big on airfare. Explore the vibrant city of Ahmedabad without breaking the bank. Touch with us to don't miss out the best flight offers. Start your journey today!

[sgiandubh]

Offer and demand

For comparison purposes, kindly find below what a devoted Ozzie fan will have to be prepared to pay for a pic with one or several of the participants to the Hublander Australia 'A Visit to The Highlands' event, this week-end, in Sydney and Melbourne:

On top of that, there is an extra option I have never seen for European events (and correct me if I am wrong). You can buy signed personal items and autographed pics for somebody who cannot attend (personal items cost a little extra, no idea why). Here is an example, for S:

Just to have an idea, remember (I will always LOL at this word, from now on, and that's really a shame, because I use it a LOT, irl) these are the prices in Australian dollars. A pic with S would cost you around 115 euros or 125 USD and the most expensive group pic would lighten your purse by around 360 USD or 333 euros.

All this, like for the Paris Landcon, are on top of what you pay for access and the rest of the side gigs, depending of your tier of choice. Those can set you anywhere from 200 Australian dollars for the standard entry ticket to 1800 Australian dollars for the Platinum Tier, where I hope S will pour you a dram or something - nope, not really, that was really a cheap joke, forget about it. You do the math, it's easy.

If you take the time to compare with the Paris Landcon, the discrepancies are clear. The Australian Lollapalooza easily costs the double. But before you screech and wail, do remember two things:

Prices in Australia and France are not really the same. Same goes for the disposable wages of the people buying these tickets. Same goes for the logistical costs (venue rent, talent accommodation and fee, insurance - very important!, other administrative expenditures like legal costs: never forget these people also sell licensed merchandise, which comes at an extra cost itself, etc).

Also, event organization is a business in itself. There is a market and a pool of potential clients for this type of business. Demand and offer meet (or should do so) on that market and the result of this encounter of sorts should reasonably reflect what the people are willing to pay for whatever you peddle around, from bagels to Scottish fantasies. Too expensive - nobody will come. Too cheap - the talent you hope to attract would, in all likelihood, not show up, especially if it takes 10 to 20 hours of flight to get there.

Now add to this the need to satisfy just about everyone in the room. The simple need to make sure that the person who paid 200 dollars for the basic ticket would not feel left behind those who paid nine times (yes, nine times, for Australia, land of plenty) more. That is not an easy task and those figures you have seen are not what you may think they do represent, on face value.

Last, but not least, a wee secret: the bulk of the talent's fee comes from those autographed pics you bought extra, the Q&A sessions and the Platinum Meet and Greets - isn't that a strange form of Marxist distribution circuit (but I digress, forgive the scholar). The rest is probably going to cover operational costs.

Nobody robbed you. Nobody forced you or hypnotized you. You will meet the real people, not some denizen of Abuja who pretends he is Mr. Blue Eyes. And S will not get richer after Melbourne, only more tired.

You're welcome.

PS: merci à toi; chérie, pour l'info and also a heartfelt thank you to you, New Friend on the Block. You know who you are! 😘😘😘😘❤️❤️❤️

[Edit]: @joey-baby tells me the Oz fans can buy the recording of both days. That is a local exclusive and I surely hope we'd see some of it in here. Thank you! 🙌

[usafphantom2]

How to identify and track military aircraft in online applications

It is surprisingly easy to track what is flying above you, but there are limits - you will still see only what the military wants you to see.

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 12/24/2023 - 14:40 in Military

The system, known as ADS-B, allows you to quickly search for what is flying in your vicinity, or even on the other side of the world.

In the past, before the 2000s, people looked at the sky and saw the trail of condensation created by commercial and military jets at high altitudes and wondered what would be the aircraft that passed over our heads, where it was going, where it came from. Today, thanks to a worldwide transponder system, you can track even U.S. military aircraft.

About a decade later, it was already possible to follow commercial aircraft, knowing which airline, flight level, speed and route taken by the flights, being able to accurately follow the arrival of a plane at the airport.

