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Robotic Aircraft To Supply Troops
Cowards Anonymous writes "PC World reports on a prototype driverless aircraft designed to shuttle hundreds of pounds of supplies to soldiers in war zones. Dubbed a flying Humvee by Frontline Aerospace's CEO, the robotic vehicle can fly 600 to 1,000 miles carrying a full cargo of 400 pounds. It's about the size of a large SUV, weighing in at 2,400 pounds and measuring 21 feet long and up to 26 feet wide."
While unmanned aerial vehicles are the future of the military, there are some serious concerns in the defense industry about the company Frontline Aerospace that is making noise about this particular drone. Specifically, the CEO appears to be all over the place in terms of his interests and talents as well as some of his claims and there are some substantial criticisms of the packaging and design.
Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.
I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.
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I really am tired of hearing about all these new "safer" ways of killing people. Your still fucking killing people. Stop it you sick fucks.
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Anyone bothered to look at the massive composite photo they created with a few soldiers running out to the CG generated drone? You'd think for $4 million a pop they'd at least spend another $1000 to make the photos -look- realistic.
;)
I see quite a lot of these sorts of getups happening, someone gets some specs, waves their hands about, generates some crappy CG and utters a price of a few million. Couple of years later there's nothing really to show for it except some rudimentary framework and an empty office.
Only wish I had gotten in there first
Reminds me of a Carryall from Dune.
1. from the same Wired page:
Seems to me to be:
A) saying that it's reasonable possible to make it, since there are no big surprises to be expected from anything in it, and
B) kind of a lame complaint. Innovation by combining existing elements is really the norm. The train was equally just an exercise in packaging a steam engine (which technically wasn't new, since it had been done before to pump water out of mine shafts) and a cart. Guns appeared as a packaging exercise between a bell and some funny powder used in fireworks. Nobel's dynamite was an exercise in literally packaging nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Etc.
Basically, I'm sorry, but the age of discovering something completely new and based on nothing that came before it ended, I dunno, in stone age or so. Ever since, all we make is built on stuff that came before it.
2. Picking on the guy's credentials, again, I have some problems with it:
A) I see no incredible claim in there. It just says that he was trained as an engineer and worked as a manager. Hardly "all over the place" or incredible. I see a dozen people every day when I go to work, which fit the exact same bill.
B) they don't say that any of his claims are false. Did he lie about it? Did he get fired for incompetence from any of those companies? Does he have some history of not achieving what he promises? Or WTF is the problem? It should be easy to prove whether he actually was a manager at Intel or Toshiba, no? So tell me if he lied, not some lame attempt at making it sound ridiculous by itself.
C) seems to me to be exactly what they need for the job, especially once they said that there are no obvious flaws with the idea. You need someone who can organize research, development and production, hence, a manager.
D) it's, at best, an ad-hominem and as per points 2.A to 2.C a pretty lame one.
Now I'm not saying they should necessarily give him money, but the Wired article is an exercise in journalistic stupidity at best.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Now all we need is to replace the soldiers themselves with robots that look like Arnold Schwartzenegger and we've got it made.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Well, while I might even join in lamenting about using them for offensive purposes, I'm afraid you don't really have that much choice about developing new weapons. Simply put, those who don't live by the sword, get to be at the wrong end of the sword.
Or to put it otherwise, ask the USSR how they felt in 1941 about still having mostly old BT tanks and outdated aircraft. What saved them were the new and vastly superior T-34. Or ask Poland about how well their cavalry divisions did when attacked by tanks.
Seriously, it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. Being a pacifist with no (modern) weapons only works if everyone else around is. Otherwise, well, you have to have the deterrent of being the guy with the biggest stick.
And we all tried forcing everyone to be peaceful and put a limit to their military. Like, you know, between the two world wars. Turns out that, as the only result, a bunch of people just lied about how big their ship were, or about what they're researching. Germany for example called their tank research and prototypes agricultural tractors for a while. (I guess you can't blame a guy for having guns in his tractor too. Just ask any mid-west farmer.;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The entire design of this craft baffles me.
