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
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.
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...
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.
In a Slashdot discussion, you read the phrase
You must be a pilot, dogfights happen in air shows and bad 80's movies, not in real combat anymore. With missles shooting down enemy planes before they are visible to the naked eye dogfighting is a term of the past. UAVs have a much lower probability of being discovered using the same radar foiling technology but being much smaller means a smaller RCS so the UAV will not be detected and could imobolize the enemy's air fields and not have to wory about air to air combat. The bigest threats to the american airforce is mechanical problems and SAMs.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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.
While a pilot's brain is one of the most valuable things in a combat aircraft, the pilot's body is one of the weakest links in the system. Fighters have long been designed (and limited in some cases) to perform within tolerances of what a human can withstand (9G limits and such). Also, various systems such as ejection seats and armor have to be included to protect the pilot. With a UAV, those issues go away. We can design UAVs which have performance envelopes that no human would survive. I agree with the problems about transmission of control signals and the like, but if you can guarantee communications, a UAV should be able to take out an aircraft with a pilot inside it in a dogfight relatively easy just because of maneuverability, not that dogfights would happen that often.
I agree with others in that the most versitile combat UAVs will just be a loitering platform for firing missiles and dropping LGBs. You can have some armed with a bunch of AAMs to protect the ones with the air-to-ground ordnance, as well as have some with both types of ordnance.
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.
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?
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.
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.