Currently, equipped with a smartphone and with a particular app or website, we can find all this and much more.

Civil aviation authorities around the world began to implement Automatic Transmission of Dependent Surveillance (ADS-B) in the early years. The ADS-B is an aircraft-mounted transponder system that transmits a variety of information in real time, including the location, speed, direction of the aircraft and a unique transponder code for each aircraft. This information, plotted on a map, gives pilots and ground controllers the ability to quickly get a sense of the local airspace (or the airspace of most places on Earth).

Transponder signals can also be captured by cheap terrestrial receivers that amateurs, aviation enthusiasts and others can build for less than $100 using widely available hardware and software, some of which can be obtained on flight tracking sites.

Movement of aircraft tracked by the ADS-B Exchange around the world.

As of 2021, ADS-B transponders are mandatory in the USA, Europe, Australia, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, South Africa, Taiwan and Vietnam, and the system is being implemented in China, Canada and Saudi Arabia.

In the United States, almost every type of aircraft - from commercial aircraft and small private aircraft to military fighters, helicopters, bombers, tankers, information-collection aircraft, transport, special operations aircraft, drones and even VIP aircraft carrying the president and members of Congress - are required to transpose into controlled airspace.

A screenshot of the online flight tracking site ADS-B Exchange showing a snapshot of military flights in the United States on July 18 of this year on the ADS-B Exchange.

The information is not only available to the aviation community. The ADS-B Exchange website gathers aircraft tracking data and makes it available in real time, allowing anyone to track air traffic anywhere the system is working.

Unlike FlightRadar24.com or FlightAware.com - which rely on flight tracking data streams provided by the FAA and other international aviation authorities or obtained from Aireon's global ADS-B air traffic surveillance and tracking network, as well as ground-based ADS-B receivers - ADSBExchange.com relies on thousands of independently owned ground-based ADS-B receivers and multilayer devices, or MLAT.

MLAT receivers in groups of three or four in a small geographical area use triangulation to track aircraft. In other words, if an aircraft is not using ADS-B for transponder as military aircraft sometimes do, MLAT receivers can still capture their S-Mode transponder signals and establish a position and tracking for an aircraft, as well as altitude and speed data.

The network of receivers of the ADSBExchange.com website includes 10,000 MLAT devices worldwide. As it does not collect flight tracking data from government or commercial sources, it may offer "unfiltered" flight tracking.

ADS-B Exchange merges ADS-B data with other publicly known data on military and civilian aircraft around the world. Individual aircraft are plotted on OpenStreetMap - a free geographical database of the world - represented by color-coded icons according to altitude. The icons range from individual autostos and Cessna 182 to four-engine Boeing 747 and Airbus A380 civil aircraft. Military icons include U-2, KC-135 Stratotankers, C-17 Globemaster III, C-5M Super Galaxy, V-22 Ospreys and so on, although fighters are often represented by a more generic icon model of swept wing and stuffy nose.

A click on the icon includes spatial information, including ground speed, altitude and location, ADS-B signal strength and other data. It also includes the registration of the aircraft, the country of registration and adds a photograph or thumbnail of the aircraft when possible.

All this means that, with the click of a button, you can instantly find out what is flying near you.

Although aircraft tracking has long been a niche hobby among aviation enthusiasts who like to catalog the comings and goings of aircraft, the public availability of transponder data in mid-air also offers journalists, researchers and other observers an effective means of tracking the movements and activities of the planes of the richest and most powerful in the world. The aggregation and analysis of public flight data shed light on the CIA's torture flights, the movements of the Russian oligarchs, and Google's friendly relationship with NASA.

Flights from ISR platforms tracked in the Ukraine region for a period of one month, at the end of last year.

More recently, these tracking techniques have gained international attention after attracting the wrath of Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. After buying social media giant Twitter, Musk banned an account that shared the movements of his private jet.

