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The Future of Battle Tech
PolygamousRanchKid tips a story about research into futuristic military technology currently being funded by DARPA. The Disc-Rotor Compound Helicopter 'is propelled by rotor blades that extend from a central disc, letting it take off and land like a helicopter. But those blades can also retract into the disc, minimizing drag and letting the Disc-Rotor fly like a plane, powered by engines beneath each wing.' The Vulture program aims to keep a plane in the sky for five years or more, and 'LANdroids' are pocket-sized robots which soldiers can scatter around urban areas to seed a communications network. FastRunner is a 'two-legged robot that can cover a moderately rough terrain as fast as the best human sprinters.' The article mentions the flying humvees we've discussed in the past, as well as projects for 'smart' binoculars and a method for recycling space junk.
I want to hear about recent ferro-fib developments leading to overall Steiner Scouting Party weight reduction as a means to increase troop transit efficiency against Davion forces.
Going to be very big in future wars.
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Anyone else read the title and get excited that it was about the future of "BattleTech" the FASA war/board game?
Giant robots are the future.
Even if their story is true, that they jammed the communications to the drone and then spoofed the GPS so it made a landing where they wanted it, at least it didn't shoot at us. (Not so good would be the intact capture of stealth technology. Oh well).
Hopefully that incident will have made our military technologists MUCH more careful about security/jamming and ways our systems can be compromised. As we deploy systems much closer in reality to the T-1000 Terminator (sans human "skin") having them turn on us would probably be the worst of all possible outcomes.
are a terrible idea from a security perspective.
"hey guys, let's give the enemy physical access to our network infrastructure. what could possibly go wrong?"
LSHAC
The Light Submersible Helo Aircraft Carrier
A submarine design to deploy up to four helicopters or two VTOL fighter jets. For use with strategically sensitive strikes.
The submarine can approach any coast an allow a pair of Marine strike fighter jets to attack a target, or allow up to four helicopters to deploy a special forces unit.
Why we need one of these. There is a ton of question as to whether our huge honking navy needs tons of surface ships and carriers. Will a battle really be waged at sea like it was of old. Or will these great carrier and cruiser fleets be wiped out within the first two days of surface combat?
A submersible light carrier can be used in the many less conventional wars we are fighting (ie: war on terrorism). The ability to strike any coastal region with almost zero warning is a very beneficial ability in today's conflicts.
RAIL GUN
Why not just fling a metal slug at unbelievable speeds with so much kinectic force that Microsoft would be jealous.
LASER ASSASINATOR
As seen in the movie real genius. Why send a strike force in for man like Osama bin Laden when you can simply cook him to a crisp from a satellite miles above in the sky.
I've seen the flying Hummingbird on Mythbusters, why the hell do we need to see an artist's impression?
Part 2, why are they calling them "impressions" artists do renderings and concept art, only French artists that died a while back did impressions, they had a whole art movement, what was it called...
I hope the first deployment is wall street, with loud speakers blaring 'money for nothing' as they napalm Goldman Sachs.
Oh to dream.
Vulture looks like a waste - you want something up forever, use a satellite.
Chembots look like a minimal advantage.
Falcon is a cheaper rocket.
Two legged robots are needlessly complicated
Satellite recovery is a big deal - but is very hard to do.
Shrike is already doable, but has limited range which means people in danger have to be looking at a screen. No. Soldiers in battle keep their eyes peeled, not on a screen.
The CT2WS system looks like a pipe dream. If it is possible, it is not likely to be very effective
Nav is like the Shrike, only smaller.
But the landroid is doable and practical. Leave little things behind to extend the radio range of all the other devices. Throw in a microphone on them and you get a nice little spynetwork that you can access from a large distance away - safe and secure back in the base.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Looks like that mini Metal Gear that showed up in the third installment of the Solid series.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
So many trademark infringements, so little time...
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
I wonder what advantages a disc-rotor helicopter has over a slowed-rotor helicopter.
BigDog, RoboCheetah, now this ostrich thing. Imagine herds of these just roaming the earth after the nuclear armageddon / pigbirdhorse flu armageddon, scavenging for fuel and occasionally blasting each other to smithereens. What will the alien archaeologists think?
We now redirect you to your regularly scheduled work at home scam.
No matter how fancy the tech, how many buzzwords... if it can be fooled by inexpensive off the shelf equipment by the opponent, then not sure how useful the equipment really is
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
dead civilians
shattered families
PTSD
horrific injuries
rape and torture
oh wait, EVERY war is about that. EVERY war is the same. EVERY war profiteer and war-welfare-queen is also the same.
regarding advances in myomer technology!
Don't forget nuclear isomer powered GRASER rifles. They're powered by Americanium .
Oh wait, that was swept under the rug as "junk science", right?
Anyhow, the military seems to be the our only institution left that's doing any forward thinking and planning past the next quarter. I'm hoping for some neato civilian spin-offs.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?"
