Posted on 06/05/2020 10:34:07 AM PDT by Alas Babylon!
Yes. The drone should not be constrained by the human limitations built into current airframes.
Take out all the life support and human G-limited support. Make the planes smaller because they do not need cockpits, ejection systems, oxygen.
Without those constraints and a failure level 100 times more acceptable (because no human lives at risk) The drones cost 1/10 as much, and we can afford ten times as many, for the same costs....
That’s why they installed explosive bolts.
Drones will inevitably replace human pilots. Far cheaper and far more capable. The future of warfare is going to be robots.
Gen. Buck Turgidson would not approve
Not only will they be better at flying, they will be a tremendous cost savings. No need to train a new batch of pilots every few years or continue flying to keep skills up. Anything that a drone or human learns can be uploaded to all aircraft. We can build ten thousand drones and keep them in hangers at low cost, all recieving skill updates from a few drones practicing in reality or virtually.
Our pilots will be fewer in number and fly in the company of dozens of machines.
Objectives will be determined by humans.
The rest of it will be handled by the machines.
The F-35 was designed as one of the control pods. And only one will be needed per squadron of $10mil drones.
The F-35 is the last manned fighter the US will produce for a very long time.
These drones are not dependent on satellites for their operations.
They are controlled via a variant of Link-16, and MADL.
https://www.aviationtoday.com/2018/09/04/f-35-data-fusion/
Cylons vs. the 12 Colonies didn’t work out so well. Just sayin’.
In fact, several Dale Brown novels posited this back in the 80’s and 90’s.
Fitting a conventional fighter with AI is hardly a big advance. Build a plane that no human could fly and maneuver then you would have something.
The tide has turned. It used to be they used drones for target practice, now humans will be used for drones to practice upon.
Clint Eastwood did a movie "Firefox" where he stole a smart plan from Russia, one you controlled with your mind. He had to learn Russian to control it, in the movie, not for real.
Skynet.
As quickly as Diane Finestein can get it to her “driver”.
DO you want Skynet. Because this is how you get Skynet.
:)
““There is no level four, fully autonomous vehicle out on the roads today,” he said, despite several companies investing billions of dollars in the idea. “On the other hand, that’s a decade worth of experience we should be pulling into the military because they’ve learned so much.””
Cars are not a good example. Flying autonomously is far, far, easier than driving autonomously. Fedex planes fly themselves. They still have pilots in them. But unless the pilot is bored and wants to land it himself, they take off, fly and land autonomously.
If we (or the Chinese) put effort into fighter drones, they will be very, very successful and push manned fighters out of the sky.
Sounds good. Until the radio link is jammed. Or it gets out of range. Remotely controlled high speed maneuvers in real time will need instantaneous comms at all times so SATCOM doesn't sound like an option as a data link.
I trust the pilot’s callsign is Starbuck.
I remember ‘Firefox’ ... in the movie Eastwood’s character already spoke Russian but had to train himself to ‘think in Russian’ so the mind-linked weapons control software could understand him.
Not a bad movie actually ...
Wasn’t the character Eastwood played a Russian-American so he already was a native speaker? I think the Russian plane could only interpret Russian mental commands.
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