Despite repeated promises to protect freedom of expression - and a specific promise not to ban the @ElonJet account - on the platform, Musk censored anyone who shared the whereabouts of his plane, claiming that the data obtained entirely legally and totally public was equivalent to "murder coordinates".

A Global Hawk flown remotely with the indicater FORTE12 was the last aircraft tracked over Ukraine before the invasion of Russian forces and the closure of the country's airspace to civilian air traffic, according to the global flight tracking service Flightradar24.

Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a US Global Hawk, with the indication FORTE12, was followed almost daily by thousands of people on the Flighradar24 platform.

Publicly available flight tracking data is a growing problem for the U.S. military, a senior Pentagon official said recently.

Sites such as ADSBExchange.com, FlightRadar24.com and FlightAware.com aggregate flight data in the United States and abroad using a combination of commercial and citizen-owned sensors that capture the movements of commercial, civil and military aircraft in real time, 24 hours a day.

"The Department of Defense considers open source flight tracking and data aggregation on our aircraft a direct threat to our ability to conduct military air operations around the world," the U.S. Air Force said.

An F-35 fighter was tracked in the Flightradar 24 app earlier this year, during a flight near Phoenix, Arizona.

Aggregated by websites and retransmitted on social media accounts, the data can be a free source of intelligence for nation-states, terrorist groups or individuals, revealing everything from operational movements of aircraft, aviation units and troops to training standards, development test flights and the movements of government officials, experts said.

This image shows a Beechcraft King Air configured for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in the military aviation field of Baledogle, Somalia, in 2021. The U.S. civil registration code on the side was not assigned to any specific aircraft at the time and its exact operator remains unknown. However, this is very much in line with the types of aircraft that JSOC allegedly operates clandestinely and that would be interested in hiding the activities through the proposed aircraft flight profile management database tool.

Therefore, military aircraft routinely transmit their ADS-B data, but have the option to turn it off when necessary. The Pentagon is well aware that aviation enthusiasts - and potential opponents - monitor ADS-B data and that aircraft turn off transponders when they do not want anyone to observe them. Often when following the aircraft they simply disappear abruptly from the map.

The U.S. military is also known to use fake hexadecimal codes, which identify a transponder as belonging to a specific aircraft, to help mask certain sensitive flights. For example, the U.S. Air Force VC-25A Air Force One jet that transported President Donald Trump to Afghanistan in 2019 electronically disguised itself for a time as a KC-10 Extender tanker in this way.

As a particularly notable and relevant example of tracking high-profile U.S. military flights, the U.S. Air Force C-40 Clipper aircraft that transported Nancy Pelosi, then a representative of the Democratic Party in California and mayor, to Taiwan last year was visible online, despite concerns that the Chinese military might try to forcibly prevent the flight from reaching the island or harassing it otherwise.

This flight, which used the SPAR19 indicative, was one of the most tracked of all time in terms of total simultaneous users monitoring it on the popular website FlightRadar24, and ended up taking down the app for a period of time.

The Ghostrider trail on the night between November 20 and 21, 2023, on Radarbox.com.

In mid-November, something new happened: a U.S. aircraft involved in combat apparently left its ADS-B on, and did so intentionally. An AC-130J Ghostrider attack aircraft carried out an airstrike against a target that had launched a missile attack against U.S. forces at Al Assad Air Base in Iraq. The AC-130 gunship has a variety of weapons, including 30mm and 105mm cannons, and precisely guided bombs and missiles, and usually flies in lazy circles above its target, pouring firepower on the targets below. In Al Assad's retaliatory air attack, according to The Aviationist website, the Ghostrider involved apparently kept his transponder on all the time, drawing large circles on the ADS-B map and it was possible to be seen on the Radar Box website.

In Brazil, it is possible to track several military aircraft in aircraft tracking applications, including the most widespread Flightradar24. Next, you can see the KC-390, C-130 Hercules transport aircraft or T-27 Tucano coaches in flight near the Air Force Academy. The FAB has hidden data from the presidential aircraft A319 (VC-1) and E190 (VC-2) on these sites.

