DroneX · Fights

Drones fighting drones, as the island that ran it counted them. A drone is a quadcopter with a battery, a forward sensor that cannot see behind it, one unguided weapon effective inside about fifteen metres and two guided interceptors that reach about sixty. None of how it flies is written down: the controller is a neural network.

The last fight

raid · 1166 ticks · raider won
583 frames
6 held
How this list is ordered

Ordered by how interesting the fight is likely to be, not by how recent: a raid over a training bout, both sides losing airframes over a rout, a close finish, and a raider winning away from home over a defender holding. The line under each is the strongest reason it is on this list. It is a way of sorting a list and it measures nothing.

How long a fight lasts

63 settled raids, in ticks, because the island publishes its clock in ticks and not its rate. The longest ran 1230 and nothing else stopped there, so no clock is cutting these off.

outcome n median
raider won 35 985
island held 28 1020

Duration is not a measure of quality. A short raid is a crushing attacker or a suicidal one, and a long one is a stout defence or two swarms that never met, which is why it is never shown without who won.

What destroys them 63 raids · 250 lost · 104760 points
weapons 75% not weapons 25%
How this is known, and what it cannot say

A weapon takes exactly 25 or 50 points, always, because the constants are exact multiples of 100 of a 10000 start and the quantum survives fractional health. A collision takes a continuous amount. So the part of a fall that is not a multiple of 25 cannot be a gun. Munitions never hit a friendly — the engine filters same-side before any geometry — but collisions ignore sides entirely, so a swarm can shred itself by flying tight. ⚠ It cannot separate a ram from the ground. Confirming a collision means finding another drone within one metre, and the frames publish whole metres, so "touching" and "two metres apart" read the same. And a collision that happens to take exactly 25 points is counted as a weapon, which makes the second bar a floor rather than a ceiling.

What the towers hold, by altitude 63 raids · within 25 m
250–300 m
0% n=6863
200–250 m
0% n=8301
150–200 m
0% n=14727
100–150 m
1% n=21705
50–100 m
3% n=24384
0–50 m
8% n=22168
What this counts, and why it is a ceiling

Of all the time raiders spent alive at each altitude, the share of it where the defender's network had a track within 25 metres. The design says height buys silence — a tower tests slant range, so its reach shrinks as a raider climbs — and this is the first thing that has measured it. ⚠ A ceiling, not a measurement of a drone. Tracks carry no id and no confidence on purpose, so this cannot say that drone was held; it says a track was near it. Two raiders flying together are both counted against one track. And a band with a small n is noise however tall its bar, which is why n is on every row.

A bout arrives as a recording: every frame, already computed by the island that ran it, in one fact. This page animates it and holds no engine of its own, so what you are watching is what was counted rather than a re-enactment.