Slashdot Mirror
Lockheed Martin Plans Unmanned Aircraft
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Lockheed Martin's secretive Skunk Works unit--which previously developed U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 supersonic spy plane and the radar-evading F-117 stealth fighter--has big plans for its latest project: drones. Among the concepts under development, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.' The WSJ's reporter also is allowed a rare visit to the Skunk Works complex: 'A factory hall was filled with the prototype of a massive helium-filled airship that one day might ferry troops and heavy equipment to distant battlefields faster and more efficiently than ships--no port or airbase needed. The blimp would float just above the ground on four hover pads, meaning that "you could literally pick a farmer's field" to set down in, says program manager Robert Boyd.'"
The blimp would float just above the ground on four hover pads, meaning that "you could literally pick a farmer's field" to set down in, says program manager Robert Boyd.'"
At least until somebody shot at your gigantic air-filled target...
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
For quite some time UAV have been considered the future of the air force. They are smaller and therefore harder to detect on radar, cheaper to maintain per hour of flight baring crashes, the only thing they can't do right now is carry large payloads and transport vehicles (soon to change). I see very little need for pilots in the future except to fight the UAV that decides to attack us but missiles should get that job done.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I hope it's more successful than their last drone, the D-21 Tagboard
Verb: Unmanned
Object: Aircraft
This is just a simple SVO sentence. So, which plans of Lockeed Martin unmanned which aircraft, and how? Inquiring minds want to know.
So, they do not want to compete with the expensive Global Hawk http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=17 5/ made by Northrop Grumman. Instead, their interested in the cheap Notebook controlled Desert Hawk http://www.defense-update.com/products/d/deserthaw k.htm/ models deployed in Iraq. They are pretty cool. Designed and delivered in 4 months.
Seems like a good idea. However, if these were deployed in other arenas, where the enemy had the ability Jam the "cheap" communication, those drones would be...well...long gone. How do military communication systems handle jamming?
Skunk Works.
This is a group that developed the first operational jet fighters, and that kept the U-2 and SR-71 and stealth planes out of the public eye forever. We think the Wall Street Journal is getting the real story from them? If it's true, you have to wonder why the massive cultural shift at Lockheed is happening just now...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I've already seen these things in action in Command and Conquer Generals. Can't they come up with some original designs for tools of war anymore instead of just copying them from video games? Sheesh.
(Yes, I'm being sarcastic)
Hero of Allacrost, a FOSS RPG for *NIX/*BSD/OS X/Win
The best pilot in the world still blacks out at about 9G. Even if the drone isn't as tactically capable as the human, it can survive far greater physical hardship. What use is your intelligence, your skill, your human flair for battle, against an adversary that can turn at speeds that would leave you a gooey mess in the cockpit?
A serious fighter drone would just slaughter human pilots, just on the superior performance of an aircraft that doesn't have to worry about keeping the pilot alive. It would be like Spitfires going up against a Harrier.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Having just watched "Sky Captain and the World of Tomarrow" yesterday, hearing these announcements is a big freaky.
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
faster and more efficiently than ships--no port or airbase needed. The blimp would float just above the ground on four hover pads
Now our plan for world domination shall be COMPLETE!
Muah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Sheesh, you Americans - you make me smile. Stuff happens outside the US too. From Wikipedia:
The Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe or "swallow" was the first operational jet powered fighter. It was mass-produced in World War II and saw action from late 1944 in bomber/reconnaissance and fighter/interceptor roles....etc...
I recently read in the LA Times about a small company that's competing with LM on the blimps.
Apparently, Worldwide Aeros, a smallish company founded by a Russian immigrant, was one of two U.S. companies that was awarded $3 million (USD) by the Pentagon to research the concept. (The other was LM.)
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian had been working on a project to develop mammoth airships to deliver supplies to Siberian oilfields.