FAB T-27 Tucano aircraft are often seen flying near Pirassununga, AFA headquarters.

More recently, it was possible to follow the flights of the Brazilian Air Force that went to seek refugees and Brazilian citizens who were and Israel and the Gaza Strip. The KC-30 and KC-390 aircraft could be tracked in real time on the tracking platforms.

If you are a fan of military aircraft or just like to know what is happening when you hear the noise of aircraft engines, ADS-B is a free and reliable tool that you should use to track and identify planes. Observing fighters, spy planes and transport coming and going can help you get to know your armed forces. Just keep in mind that, at least when it comes to military flights, you will only see what the military wants you to see.

BONUS

From Christmas Eve, the flight tracking site Flightradar24 will be keeping an eye on Santa Claus and his reindeer Rudolph, Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner and Blitzen as they accelerate around the world.

Initially tracking Santa Claus was a challenge, but thanks to an ADS-B transponder installed a few years ago and the reindeer horns functioning as an additional antenna, Flightradar24 uses a mixture of terrestrial and satellite ADS-B coverage to track Santa Claus during his busiest night of the year.

To follow the good old man, go here.

Tags: Military AviationtrackingTechnology

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 8.23

Holidays

Asian Corpsetwt Day [Every 23rd]

Battle of Kursk Day (Russia)

Black Ribbon Day (Baltic states)

The Blitz Begins (WW2; 1940; UK)

Daffodil Day [also 4th Friday]

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Hashtag Day

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Food & Drink Celebrations

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Swedish Meatball Day

World Vada Pad Day (Maharashtra, India)

Independence & Related Days

Aerlig (Declared, 2001) [unrecognized]

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Kharkiv City Day (Ukraine)

Mexico (Treaty of Aquala Signed; 1821)

Open Rebellion Day (UK declared US Colonies; 1775)

4th Friday in August

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Comfort Food Friday [Every Friday]

Daffodil Day (Australia, Southern Hemisphere) [4th Friday]

Five For Friday [Every Friday]

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Forgive Your Foe Friday [Friday of Be Kind to Humankind Week]

Friday Finds [Every Friday]

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International Pozole Day [4th Friday]

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Weekly Holidays beginning August 23 (3rd Full Week of August)

Health Unit Coordinators Week (thru 8.29)

Festivals Beginning August 23, 2024

Askov Rutabaga Festival and Fair (Askov, Minnesota) [thru 8.25]

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Colorado State Fair (Pueblo, Colorado) [thru 9.2]

DeKalb Corn Fest (DeKalb, Illinois) [thru 8.25]

Espoo Ciné International Film Festival (Espoo, Finland) [thru 9.1]

Fallon Cantaloupe Festival & Country Fair (Fallon, Nevada) [8.25]

Fête Rouge Food & Wine Fête (Baton Rouge, Louisiana)

German-American Festival (Oregon, Ohio) [thru 8.25]

Hill City Wine, Brew and BBQ(Hill City, South Dakota) [thru 8.24]

Humungous Fungus Fest (Crystal Falls, Michigan) [thru 8.24]

Indianapolis GreekFest - Indianapolis, Indiana

Mammoth Rocks & Music & Food Festival (Mammoth Lakes, California) [thru 8.24]

Northwest Art and Air Festival (Albany, Oregon) [thru 8.25]

Nebraska State Fair (Grand Island, Nebraska) [thru 9.2]

Old Fashioned Corn Roast Festival (Loveland, Colorado) 9thru 8.24]

Oregon State Fair (Salem, Oregon) [thru 9.2]

Potato Days Festival (Barnesville, Minnesota) [thru 8.24]

Roots Festival (Paola, Kansas) [thru 8.24]

Shrewsbury Folk Festival (Shrewsbury, United Kingdom.) [thru 8.26]

Soybean Festival (Mexico, Missouri) [thru 8.24]

Sylvester Swine Festival (Sylvester, Georgia) [thru 8.24]

