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A little more context from that episode - this 1.8 GP camera thing was in part because operators would get tunnel vision when running the mega-zoom camera on the Predator drone for too long. They'd be tracking a van and miss the larger context that the van is full of school children. Nova painted this camera as a way to never lose the bigger picture. Of course now you've got a massive bandwidth problem.

No mention was made of the obvious solution: add a second low-zoom camera. A basic usability feature would be to click on a spot in the low-zoom area and have the high-zoom camera immediately track over to that spot, making it very easy to flip between several locations with the high-zoom lens.

edit: Other bit of bad design mentioned in that show. Apparently if you bank too sharply the satellite connection will break. I do not understand how this is possible. Gimbel the antenna and slave the servo to the artificial horizon gyroscope. This was a solved problem decades ago.



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