You can find the article here. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I, for one, cannot wait for the Kirov Airship to be developed. I wonder if that's the 'massive helium-filled airship' the article mentions... Of course, Lockheed Martin isn't bound by international treaty *not* to build bombers, so I guess they could build something like an Apocalypse Tank while they're waiting for demand to rise... after all, who *doesn't* want a tank with auto-reconstruction, missiles, dual cannons, and thick armor?
games journalism blog
Even assuming that the AI pilots are markedly inferior to humans, there's still a great advantage to using them. They're cheap. Training a pilot is an expensive thing to do and it takes a lot of time. Losing a pilot is bad news. Losing significant numbers of pilots also has the effect of undermining political support at home - every letter sent to the mother of someone who isn't coming home chips away a little at the mindless jingoism that you need to have to conduct a war.
So, let's suppose that the AI drones are so crap that the kill ratio is ten to one - a human pilot will on average bring down ten AIs before being killed himself. This need not be a problem. A computer program costs nothing to copy, and the hardware's relatively cheap, and robots don't have families. Throw a hundred AIs into the air and let them all be slaughtered if necessary. Who cares? Make 'em kamikaze if you like. It still costs less than training humans to do it.
For a Western army, recruiting humans is expensive, because citizens of very rich countries expect to be paid well to risk their lives. Probably the economics work out differently for the likes of China, but for the USA... let's fill the sky with droids.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
...Is that they make it easier to go to war. None of those politically inconvenient body bags to bring home.
In which case humans are completely superfluous. The real fighting's already being done by a kamikaze robot pilot, aboard the missile. Why do we need to put a human in harm's way aboard the missile launch platform?
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
At this time technology isn't the problem. Question is, what will happen first?
- Errant political leaders misuse technology?
- Politically disgruntled scientist develops AI to run Terminators?
Cogito Ergo Sum
I am.
For an young guy passionate about flight and aspiring to become a fighter pilot, this is a nightmare come true!
Aviation Week has already covered the fact that the airship has already flown. It looks like Lockheed is in exploration mode for aircraft right now because the traditional market of milking the government teet for manned fighter and bomber contracts has a decidedly less than glorious future.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
In a Slashdot discussion, you read the phrase
One of the first UAV experiments was the Snark. So many crashed into the waters off the test facility that they were called Snark Infested Waters. We've come a long way since then.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
This should be especially important when the military is fighting an immoral, unnecessary and imperialistic war.
Right! Especially when most of the casualties, day-in and day-out, are the result of other medeival-minded religious zealots people from neighboring countries blowing up civilians with car bombs paid for by Syrians and Iranians. Maybe we'll finally get that imperialism right though. We keep letting whole countries like France, Japan, Germany, Kuwait and more slip through our clumsy imperialist fingers.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
A quick Google search -
Total Deaths Due to Unnatural Causes 2000 in Detroit (page 55)
955 - 719 Male, 236 Female (Black Non-Hispanic: 540 Male, 178 Female)
Iraq War - March 2003 - Feb. 6
2,452
Don't know if the Detroit numbers have gone up or down, but that was an average of about 80 people a month in Detroit and 70 a month in Iraq. Not making any judgement about anything - just giving numbers. I'm not planning on moving either place any time soon.
Refs:
Detroit Health Department
CNN Casualty Counter
A welcome progress...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Military automation is a worrying trend. Eventually it could reach the stage where there are very few soldiers actually involved in combat. That would make it much easier for governments to prosecute wars. Consider Iraq. All the concern has been over how many US troops have died and how politically damaging it is. There is little concern for all the Iraqis killed in air strikes. If you can automate the military, you remove most of the political repercussions of war. No US Soldiers dead, just lots of automated robots killing people in another country, who no-one cares about. It would also make it much easier for governments to turn the military against their own people.
materials for the space elevator (AS YET UNMADE) are designed to withstand incredible stress..
what if you made your blimp out of the same material, in rigid form, and had an empty blimp.
pop quiz, what lifts better, helium, hydrogen, or vaccuum?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Modern helium-filled airships employ multiple gas chambers. You would need to shoot holes in a large number of them to make a dent in it's air-worthiness.
