i'm not sure about that, actually - it's much easier to deal with obstacles when you're flying - besides which, what matters is the overall cost. it'll just be cheaper to send some quadcopters - or for that matter, just to fire some shells or rockets - on a one-way mission than it will be to bother with legged robots.  leaving that aside, i only offer quadcopters as an example. you can make e.g. disposable turbojet/turbofan engines very cheaply if you follow the right approach and mass-produce them; i think quadcopters will be replaced by little fixed-wing drones/missiles; they'll fly much faster and have much better payload-range capability, and they won't be much more expensive. you could use them to kill something like a robot dog, too. > ground-based drones will have their niches at the very least they will, but more on this later.   as i've said many times before, it'll be cheaper and easier just to use, say, fixed-wing drones for overhead reconnaissance. legged robots are fairly mechanically complex; they've only been feasible this century, whereas the sort of things i'm talking about are mostly mid-20th century tech, apart from the electronics. why would you bother with robot dogs and so on when you can just shell or rocket any position you like, thereby achieving equal or greater destructive effects, for much cheaper?
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