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Military Aircraft To Get All-Fiber Network Gear
coondoggie writes "Looking to significantly reduce weight, improve on-board communications and make it easier to upgrade avionics, the US military is developing prototype phonic gear for use in all aircraft. Behind such a drastic shift is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project with an ungainly moniker: Network Enabled by Wavelength division multiplexing Highly Integrated Photonics (NEW-HIP)."
Now our military has more stuff, we might be able to stand a chance against another military for the first time in a long time!
From the summary: "prototype phonic gear" - are they going back to speaking tubes like the ones on old ships?
-Snorbert, somewhere in the antipodes
Oh they just called it that so they could say: "This plane needs a HIP replacement!"
Fiber optic cables in of themselves are immune to EMP but the equipment used to manipulate the data sent through the optical cables is not. That is, unless it is specifically shielded against EMP using twisted wires and proper grounding. This would probably be on the list of things that the military would be smart to insist upon in their aircraft.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
"photonic" -- not "phonic"
Given that fibre will fail even if say the cable is a kinked too much I have to say is it going to be robust enough?!?!?! Ditto with the transceivers, how many GBICs fail compare to good old ethernet ports (gigabit or 10BASET its all good).
Further what about repairs. You don't need complex equipment or training to splice copper together, but different story with fibre. Theres a reason why telco techs who work on fibre have to do special courses and use protective equipment.
With all its volume, the box is comparatively easy to shield
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Assuming that a typical Cat5e cable can do about a Gbps, each of these cables are equivalent to about 30 cat5's. So unless these things weigh over 30 times what a cat5 does, they'll be significantly lighter.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Don't forget that the copper cables need to be shielded against interference, while fibre is much more robust.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Immune to EMP?
The research is part of DARPA's Information in a Photon program which is looking to discover and take advantage of the basic information content carrying capabilities of a photon and exploit this information capacity for imaging/sensing and communications applications, the agency stated.
I'm thinking, Oh great, they're rediscovering daylight, pen and paper.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Surely, they could have been more creative, and backronymed whatever that they are doing into NEW-HYPE instead of NEW-HIP.
Reduce weight on an airplane? I'd start with the passengers. The last few times I have flown anywhere, I have been amazed how many people are overweight. But I guess military folks are in better shape then the general population.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Huked awn fonix wurked four me!
optic fiber becomes opague when there is a nuclear explosion nearby. So these planes build in a major vulnerability to tactical nukes on the battlefield..Its just the military wanting to make more money..
Who ever it was who decided that every bill, program and project the government undertakes has to have its title mangled into some moronic acronym needs to be taken out back and and shot to death, starting at the toes and working up from there.
And what a dumb acronym this is too, making the data channels in our military jets conjure up images of feeble old ladies who fall down in the shower and need bone replacements. Gah.
The F-22 and F-35 already use IEEE-1394 (aka "FireWire") as their primary data carriers between parts of the aircraft, over shielded copper wires. Is optical cabling really that much lighter that this matters?
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
It's just like nucular, you know. ;-)
But if they shoot well, who cares how they spell...
You are assuming the system can and will saturate 30 cat5 cables, which may or may not be true.
We are taking damage! The ODN relays on deck 8 have overloaded!
[The Universe] has gone offline.
I would imagine that the shielding has to be especially robust in military equipment, as it should be EMP resistant.
The grandparent article is titled "Star Trek anyone? US sets out to build photon-based optical networks."
Shouldn't they be building bio-neural networks then?
its going to be a long time before it is cost effective for your everyday UAV's and fighters - right now the technology is quite complex and costly, someday maybe - it is hard to beat the low cost of wire and the weight savings is less than you think - fiber is pretty fragile and has to be protected quite well (meaning heavy jacketing and such)
10 Gbps over some new optical bus sounds like Light Peak to me.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
I dont know. Vibrations, fatigue? Unless they use some plastic fibers and not glass, Im not sure how well it would resist fracturing compared to metal wires. It will also raise costs like crazy. Although hey its the military. They dont have budget problems like NASA.
Seems like a huge market out there.
Because they sure as hell aren't going to redesign existing avionics.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Shielding the hundreds of miles of wire on a small fighter like the F-16 would add thousands of pounds to the unloaded weight of the aircraft, reducing available payload for fuel or ordnance. In aviation- and more specifically, military aviation- there is a constant struggle between weight and strength/redundancy. Panels are chemically milled to thin out areas with lower stress concentration, a process that saves only a few grams or ounces per panel. The airframe is built to be just strong enough to fly between 300-400 hours without disintegrating in midair, whereupon it must be taken apart and have many parts replaced. The manufacturer and the AF decided that it was worth the extra maintenance costs to have an airframe that can turn x degrees-per-second faster, or take off from a runway that is y feet shorter, than a stronger, heavier airframe.