Washington State Garlic Fest (Chehalis, Washington) (thru 8.25]

Whiskies of the World (Boston, Massachusetts)

World Food & Music Festival (Des Moines, Iowa) [thru 8.25]

Feast Days

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Chǔshǔ begins (China) [Thru 9.7]

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Premieres

A-Hunting We Won’t Go (Color Rhapsody Cartoon; 1943)

Alice Adams (Film; 1935)

Angel Has Fallen (Film; 2019)

Animal Crackers (Film; 1930)

Barton Fink (Film; 1991)

Better Off Dead (Film; 1985)

The Big Sleep (Film; 1946)

Birdland (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1935)

Canadian Capers, featuring Farmer Al Falfa (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1931)

Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White, recorded Perez Prado (Song; 1954)

Club Life in the Stone Age (Terrytoons Cartoon; 1940)

DC Super Hero Girls: Hero of the Year (WB Animated Film; 2016)

The Death of Superman (WB Animated Film; 2018)

Drinking Buddies (Film; 2013)

Freeway (Film; 1996)

The Girl at the Ironing Board (WB MM Cartoon; 1934)

Going! Going! Gosh! (WB MM Cartoon; 1952)

Grace, by Jeff Buckley (Album; 1994)

Henry IV, Part 2, by William Shakespeare (Play; 1600)

Knighty Knight Bugs (WB LT Cartoon; 1958)

Lover, by Taylor Swift (Album; 2019)

Pass the Biscuits Mirandy! (Swing Symphony Cartoon; 1943)

Scotty Finds a Home (Rainbow Parade Cartoon; 1935)

She Loves You, by The Beatles (UK Song; 1963)

She’s the One (Film; 1996)

Sir Army Suit, by Klaatu (Album; 1978)

The Sun Also Rises (Film; 1957)

Superior Duck (WB Cartoon; 1996)

Superman: Man of Tomorrow (WB Animated Film; 2020)

Teen Wolf (Film; 1985)

That ’70s Show (TV Series; 1998)

Tom and Jerry and the Wizard of Oz (WB Animated Film; 2011)

Woody’s Magic Touch (Woody Woodpecker Cartoon; 1971)

The World’s End (Film; 2013)

Today’s Name Days

Isolde, Philipp, Rosa, Zachäus (Austria)

Rozalija, Ruža, Ružica (Croatia)

Sandra (Czech Republic)

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Signe, Singe (Estonia)

Signe, Varma (Finland)

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Bence (Hungary)

Fabrizio, Maria, Regina (Italy)

Benjamins, Ralfs, Spriditis, Vitālijs (Latvia)

Girmantas, Pilypas, Tautgailė (Lithuania)

Signe, Signy (Norway)

Apolinary, Benicjusz, Filip, Laurenty, Sulirad, Walerian, Waleriana, Zacheusz (Poland)

Filip (Slovakia)

Rosa (Spain)

Signe, Signhild (Sweden)

Eugene, Eugenia, Geena, Gena, Gene, Genie, Gina, Jina, River, Zacchaeus, Zaccheus (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 236 of 2024; 130 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 5 of Week 34 of 2024

Celtic Tree Calendar: Coll (Hazel) [Day 21 of 28]

Chinese: Month 7 (Ren-Shen), Day 20 (Ji-Wei)

Chinese Year of the: Dragon 4722 (until January 29, 2025) [Wu-Chen]

Hebrew: 19 Av 5784

Islamic: 17 Safar 1446

J Cal: 26 Purple; Fryday [26 of 30]

Julian: 10 August 2024

Moon: 80%: Waning Gibbous

Positivist: 11 Gutenberg (9th Month) [Dollond]

Runic Half Month: Rad (Motion) [Day 1 of 15]

Season: Summer (Day 65 of 94)

Week: 3rd Full Week of August

Zodiac: Virgo (Day 2 of 32)

Calendar Changes

Rad (Motion) [Half-Month 17 of 24; Runic Half-Months] (thru 9.6)