I know I sound like a broken record on this... But we really need a new intrinsic/mutual definition of security arising from "A Newer Way Of Thinking" like Albert Einstein called for if we are to survive all the technological power we are creating in the 21st century:
http://anwot.org/
To go with the newer way of thinking, then we need different sorts of machines... Thinks like 3D printers of everyone, or solar panels for all, or advanced "AutoDoc" medical systems, or organic gardening robots, or plenty of other similar things where we use our technological knowledge to make abundance for all -- instead of using advanced technologies of abundance like robotics to fight over scarcity, or worse, create artificial scarcity. Still, DARPA has made contributions to some of these, so that's a good thing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
easily defeated by Iranians spoofing GPS signals.
A flying humvee with retractable rotor blades which can seed an area with a network of smaller robots all while staying in the air for 5+ years?!
God help us all!
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
I thought this was gonna be about the tabletop miniatures game from FASA...
is what is has always been: death. thirty years ago we cloaked the cold war in 'tech' in the hopes it would be the solution to a horrific conflict caused by humankind, and all it served to do was amplify the tone of that conflict, to push us ever closer to the precipice. in the nineties we did the same thing with guided ballistics and slaughtered countless innocents in our zeal to decree global weapons superiority in the balkans. In iraq we developed the latest, the greatest, the drones, and with a moral superiority not seen since the 1600's we proudly declared our mission accomplished as millions of iraqis died in the streets and not a single predator stood by to prevent the atrocities at abu grahib..
so let me reiterate, the future of battle tech is a bleached-white skull rotting in the latest theatre of the most righteous conflict at the hands of the most just nation it is the carbonized ashes of a house of innocents, and the eviscerated corpses of scores as they flee from an enemy that cannot be reasoned with not because it is incapable as a machine, but because its masters stopped caring long ago.
Good people go to bed earlier.
0.4% of upwards of a trillion bucks is still a ton of cash. I wish i had a minuscule amount of money in that case! ;)
I vote for FASA to send a SOPA order to the DoD to take down their infringing weapons.
They are just gonna mess this up. I can't believe the Drones don't have a self destruct system. First off military GPS radios have a specific password seeded handshake in order for the gps to process the beacon signals. If the authentic handshake is not there the signal is ignored. maybe the drone was a disposable device so military gps wasn't used. I think in that case it would have been easy to build a smart receiver. GPS signals are week. if the beacon is strong then the autopilot should ignore gps signals and use standard inertia guidance to get out of harms way. Also a self destruct would be a nice feature.
Is this stuff really hundreds-of-billions-of-dollars cool? We live in a pretty backwards country when technological innovation is about killing and oppressing instead of healing and entertaining. Every bomb or shiny gun or automated robot our military makes is being made for the sole purpose of killing or oppressing someone else, and nobody cares because those tragedies are happening in a mythical little place called "the rest of the world."
The tech geek in me loves to see so much money going into innovation and new inventions. I know one day that these amazing machines and the lessons that they teach us in building them will be used in ways which make our lives easier and may even save lives.
The peace lover in me wishes the money would go into fixing immediate problems in clear headed and rational ways.
Metal Gear!?
The U.S has 18 times more military then every country combined, DARPA is just one out of many military setups that spends money on research, however most of the time they spend that money on contracts usually given to private companies to develop technology. These private companies usually develop this stuff without these contracts, I believe Boeing had a lot to do with Jet power, and other aircraft. The government handed out millions of dollars to private companies to develop aircraft designed to do specific tasks, out of the millions they spent only a few companies managed to spend that money to at least create aircraft the others spent it on themselves. Howard Hughes was tried by Congress for spending his cut of that money they claimed he failed to spend it developing any aircraft and failed to deliver the aircraft to the military, he pointed out that he had developed aircraft and numerous companies never turned in any plans or actual aircraft, and they had the same contract to develop and deliver. These Private companies have been developing technology for years without the military even being aware of it, spending the money on it only helps to accelerate its development, these days, and sadly 70% of the time it was rushed and always has some type of failure pushing technology always has more downside then upside, of course they heavily test it and continue to work on it for 10-20 years before it is considered just about fail proof. However the fact that other countries probably have become aware of these things, long before the public is ever told, (the whole every country is spying on each other they all know this but act like they don't) I find it funny the other countries can create some (not all the time) very cheap, and effective methods to counter these new technologies, considering the millions the U.S military spends to get these things developed and deployed. With private companies even Universities developing or pushing technology, I am not so sure the military or the Pentagon should be spending money on this, it helps to accelerate its development but these technologies would exist anyway.
I wish DARPA would focus more on non-violent forms of persuasion. Like for example, an entire army of non-violent protesters that we can fly to any city in the world to perform sit-ins, street demonstrations and suchlike. I can imagine a group of 100,000 americans fully equipped for urban camping occupying Beijing with placards that read "We don't like your labor laws" and other such slogans. Even if the opposing army killed all of the non-violent protesters, we would win the propaganda war, which is the only war worth fighting anymore. By taking the futuristic approach to warfare, with robots and lasers, America turns out to look too much like The Death Star and the American forces are basically just Storm Troopers. We make our enemies into Jedi Knights and really in the end who doesn't want to see the Jedi Knights blow up the Death Star? In other words, our Sith Overlords in Washington DC are already on the losing side of the ideological battle so long as they keep pursuing the technological approach to war.
if your life is such a big joke then why should I care?