Also, each shot the enemy fires lights them up on the (likely) acompanying Apache strike team's computer-guided weapon systems. An enemy shooter would only manage to get off a couple of good shots before they were disintegrated.
Ok... some quick and dirty math here -- sea level conditions assumed on a normal (15C) day:
Air weighs about 1 Kg per cubic yard (no whining about mixed units, please)
O2/N2/H20 21/78/1% mix works out to 12.29 atomic weight vs He weight of 2, so...
He weighs only about 20% of air, so it can lift 80% of the air it displaces.
Given the above:
An equipped company of 100 soldiers is about 100kg/220lbs each -- total: 10 tonnes
This would require a minimum of 125000 cubic yards of He to lift by itself, and much more for the vehicle empty weight, fuel, etc.
For comparison, an LTA 138S Airship is 160 feet/50 meters long, volume of 138,000 ft3 (3,908 m3) (5100 yd3), and lifts only 1.5 tonnes.
Scaling up from the LTA 138S, you'd need 25 times the volume - 3.5 million ft3 minimum. Not impossible, but consider the design for the CargoLifter which would be 850ft/260m long with payload of 160 tonnes for 17.6 million ft3/ 500,000 m3 of Helium.
What ever it would be, navigating a floating object the size of an WW II Jeep Carrier or Cruiser into and out of cornfields would not be simple in any sort of wind.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
You confuse the advance of technology with the use of technology. War will not stop occurring if technological advances don't occur. Often, newer technology can help reduce side casualties (carpet bombing vs smart bombs, etc).
If you feel strongly about war, create political pressure to stop it. Don't troll slashdot and whine about how some new technology can be misused.
EMP isn't all its cracked up to be.
All military hardware is at least partially EM shielded (or hardened)
Actual combat vehicles have greater protection and also alot of redundant systems.
The big deal with an EMP is that it creates a massive voltage surge in any conductive material. Voltage limiting gear can help greatly, as well as the ability to work around blown components with backup systems. Encasing the entire electrical system in a Faraday Cage also helps by setting up counter EM fields to reduce the Voltage surge.
A separate long-term Pentagon blueprint calls for a quantum leap in drones, from hand-launched planes for battlefield surveillance
My son and I were involved in the construction of some of those recently. They were manufactured from sheets of cellulose fiber, carefully bent into the best aerodynamic shapes and flown in our indoor testing ground.
We're still working on the surveillance part but the hand-launching went well. Many made it all the way across the house.
SCO, Microsoft, P2P, what's your hot button?
The density of air is about 1.29 kilograms per cubic meter at sea level; the density of helium is about 0.18 kg/m^3. Going to hard vacuum (zero kg/m^3) only gets you about fifteen percent more lift per unit of envelope volume; the engineering hassles just aren't worth the trouble.
~Idarubicin
The point of the titanic story isn't that you can't build an unsinkable ship.
The point is that excellent design ideas often have hidden, unexpected flaws that are easily exploitable.
It just happens that the titanics' flaw was just the thing it was designed against.
Hmmm witty sig or funny sig? Maybe elitest techy sig!
I see that the British has just recently reduced their occupying troop strength below 20,000 troops...
In Germany.
It's a quagmire, I tell you! I blame Churchill for not having an exit strategy.
Well, technicaly speaking, the US system of govenrment was never intended to support public broadcasting or diabetese research. The federal government is only supposed to be responsbile for a few things, and external defence is their one major responsibility. If you want a more socialist society, move somewhere else.
And what the hell is so "horrific" and "terrifying" about unmanned drones and transport blimps?
