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Unmanned Combat Aircraft
An AC sent in a link to a Jane's article about unmanned fighter aircraft, including some designed for carrier operations. (See older story.) Funny, everyone always thought it would be the tanks that were unmanned.
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Yes, but you have to be careful and make sure no pop star computers take over control of your aircraft.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
That is a major reason to go unmanned. A very good pilot can reach 10 G. An unmanned vehicle should be able to turn at the maximum design strength of the airframe, without liquifying the pilot. :)
However, I'm sure that the designers of UCAV will use techniques designed to mitigate any attempt to jam the control signals for the UCAV.
The only really effective way to stop UCAV's other than a lucky shot by ground-based rapid-fire cannon is to detonate a low-yield (around 1 to 4 kT) nuclear warhead at very high altitude (e.g. around 25 km altitude). The EMP from the nuclear blast will effectively jam all communications between the ground controller and the UCAV, though the EMP effects would also jam the communications for the defenders, too.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Sweet, one of those could take out Iraqi radar installations, destroy some of Saddam's surface to air missile batteries, and still crack a few zillion keys per second for distributed.net.
If you see "Team Colin Powell" in the top 100 on the RC/5 stats page, now you know why.
Trolling is a art,
The driver is most definitely a bottleneck in a standard F1 car.
:) As I recall, that sort of thing was part of why they dropped the old turbo engines - truly insane acceleration. In the name of reducing cornering speeds, tyres have been narrowed then forcibly grooved. Why bother reducing cornering speeds? Driver safety - after the spate of accidents in '94, it became clear they needed to make the cars safer at the dangerous points - the corners.
Various bits of design are purely there to protect the driver (which wouldn't be necessary in an autonomous vehicle) while some technologies have been banned to protect the driver.
Full ground effect underbodies were generating enough Gs in the corners to make the drivers begin to black out - 20 years ago. They banned them to avoid needing pressure suits for the driver's safety
Front wheels were moved to protect ankles when the suspension punctured the monocoque. X-wings were banned as they made it much harder to extract drivers in the event of an accident. They weren't so fond of how ugly the cars looked with them, but that wasn't the prime force.
The cars have to carry extinguishers and electrical cutout systems, both of which you can live without with no human on board.
Without trying one you can't say exactly what'd happen, but the autonomous vehicle could be a different shape. Aerodynamics on these things are critical, after all.
A car without a human driver could be substantially faster and certain developmental avenues wouldn't have been closed down.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The other problem which occurred to me:
:-)
There's no law there which prevents robots from building others not encumbered by the three laws. Which could be in the interests of robot society as a whole...
I propose the fourth law
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The balance between chassis, engine and driver WRT which is the most significant factor moves pretty much constantly. There have certainly been times when the driver was the least significant component in the package's overall performance.
This would simply be one of them, for racing cars.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
The combat problem of aircraft is actually a simpler problem in some regards, because generally everything can be better mapped to a certain degree. Long range sensors give an added edge as well.
Also far more things you have to identify for a tank amongst clutter which can render optical and RADAR ineffective
The combat problem with a tank involves far more as far as obstacles goes, plus the problem of identifying friend or foe in dealing with combatents. With aircraft this is dealt with by certain automated communications protocols. This is far harder to do on the ground. How do you identity civilians, etc?
Still a problem an enemy K10 tanker is a high value target it's worthwhile your UAV taking down by any means possible a civilian DC10 you don't want to even go near. They are more or less the same type of aircraft and you can't trust the enemy to send out an "I am your enemy" transponder signal.
In combat situations, your friends send out an "I am your friend" signal in response to the correct query.
A civilian aircraft is not going to respond to a military IFF query. But there is no reason to assume that a military aircraft will not respond with fully valid ATC transponder data.
Also you don't really want your UAV firing off IFF signals which turn out to be "I am a target for your anti radiation missiles"...
> When this thing gets hit, it just goes down whereever [sic] it wants to.
Your comment has two plausible interpretations:
(a) You believe the plane will go "whereever [sic] it wants to." That is, wherever its computer decides is best. Presumably "best" is a place with no structures or people. Even a 1:25k topo map from the USGS shows houses.
Response:
This behavior is good but your phrasing seems to indicate that this behavior is bad. Your rhetorical device is misleading and awkward.
(b) The plane goes somewhere other than where its control system desires. Possibly due to damaged control surfaces, broken servos, or a malfunctioning control computer.
Response:
A control computer can be made stronger than the human body. A human pilot is subject to the same equipment failures as a computer control (servos, linkages, etc). A human pilot bails out; a control computer steers the plane until impact. Therefore, it is possible to construct a control system that maintains control longer than a human pilot in a crash scenario. Furthermore, there is no reason to believe a control system would be constructed such that the preceeding is untrue. You did not conduct this simple analysis before you posted.
