Lt. Dan'l (Grumpy) Voxic was in a foul mood months of work building drones down the tube.  In addition there was the astronomical costs for the research, materials, and even weapons that had gone up in smoke.  He stared at the wreckage of what had been two medium sized drones and swore.  So many things had to go right for the project to work and only one thing had to go wrong to ensure, to ensure this.  Other than hundreds of thousands of wasted credits he wasn't exactly sure what "this" was.  The amount of  time it was going to take to find out what had gone wrong this one time already had him cringing thinking about it.  You had to start somewhere though with a sigh he began poking through the wreckage he was going to have so see about rebuilding the two drones to see if the problem lay in design, faulty wiring, dwarven error... the list went on and on.

Back to the drawing board and back to the basics Voxic went he spent the next six months relearning how to pilot a single drone in a variety of situations.  As he relearned skills he also learned, or adapted, new skills for new purposes of the drones he invisioned utilizing.  With the training under his belt he went back to work with a renewed vigor.  One drone had been fairly easy.  Now to change the controls so that it could be down with the mere movement of a hand.  There would be a monumental number of sensors involved of course that was a given.  One would have to wear a glove of some kind but that was a small price to pay.  Once perfected that would pave the road for a second gloved hand and a second drone, baby steps.

Three more months of labor intensive work and a working prototype of the glove was fashioned.  Dan'l took it out for a test run for the fifth time this time with a drone carrying a weapons payload and grinned at the results.  Things were coming along well, very well.  It was time to begin working with a pair of small drones in tandem to see if it could indeed be done.  The crashes were inevitable as there was a learning curve involved and as much as he didn't like it Dan'l understood.  The small drones at least were far less expensive than the larger ones and he hadn't been foolish enough to put any kind of a payload of them.  It looked like another two months or so of r and d and this would be ready to roll out into the field.

Four months later Dan'l looked over the screen at the three small drones flying straight ahead and then reversing course.  So much hard work and so much passion involved in getting this far.  He'd even raised the bar from two drones operating to three although admitidly they were three of the small drones currently.  Add in they weren't doing any complicated flying and well it was still an enormous achievement.  Still it would take probably another year before he felt confident enough to place any kind of a payload on a heavy drone.

A full year and a half later Dan'l steadied his left hand making sure to leave it motionless with his other hand he carefully manuvered the second drone into position.  "Forward half speed"  the command was quickly carried out by the third drone.  "Up three hundred feet and halt." Once again the system worked flawlessly. 

Dan'l almost sighed in relief as he watched the holographic display.  Now for a few more simple commands and the mission might just be a success.  "Weapons hot, engage." At the command two laser guided air to ground missles were loosed from a drone from ten miles away.  The laser guidance systems in the missles picking up an illumination from yet another drone and directing them on their way. 

Dan'l began bringing those two drones back to his temporary headquarters as he held the last drone steady.  Mentally counting down the seconds until three two one the camera mounted on the third drone showed a massive explosion rock a three story suburban house the shockwave from the blast gutting it.  That was as close to a success as he could possibly have.  He'd watched the three men inside for days via drones seen the explosives they were transporting, seen the heavy machineguns they brought inside and had seen them begining to install a security system on the premesis.  It had been enough for him to decide to take action with a drone attack and what an attack it had been.  Now he could actually stamp field tested on to the LDV Drone Armada name.  It had only taken wreckage, lots of wreckage.  Blood, sweat, tears, copious amounts of time and money and yes wreckage.