First, ducted fans are inefficient compared to rotors. You get a lot more force out of a large diameter and small exit velocity. Its why props are more efficient than turbofans, which are in turn more efficient than turbojets. The ONLY advantage is that the fan is out of the airstream, so high velocities are achievable.
Second, it has very low wing area, meaning you have very high wing loading (bad for fuel economy). Alternatively, they could be using a lifting body (also bad for fuel economy). Considering they have the big fan duct running through the center of the body, the body cannot provide much lift anyway, leaving the fan (even worse fuel economy).
Third, they chose a joined box wing. Box wings can considerably reduce losses from the tip vorticity, but there is so little lift coming off those wings, there's no purpose. The only purpose to joined wings is that they provide structural rigidity to large, light, high aspect ratio wings for high altitude, long endurance craft. This is obviously not the case here.
I seem to recall that they had something like this before. Quite a bit faster. Very good at getting its cargo to the waiting soldiers. A bit rougher on the payload, perhaps (and the soldiers).
I believe it was called a Cruise Something-or-other.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The verb phrase most likely to be applied by the US military to a particular city block in Iraq is "restoring power to". But you can pretend they're vicious indiscriminate killers if it makes you feel better. 'course, they'd be pretty darned incompetent vicious indiscriminate killers since they were able to level cities 60 years ago and, look, plenty of unleveled cities all over the place.
Its almost like they were TRYING to not hit any of the civilians this time...
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
As an ex-AA guy, I can tell you that even hitting something that moves fast and low with a gun is hard enough, and requires sophisticated radars and computer-controlled guns. I.e. noone does it by turning cranks any more.
Throwing some satchel by hand, on the top of something that moves at 288 miles per hour... well, if you can do that, you're Superman.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Well, I for one would like to welcome our new automated remote controlled food toting flying overloards...
"It seems that we are at the age where life stops giving us things, and starts taking them away..." Indiana Jones
Well, actually, that's a fairly conservative estimate...
"a person performing hard work in the sun at 43 degrees C requires 19 liters of water daily." http://www.aircav.com/survival/asch13/asch13p02.html
"A general guide for planning to meet the water requirements in an arid zone is 3-6 gallons per individual per day" http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/dphs/EQB/doc/Instructor%20Manual/L004LP%20Water%20Supply%20LP.doc
Interesting... Because most of them appear to be quite alive...
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What I should have said - if every soldier needed 4 gallons of water *airlifted* in every day, they'd all be dead. Yes, the water needs to come from somewhere - and you certainly can't assume that all missions are in 110 degree mean temperatures (= 43 celsius). Yes, it happens. So really, we're talking about a variety of factors, and not every mission is going to be in Iraq in July.
Laugh all you want at 400 lbs of cargo space, but if that can deliver even 30+ lbs of critical equipment to 12 soldiers who wouldn't otherwise receive it, that could make a huge difference. What if every soldier got new boots, clean socks, extra iodine tablets, fresh hygiene products, etc, that wouldn't otherwise reach them? And heck, an extra gallon of water to supplement a shortage.
The point isn't that 400 lbs is that much per se, the point is that 400 lbs of ADDITIONAL cargo could be a big deal if it requires zero man power to get it there and arrives quickly.
A humvee hauling military cargo wouldn't put 400 lbs in the trunk per trip, it'd put 1500 lbs on a trailer.
These are the beginnings toward a good concept since cargo hauling is dull, dirty & dangerous. But VSTAR needs to scale up considerably instead of racking up expensive flight hours with 4 round trips when comparing to a Humvee's operating cost. The key is not the round trip speed but its servicing to keep it flying.
"Scaling up" to the reality tends to be a gotcha for many novel concepts.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
It's about the size of a large SUV ... measuring 21 feet long and up to 26 feet wide.
Yes, that's exactly the size of my Jeep.