As I have shown in my two interpretations and associated responses, you are either misleadingly inarticulate or intellectually lazy, respectively.
A note:
There exists no "flame" moderation category. I wonder why acerbic posts such as this one aren't deserving of their own category? I propose three new categories:
- flame, entertaining (+1)
- flame, annoying (-1)
- flame, principally spelling, grammar (-2)
The last may overlap Redundant (-1) when applied to posts flaming the editors.
Ryan
Reasons why the government continues to build weapons:
If a potential enemy knows that it's going to get its ass whipped, what are the chances of it picking a fight? Better weapons increase the chances of this perception taking root. Better weapons are therefore good. Myself, I prefer fewer conflicts over more anyday.
At the most extreme level, consider the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction: it may sound grim, but it's also kept the world's trigger fingers away from the nukes for the last 40 years.
More lethality, increased standoff ranges, decreased response times, more integration, etc. are reasons why the armed forces wants the newest and latest toys. These reasons are important because, bottom line, the more advantages our soldiers have, the more soldiers will be alive after the next conflict (e.g. the Gulf War).
Take the M-16 rifle. US infantrymen were still learning the ins and outs of using and taking care of the new M-16 rifle while they were fighting in Vietnam. Result: hundreds of soldiers KIA from having a jammed weapon at exactly the wrong time. Introducing and learning how to use the newest and latest wonder hardware before we get into a fight will save lives.
Some weapons systems take way too long to procure and build to wait until we're near another conflict. The Navy's surface combatants and carriers take years to build, not to mention the time spent in their development phases. Start building Seawolf and Virginia class attack submarines now, and in 15 years we won't be stuck with obsolescent Los Angeles class SSNs when China finally gets around to taking military action against Taiwan.
So for those who don't know the scoop, all the planes that will be replaced by newer ones such as these go up for sale to countries that we have "erratic" ties to like Afghanistan.
More likely, they'll end up going to allies like Taiwan or Egypt, who could use the upgrades for their decaying militaries and we have no problems with selling to. Osama bin Laden's weapons came from the Soviet Afghanistan War, when the mujahedeen were our nominal allies then. Ditto for Iraq in the 1980s against Iran, who had fired on US ships and taken US diplomats hostage.
All these new toys for warfare when people are starving, and our economy slowing tanking. Thanks alot Dumbya.
Okay, you obviously missed A) the economic news that the US economy just grew by 2% and B) that the Fed is cutting interest rates like crazy. I'm not exactly sure how you think the few million dollars could be better spent to help the economy anyways. Monetary policy has been shown to be far superior in prodding the economy along than meager government spending changes.
And pardon me for sounding like a cold-hearted fascist conservative, but throwing money at poor people does not, in the long run, make them any better off! You'd think, after 3+ decades of the welfare state, that people would reconsider using big government as a solution to social and moral ills. Apparently bad ideas, like bad bosses, never go away.
If you were talking about foreign aid (especially to help starving people, a la Ethiopia and Somalia), it's notoriously bad for getting hijacked, commandeered by local warlords, and pocketed by corrupt bureaucrats. Also, consider this: the defense budget is a pittance to what the US government spends in entitlements, corporate subsidies, entitlements, interest towards the national debt, and entitlements. Did I mention entitlements? Sacred Cow programs, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are using up two-thirds of government expenditures. I wouldn't be worrying about the millions we spend developing UCAVs.
To paraphrase: don't be worrying about our President's education until you check your own noggin.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Marines' Flying Foot Soldiers
Want Root?
An interesting issue that goes along with a more automated (or, more remote-control... either way) military is whether this decreases the political cost of a war (since it reduces the probability of human casualties), and whether or not this is dangerous. Some vague thoughts --
* A reduced casualty rate frees the military to act more aggressively because it's the casualties that most riles up people (and Congressmen). "No hydraulic fluid for oil" doesn't quite have the same impact.
* Thus, they can act with less of a popular mandate, which is a double-edged sword; "unpopular" does not necessarily mean "wrong" from a moral perspective. I've read that isolationism was quite strong in the US before Pearl Harbor (and even *after* that attack, there was STILL a Congressman who voted against declaring war on Japan); but abandoning Europe to the Nazis and even denying, say, Lend-Lease would have been far less moral than going against the isolationists and helping out.
* Conversely, would an enemy, seeing that it may have greater difficulty striking at the people actually in the military, be more likely to resort to striking at people who *aren't* -- via terrorism, for instance?
* How much automation technology will make its way into civillian craft?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Nonsense. The EMP might fry unprotected equipment (which is not what will be involved) but after that, the only radio communications it will affect would be HF. Not a problem for the UCAV.
The only good weather is bad weather.
UCAV is old news -- a 40-year-old dream finally being realized. Now Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) are a more recent and much more interesting dream that is also being realized.
