Hasn't happened yet, but I can't wait for the first shots in the US "war on fireworks". It's a natural extension of recent culture wars, combining many familiar elements of climate policy debate, worry over China, the inalienable rights of Americans to buy things that explode, etc. Have any big municipalities replaced their July 4th fireworks with drone displays?
To me fireworks are enjoyable because of the light, sound and smell experience, plus the slightly chaotic/unpredictable behaviour.
Drone shows are pretty but.. well, quickly becomes kind of predictable and dull. Like any CGI in movies these days, just never amazes me or gives any "wow"-feeling like it did when Terminator 2 came out.
I love seeing chemistry in action in the form of fireworks shows. The sights, sounds, and even smells(who doesn,t love sulfur?). There is a local fireworks manufacturer here in the Midwest US that supplies a lot of municipal shows. No China needed if that's a problem for you.
If I want to watch pixels, I'll watch a video on a screen.
I hope so. Leaving the question of air quality aside, fireworks are a torture upon wildlife. Every year in Germany, about a thousand dogs and cats are lost around NYE because they are scared off by fireworks [1], to say nothing about actual wildlife like birds, rabbits or other animals you'll find around every city that is traumatized or directly killed from the stress. The trash load is insane as well, it's hundreds of cubic meters [5] worth of trash that major cities have to dispose of on the taxpayers' dime because people can't be arsed to pick up and dispose of their ordnance after themselves.
And on top of that, you get the insane caseload for medical staff in the weeks before, during and after from all the dumb drunk fucks thinking it's wise to handle fireworks while being drunk out of their mind - 2024 we got five dead [2] across Germany and hundreds of injured in Berlin alone [3], we even got an "influencer" shooting a rocket into a home for social media clout [4].
IMHO: The sooner fireworks go off and die, the better. The problem is, it's a certainty that the usual far-right crowd will drag this issue into their culture war allegations bullshit, just as they did with electric cars, renewable power or smoking bans...
[1] https://www.derhund.de/fast-500-hunde-um-den-jahreswechsel-e...
[2] https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/jahreswechsel-...
[3] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2025/01/silvester-berl...
[4] https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/berlin-raketenschuss-...
[5] https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/12/berlin-silvest...
It's like going to a NASCAR or drag race with electric cars. What's the fun? The fun with internal combustion engines is the loud engines, the lumpy idles, the reverberation of the engine and exhaust into the environment, you can feel it. The hair on your skin will rise, you will close your ears, you can smell the exhaust. Likewise the same with fireworks, you feel it, if you are close enough you can smell it, LEDs can't match the bright explosive lights. It will never be comparable.
In a few years we'll be able to enjoy the spectacle of the drone-firework wars when drone show operators see their widgets under attack from fireworks aficionados. See that 'copter there, seems to be the guide drone for the flock around it. Take it out with a barrage of rockets, sayonara! Oh shit, there's a drone watching us over there, move before it calls in reinforcements!
I remember seeing my first drone show in 2016, and it was fairly rudimentary. But even still, it was awesome-inspiring and moving.
I wonder if you can get a strong enough laser on a drone that it’ll show up in the sky, in the fashion that a laser show does.
A great big flying vector display would be a cool upgrade for a laser show.
No. Please don't. Both of them require different skills and technique to get it perfect.
Drone shows will probably overtake fireworks not because people like drone shows, but because cities don't like firework shows and never have. Cities will switch to drones once they feel it can be done without losing the next election, and when people stop showing up they'll just stop altogether
No
We first had that discussion some 10 years ago. They're not taking the world by storm, we know that much.
They are a worse variant of the fireworks we know, but they're different enough to be something else. Cost and regulatory overhead has meant that we haven't fully explored what that could be. Drones work at a completely different speed, and with a different language. Much slower, much more docile. More female, if you will.
The same way that good firework is an art form, a good drone show is a whole choreography, and must be treated as such. It is neither a flashing firework, not a hovering dot matrix display.
Stuff is hard.
I hope not. It was interesting the first few times I saw it, mostly because of the complications of coordinating all those drones in formation, and a bit in the capital expenses required to set it up. But I don't really find any enjoyment from watching a bunch of drones make simple slow moving animations in the sky.
Its like digital watches, impressive the first few times it is accomplished, but now that they are pretty easy to find and you can see a demonstration of it working without much effort, I don't see much point in seeking it out nor have any desire in watching it work.