There wouldn't be any "medeival-minded religious zealots" running around killing people if the US hadn't invaded
Well, that's true. At least, they wouldn't be running around in Iraq. They'd be running around in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, etc. And of course Afghanistan, where they (the Taliban) had the whole country to themselves, and decided to let Al Queda use it for a playground. You remember the fine things they did there, like shooting women at lunchtime in the town square for offenses such as teaching their daughters to read. Sure, Saddam had no problem with daughters being taught to read, but he also had no problem gassing whole villages full of daughters, invading neighboring countries, lobbing missiles into Israel, starting a war that killed over a million people, regularly (and publicly) sending cash to friendly outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah expressly in support of suicide bombers' families, and so on. Yes, that was just rosy, that picture. To say nothing of having his ground forces use anti-aircraft weapons against the aircraft enforcing the terms of his surrender when he was forced to give up his attempt to annex Kuwait. Secular? Who cares? A monomaniacal mass murdering aggressor that refuses to abide by his surrender terms and corruptly (well, with UN help, of course) corruptly skims billions of dollars of palace-building and weapons-buying cash off of the money intended to feed and care for his population is your idea of a just-fine situation?
Most Iraqis today -- even those here in N. America -- prefer Sadam over the US for running of the country.
Nice baseless, context-less, no-reference assertion, there! Who cares how many people do or don't want the US running Iraq? The US doesn't want the US running Iraq, either. That's the whole point of supporting the elections (in which a greater portion of the Iraqi population continually votes than even do in the US). That's the whole point of rapidly building up the Iraqi law enforcement and armed forces. Guess you're not paying attention to those areas where anti-insurgent patrols are now solely being conducted by Iraqi units? It's changing, whether it bothers your world view or not to know it. And of course, you might even check with what the people there, and in Afghanistan think. They are among the most optimistic people in the world about their economies and their futures.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You seem to misunderstand what the real cause of war is. If you've ever been to a school, you'll note that fights occur for a number of reasons:
(1) People get edgy with all those hormones and fight for no reason at all.
(2) Someone is genuinely trying to hurt someone else or exert their will with physical force. The other party isn't going to take any more of it and decides to fight to protect themselves.
In international politics, (1) is only a problem if you have a single person or very small group of people that decides when to go to war. Democracies, by and large, don't have this kind of structure. Besides, it's always in everybodies' interests if the two people got along and got rich trading with one another.
(2) is far more common. This is the case when you have a corrupt government that seeks to either exploit its people or neighbors with physical force. War doesn't start when they decide to threaten force or use force to exert their will. War starts when somebody stands up to them.
It's often confusing to determine who "started" a war. Did Hitler start WWII, or did England when it decided to fight Germany's expansion policy?
It's nice to imagine some kind of conspiracy where the "military complex" determines when and how to go to war. I'll grant you one thing: Technology creates uncertainty, and uncertainty allows bad people to be more bold in their actions.
Here's a current modern day example. Iran has at its head a group of people whose purpose is to start a world war. They want a new piece of technology --- nuclear weapons --- because they think it will give them power enough to stand up to the US. It's really not certain if nuclear weapons are powerful enough to convince the American democracy to cower in fear. (They may well be!) So Iran is more bold in moving towards aggression and making threats.
When the US and its allies begin the invasion of Iran, likely, the blame for "starting" a war will go on the heads of President Bush and his friends. (Note: Already, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia have pledged to help with the invasion of Iran. There are several other smaller countries, including some Middle Eastern ones, who have pledged to help as well.) However, the true cause of this war should be Iran's aggression and threats to the annihilation of Israel and a nuclear attack on Europe and the US.
The Vietnam war, likewise, wasn't caused by a bunch of military industrialists. It was caused by communist aggression. They tried to turn a sovereign, democratic country into a wing of the Communist empire by force. The war really didn't start until the US decided to stop the aggression with force. Did the US start that war? No, but it was there to try and finish it.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
I don't think that any UAVs are flown entirely by computer. (at least no reusable ones - if you consider Cruise Missiles and the like to be UAVs. . . ). Most are more accurately called "remotely piloted vehicles" with a lot of computer assist.
A UAV operator is probably a lot cheaper to train, also probably has a much higher survival rate, probably needs much less education, and they could probably recruit droves of them at any Computer Gaming convention.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.