The munitions have timers that detonate at the distance prescribed by the laser sight.

Given lots of flying cars, why in the world would they all be flying over LA. One of the advantages of flying cars is that they make commutes of hundreds of miles practical – which in turn makes living hundreds of miles from one’s workplace, school, shopping center, etc. practical, and even more importantly, makes locating all of those businesses hundreds of miles from each other also economically feasible.

Get enough people into flying cars, and cities as we think of them today will be obsolete.

How do we get there from here. Replace the regulatory regime we have now with mandatory liability insurance and nothing else. Insurance companies will then charge you based on your skill, the design of the machine, and what restrictions you’re willing to accept (no flying over crowded cities, etc., which will only encourage dispersal). Vendors will reap big bucks designing and introducing craft that are easy to fly safely (and thus cheap to insure and suitable for the mass market) rather than losing their shirts because the average people that would need such user-friendly controls aren’t allowed to fly them.

It won’t happen overnight. But without regulatory changes, the odds are slim that it will ever happen in our lifetimes, which would be quite a bummer.

GPS makes it POSSIBLE, but you need more than that for consumer operable autopilots! Massive beacon infrastructure, etc. etc.

So the ‘flying car’ part of having flying cars isn’t the hard part. :-(

But yeah, every time I see something advertised on TV that was only science fiction in the 20th Century, I go “damnit, where’re the flying cars we were promised!” Just ask my wife :-)

I really know how den Beste feels. This flying car issue is one of them.

So this skycar has been around for, what, 10 years or more? Never worked, don’t even have a working prototype, and the people behind it keep saying that if they just had a few more dollars, just ten million or so, then they’ll actually have something that will blow the socks off of the American car-buying public!

I don’t want to sound too snarky. I value and cherish every one of my readers, doubly so for those that take the time to actually leave a comment. But instead of going mad trying to point out the absurdity of the skycar flying, let alone becoming a commercial success, I like to challenge my readers to show me a flying car that I can go out and buy tomorrow. If they can’t do that then there’s no point in discussing pie-in-the-sky projects that never deliver.

James

Now everything is line of site, and some SOB will stick GPS coord’s on the pics too, so the next GPS-driven mortar smart round will be right in your face.

Man, it’s really going to suck to be an infantryman coming up against people armed with this stuff.