[theflightshubaustralia]

https://www.yellowpages.com.au/qld/taigum/expert-travel-agent-in-australia-the-flightshub-australia-1000002941322-listing.html

Your Trusted Travel Partner in Australia - The FlightsHub Australia

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[skopostheorie]

q I need to know how do you have enough money to go all these places so frequently especially internationally

Asia was cheap because I just used my tax return which was like $3000 (a quarter of our yearly earnings go to it but unless you're making a bucketload they give it back) and Asia is close to Australia so a flight to Vietnam was like $200 and then all the others were also within that range. Plus I'm low maintenance so I stayed at hostels. Which is like what. $5 p/n in Vietnam. $25 in HK. $30 in Korea. etc

[dig-with-it]

Google Searches On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown

cheap flights / sometimes I don't feel like a person / inability to leave my bed / inability to breathe / things are moving very slow but also very fast at the same time / symptoms of depression / how long do I have to sit in the sun before my brain starts working right again / cheap flights / can you buy NyQuil in bulk / top ten foreign cities to disappear in / cheap flights / how to explain anxiety to your mother / how to explain depression to your mother / how to explain sometimes wanting to kiss girls to your mother / what to do if you come out and your parents don't love you anymore / how to find the city farthest away from where you are currently at / cheap flights / how to pronounce Melbourne / deadliest animals in Australia / will wanting to die feel different in another country / does it matter

— Trista Mateer

[msvorderofoperations]

More dream journaling.

This one was really fucking intense, and I feel pretty comfortable calling it a nightmare even if everything was fairly mundane.

It started off being about on vacation with the whole extended family. It was to be a kind of last hurrah before my immediate family moved to a different country. As has been the problem lately, my mom was causing tons of problems. She was ordering people around and getting mad at people for doing things she asked of them. Eventually it reaches a head, and I go off on her about how she has ruined any chance of this being a good time. In addition to being a completely unreasonable control freak, she has utterly forgotten a bunch of the things she has done and said. And it goes beyond selective memory, (which has long been a problem in dealing with her) it now is clearly dementia.

In all the time it takes to wrest control from her and make the required arrangements for her to be given the care she needs and to stop her from doing any more damage, the vacation has ended and it has fully eaten into the time I needed to pack. In the days leading up to the move, I start having dreams (I have had multi-level dreams long before Inception made it into a meme) about being a soldier in an armed conflict.

The experience is about as bad as it can be, with awful mental conditioning, being completely unsupported during combat, the dehumanizing aftermath where we're given cheap trinkets made with slave labour to signify our deeds. And to top it all off, we weren't even paid in money for our time served: we get paid in spices, pigments, and tokens that can be exchanged elsewhere.

I eventually wake up (from the dream within a dream at least), and start working on trying to frantically get things squared away for the move. As I'm working, I see a bunch of stuff from my early life that I had completely forgotten. And as the memories start coming back, I begin to wonder if the dreams of war were in fact memories that I had suppressed. This is something that has happened to me IRL, and I'm keen to disprove the dream being real because so many awful things were done to me, and done by me.

As I randomly search through my possessions for something to either prove positive or disprove the dreams were real, I start to remember more of the war. Our last operation had been a complete clusterfuck, with many members of our unit being permanently injured and more than a few outright dying. As I more and more desperately try and find anything to prove it didn't happen, a final detail clicks in my head: the person most adversely affected by PTSD was given one final order. Kill the remaining people of our unit should anything come to light about our mission.

At this point I am just throwing out most of my possessions to try and save time and get things moving because I am now fully afraid for my life. I can't even tell anyone about my fears or ask for confirmation about my time served because that may be enough to sign my death warrant.

Eventually I make it onto the flight and it's a long one, I think from Canada to Australia. I dream once again, but this time it's benign anime robot fighting bullshit. I wake up again and move to head to the bathroom, and I see the dude who had been given the order to kill us. I try not to freak out but once I'm again seated I desperately search to see if anything I have in my carry-on can be used as a weapon to defend myself.