The point is- these aircraft are not built like a long-haul commercial passenger fleet, nor are they built like the heavily defended flying fortresses of yesteryear. Modern fighters are built and equipped for very specific missions, and afaik none of those missions include surviving major emp. You can ask about nuclear warheads, but the simple answer is that the fighter fleet is not an 'anti-nuclear' force. An F-16 doesn't need to be nuclear hardened because an F-16 close enough to a nuke to have its circuits fried will almost certainly be a loss anyways. The base I work at was once a primary target for soviet ICBMs due to nearby silos and our nuclear munitions. It would be laughable to expect the planes on the ground to scramble after a nuclear detonation or hope to land on the glowing crater where the runway used to be.
tl;dr- non-rf cables aren't shielded except in areas of the aircraft where it is absolutely necessary.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
phonic |fänik|
adjective
of or relating to speech sounds.
of or relating to phonics : the English language presents difficulties if a purely phonic approach is attempted.
So... Fighter jets will be like the ship's bridge in old movies, the pilot will pull out some air-tube thingy and shout commands into it? Will there be speech recognition? Or will there be a person hunched up in cramped quarters down in the engine room?
Could this be the fix for nuclear EMP. No wires to act as antenna. john
Besides the obvious, snarky answers, how do you electrically *ground* an aircraft?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
These systems were created in the 80's and 90's. They likely wouldn't be spec'ed for anything newer then cat5 and repair crews on the ground know better then to just put something that looks similar in place on something that can cost lives if it fails.
It's most likely cat5 shielded with some sort of covering to protect against EMP or radio frequency jamming. SO by using fiber, they are likely going past the simple weight advantage of replacing cat5 (even cat 6 or 7) and forgoing some of the weight from the shielding too.
China will be busy with settling internal Affairs (no - not Tibet and neither Taiwan; both are issues blown out of proportion by the US for political reasons.) and getting a stable modern country for another 50-100years. They are modernizing at an extreme rate, but in large parts of China there is still nothing (i.e. poor villages, no infrastructure, low income agricultural Jobs working like Farms in the US or in Europe would have 80 years ago).
Chinas top problems:
1) Stabilize the Demography of the cities
2) Stabilize the social development (e.g. they introduced a social insurance system recently)
3) Create better Jobs and increase the Salary of the poorer people
4) Manage the ethnic and religious conflicts in the northeast of China
5) Make the legal system working better (for Human rights reasons, but also for things like enhancing Trade and bigger investments from foreign countries)
Oh - and by the way: Should China not manage this, we all have a problem. Why do you think that the West complains about Tibet, but not so much about other regions in China with similar problems? Yes - because Tibet is actually quit unimportant...
Military aircraft certified for nuclear ops are EMP certified, for instance, all the bombers, the F-15E, etc.
Impetuous! Homeric!
Not sure what you're asking, but each military aircraft has several grounding points that use a standard RCA jack for the aircraft and an alligator clip (OK, a big one) on the other end of the wire that grounds the aircraft to a common ground in the concrete. As for in the air, there are electro-static dischargers on the trailing edges that help dissipate charges that build up, but in the case of a lightning strike, well, just about anything goes...
Impetuous! Homeric!
Citation needed.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
Personal knowledge of the F-15 and F-111 weapons systems (13+ years); Two quick sources on a quick search, you'll have to find the rest. 1) MIL-HDBK-516A, para 7.4.3 (for engines); 2) http://www.wrcoc-aic.org/Archive/RS/RS06/RS06_7.pdf (Note: Summary states that the B-52 is required to be hardened against EMP).
Impetuous! Homeric!
That's what I was asking... :)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
The high bandwidth cables don't need to go everywhere. Only on the busses between the FADECs, FLCCs, radar systems, and perhaps any other sensors that would benefit from a high bandwidth low latency connection.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Crosstalk and EMI are big, big bugaboos in aircraft wiring. I installed a LAN in a large airframe once, and it was incredible how much trouble we had with electronic noise from other aircraft systems. Fiber would have been a godsend, not only for the LAN but for the avionics as well.
:\
Regards;