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Pentagon Selects Companies To Build Flying Humvees
longacre sends in a quote from Popular Mechanics:
"The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has selected two companies to proceed with the next stage of its Transformer, known as TX — a fully automated four-person vehicle that can drive like a car and then take off and fly like an aircraft to avoid roadside bombs. Lockheed Martin and AAI Corp., a unit of Textron Systems, are currently in negotiations with DARPA for the first stage of the Transformer project, several industry sources told Popular Mechanics at a robotics conference here in Denver."
The picture included with the linked article says it all, really.
Military spending is out of control, this program should be killed.
What. To avoid roadside bombs, we're making Humvees that can fly automatically.
Tomorrow's news: in order to prevent heat stroke in our soldiers, the Pentagon has begun selecting companies to build a satellite that will block out the sun.
Did I accidentally get redirected to The Onion?
Armor.
What kind of armor can a flying Humvee really have? Military-spec Humvees are already heavier than a fat chick at an all you can eat buffet with a bag of holding...how do they expect to make them take off quickly at any given time?
Living With a Nerd
I can tell you right now this will fail and I can tell you why - it will cost less to run a heavily armoured vehicle than it would to fly even a lightly armoured one. It would also cost less to produce and be easier to maintain. Oh plus safer from ground fire and rockets.
But apart from all of those blindly obvious holes, this is a grant plan.
"Why did it take them so long to realize that the best way to avoid roadside bombs might involve getting off the road?"
Even safer- get our young men and women out of the country. It's pretty clear that the picture is suggesting Afghanistan.
The point of a Humvee is that it's cheaper/easier/safer to drive than fly. If they can "take off" to avoid a road-side bomb then that implies they know where it is so they could also, you know....stop? Or turn around? I'm sure insurgents would love it if not only does the convoy stop when they encounter a roadside bomb, but instead of getting out and clearing the area/shooting insurgents they instead start spinning up giant rotors of death in close proximity to each other and then slowly become airborne targets to which even small arms fire can now cause catastrophic failure.
DARPA is out there to look at the strategic techonologies that might be required in the future battlescape. Just because it starts out as a design concept that doesn't necessarily seem the best of ideas it's there to further flesh out and seek out innovation from industry/private sector. So many are quick to chastise DOD research, yet there is so much out there that wouldn't be possible without DARPA and other Military/Goverment funded research. Healthcare (ie Trauma response) is always a huge beneficiary to this research. Across the board it pushes technology and innovation in fields which may not have had the funding to be researching such.
"What is there a tank on the boat? WHY IS THERE A TANK ON THE BOAT?!?" L4D2
This is still a DARPA project. DARPA funds all sorts of wacky far-future development work in the off chance that some of it actually becomes feasible, and at the very least they try to learn a bit more about how to make a successful flying car, or why it won't work without unobtanium.
$40 million bucks is not a lot for a military project. That's more "do some research and build a proof of concept and maybe we'll consider funding you to build them for real" money.
Also, that was one of the most obnoxious webpages I've seen in awhile for having popups appear all over the article.
I read the internet for the articles.
On the other hand, FLYING CARS!
Isn't Popular Mechanics art what started the whole flying car thing in the first place?
For the past few centuries, the biggest technological developments were driven by the military. Mass production started with guns. Aircraft were first made into actual tools by the military. Jet engines. Nuclear power. I don't have to tell you guys how much of modern computing is derived from the military, from ARPANet to microchips. Whatever your thoughts on the ethics of it, the military drives technology.
Now we're just co-opting that process to get me my flying car.
Smarter and smarter vehicles for dumber and dumber wars.
I'm curious to know how it will get around in urban warfare setting with narrow streets with that wing-span.
I want to know how they expect this to help in any way, shape or form. The idea behind road-side bombs (IED's) is to remain as stealth as possible and then detonate as the vehicle or convoy is passing. I have two friends who served in Iraq: one who lucky survived an IED blast with only cuts and partial hearing loss (the gunner died from shrapnel and the passenger had severe injuries) and the other had the Humvee in front of his hit but thankfully no deaths. One even told me a story that they walked over an IED after they went to investigate suspicious movement in a building and it detonated but it was a 155mm shell buried upside down so the blast dissipated into the ground. They were lucky.
Most of the IED's are disguised as broken down cars, carts or buried in the road itself. Some are poorly disguised, an example was one of my friends was in a convoy that stopped when a very out of place pile of rocks was spotted up the road. That IED was detonated by M2 machine gun fire. So some can be avoided but others are almost impossible to spot. Detonation was an area of interest and Army EOD (explosive ordinance division) was called in to disarm and study the methods of detonation used. Some were set off by a guy hiding near by with a wired detonator (my friend always said he pictured Wile E. Coyote hiding behind a rock with a plunger type detonator.) Others are set off using cell phones and in one case, timed by a washing machine timer (that one failed to detonate).
So I really want to know if this is a ridiculous idea someone came up with or some form of pay out as a favor. It makes absolutely no sense. Besides this is the same military that sent Humvee with no doors or armor. Their only defense was to cover the floor with sand bags and pray they didn't take fire through the doors.
Before I read the article I was thinking in terms of an advanced ground effect vehicle. Maybe with four small turbine engines. Enough to get you over a road block, and set fire to it as a bonus.
Another thought was the hybrid APC in Aliens. The top half is basically a helicopter. It drops on to the road and releases an armoured vehicle. The helicopter alone is very light so it can loiter above the field of operations providing a high view of the area. When the APC wants to be picked up they find an open area and the two components join up, probably in a few seconds.
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