At this point I finally, mercifully, wake up for real.

[tourhawker]

"Finding serenity in solitude. 🌿 Solo adventures await! Join us if you wanna explore, discover, and embrace the world on your own terms.

[dialogue-queered]

Article

Paul Cureton

Innovative design choices can have a massive impact in the theatre of war, so it is important to understand the principles behind their development. Recent use of low-cost cardboard drones by Ukraine, supplied by Australia, to attack targets in Russia is a good example of how this can work.

Australia has been supplying Ukraine with 100 of the drones per month from March this year as part of an aid package deal worth an estimated £15.7 million, following an agreement struck in July 2021, according to the Australian Army Defence Innovation Hub.

Emerging technologies tend to override current technologies, and in turn, this generates competitive counter-technologies. This circular relationship driven by innovation is often critical in warfare as it can provide key technological advances.

Drone technology was originally developed for military use. It was then seen to offer opportunities in the civilian sphere for logistics, delivery and disaster relief. This then in turn has offered new innovations that can translate to military applications.

Conflicts in the future will be particularly shaped by drones, which will have implications for international relations, security and defence.

The Australian firm Sypaq, an engineering and solutions company founded in 1992, created the Corvo Precision Payload Delivery System (PPDS) for use in military, law enforcement, border security and emergency services, as well as food security, asset inspection and search and rescue.

Ukrainian forces reportedly used the PDDS cardboard drones in an attack on an airfield in Kursk Oblast in western Russia on August 27. The attack damaged a Mig-29 and four Su-30 fighter jets, two Pantsir anti-aircraft missile launchers, gun systems, and an S-300 air surface-to-air missile defence system.

Design principles

The design principles behind the success of the drones revolve around several factors including the production cost, airframe material, weight, payload, range, deployment and ease of use. Other considerations include the reliability of the operating software and the ability to fly the drone in various weather conditions. Seven Network news report on SYPAQ’s cardboad drones.

Generally, small drones offer high-resolution imagery for reconnaissance in a rapidly changing theatre of war. The Corvo drone has a high-resolution camera that provides images covering a large area, transmitting footage back to its user in real time.

The importance of real-time mapping is critical in modern agile armed forces’ command and control as this can direct ground forces, heavy weapons and artillery.

In some cases, the design of small drones is concentrated on adapting the payloads to carry different types of munitions, as seen in the attack in Kursk.

The cardboard drones can carry 5kg of weight, have a wingspan of two metres and a range of 120km at a reported cost of US$3,500 (£2,750). Waxed cardboard is an ideal material as it offers weather resistance, flat-pack transportation (measuring 510mm by 760mm) and, importantly, a lightweight airframe, which enables a longer flight range and a high cruise speed of 60km/h.

Fixed-wing drones also offer longer ranges than rotor-based drones as the wings generate the lift and the airframe has less drag, so they are more energy efficient. They can also fly at higher altitudes. The drones can be launched from a simple catapult or by hand and so can be rapidly deployed.

Low-tech material, hi-tech thinking

Radar involves the transmission of electromagnetic waves, and these are reflected off any object back to a receiving antenna. Cardboard is generally harder to detect by radar – but its components, such as the battery, can be detected.

But the Corvo drone is likely to have a small signature. Radar-absorbing materials are needed to have full stealth properties. These polymers have various absorbing qualities to avoid radar detection.

Another design principle is the swarming capability of the drone. Swarms of drones can overpower air defence systems through sheer volume and or can be used as decoys in counterintelligence operations.

Swarms are highly reliant on the development of artificial intelligence, which is still an embryonic research area. But a recent drone race at ETH University in Zurich, in which AI-piloted drone beat drones controlled by world-champion drone racers, highlighted this potential.

All of these design principles and innovations have and are continuing to transform warfare and theatre operations. It is likely that small drones at low cost are likely to have further mission success in the future.