The key advantage of unmanned combat aircraft over tanks or F1 racers is that the pilot is the biggest performance bottleneck. The pilot places a limit on how tightly the aircraft can turn, and out-turning your opponent is the key to winning dogfights (or evading missiles.) If you remove the pilot, the dynamic performance of the aircraft is limited only by the airframe. In tanks and F1 racers the crew/driver isn't the bottleneck, but you may get some improvements because unmanned versions could be made smaller, lighter (less armour) or more aerodynamic.
Now, let me get this straight, the geek engineers are the heros behind the military now, while the jock hot-shot pilots are going to be sitting on the sidelines.
Let's see you make fun of my pocket protector now fly-boy!
--
Milk, it does a body good.
Create an internet spy portal -- www.spyportal.com. Offer free e-mail and webhosting to all spies, supported by banner ad revenues.
Read all their e-mail.
This could even turn profitable if the banner revenues don't plummet this year.
--
Milk, it does a body good.
...will these planes get stuck trying to manuver around doors? What if enemies are hiding behind walls?
Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
Or.. what if someone hack's them... compare the amount of hacking done to .gov sites compared to the amount of breakins in .gov buildings :)
Wanna root a b52 ? ;)
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
The combat problem of aircraft is actually a simpler problem in some regards, because generally everything can be better mapped to a certain degree. Long range sensors give an added edge as well.
The combat problem with a tank involves far more as far as obstacles goes, plus the problem of identifying friend or foe in dealing with combatents. With aircraft this is dealt with by certain automated communications protocols. This is far harder to do on the ground. How do you identity civilians, etc?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you think I'm joking take a peek at the following.
geek
new
UMich
And my favorite, check out his Darpa funding: Quinn
I've hit Karma 50 and gotten a Score:5, Troll... I win!
I forgot to include this link as well for those who like to know more about these craft: Predator UAV Fact Sheet
"To travel the paths of human imagination you have to be willing to unlearn all you know"
Although the article primarily focuses on new UCAVs been developed for Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses and Precision Strike missions, the Air Force is currently working on a plan to convert their existing fleet of Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicles from a reconnaissance to an anti-tank mission
In Febuary, the Predator successfully acquired, launched, and "destroyed" a target using a Hellfire-C anti-tank missile. Phase II, when approved, will contain further challenges for the Predator, to include firing at a higher operational altitude and moving targets.
The Predator has already proved itself a valuable assest in its primary role in locations such as Bosnia, it will be interesting to see how well the Predator can adapt to a more lethal mode.
More information can be found here: Predator missile launch test totally successful
"To travel the paths of human imagination you have to be willing to unlearn all you know"
Most unmanned vehicles? This reminds me of the excellent scifi series "Lord of the Diamonds" by Jack L. Chalker. In the series the human government fights aliens from another galaxy using an array of unmanned remotely controlled war machines - great stuff!
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
My .02,
My .02,
zencode
iactivist.org/jason
I agree,
But These are where to look:
Discovery Channel MUAV page
Aerovironment's Black Widow
Black Widow development (pdf)
won't EMP kill the onboard control systems too? if defenders switch to hardened cables, or line of sight lasers for comm, this could be an effective counter to the whole concept...
-- taiji technologies, making ch'i quarks for the new age chalanged
Will these be able to perform sharper turns without a pilot? My dad, who is a radar specialist, says that missiles can pull 27Gs because they have no pilot to pass out. How about flight time, or reflexes in dodging fire and choosing a target?
We'll have toys fighting toys - He who dies with the most wins! So we have unmanned tanks being shot at by unmanned AV's, being shot at by automated SAM sites, which is fine, until someone runs out of toys. Then a human shoots back at the UAV, and then what?? Right back into conventional war as soon as the toys are gone. Better living through technology. But there's always the possibility that war breaks out and no one shows up...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
By the Gulf war, our soldiers weren't at risk, and we didn't have the firsthand accounts of the horrors of war. No one saw the bombs blowing people up. Without those things, there was a lot less resistance to the war.
With unmanned vehicles, the risk is even less, and the consequences are seen even less. No longer are pilots of attack aircraft at risk, and no longer do they even see the ground before firing, or the devestation left behind, even from a distance. The only people who see the casualties are the victims, and no one cares about them then. This is truly a horrible development.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
At the bottom of the Jane's article, there are some pictures.
I scrolled through these using the down arrow, and what I saw immediately after the last one (the plane in the crate) was just the first line of the item that followed. It was not unamusing.
--Blair
Now the U.S. can skip the whole getting-the-crew-home part and get on with the getting-the-top-secret-plane-home part.
--------------------------------
Instructions on making top secret unmanned aircraft: 1. Take 1 8.5 x 11 Sheet or Paper 2. Fold in half lengthwise 3. Fold wings 4. Throw And it's only 1/1000000000th the cost! -underdog