Posted on 09/27/2020 11:10:35 AM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
The Air Force's flight test center at the Nevada Test and Training Range continues to grow...the facility has grown dramatically since 2000, including the addition of a massive and mysterious hangar built at the base's southern end...an even larger extension to an existing hangar facility that is quite peculiar in nature points to the possibility that the age of large swarms of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) has finally arrived.
For a year, construction has been underway in a section of the southern ramp area at the base, near where the original A-12 Oxcart hangars still stand. Four more modern hangars that are divided into two separate buildings, with each bay measuring roughly 90 feet wide, and are understood to be known as hangars 20-23, has been the recipient of a highly curious series of modifications.
[snip]...it seems that this revamped facility is not meant for a small number of large tactical aircraft, but instead, it seems to have been remodeled to support a fleet of smaller tactical aircraft, ones that are designed to fly together in a collective swarm on missions.
[snip]...the arrangement would allow for a large group on drones to park outside of the view of satellites and out of the weather on one side, with the hangars in the center working as pass-through servicing bays for preparing them for another flight, and then moving them to the other side to await a launch en-masse on their next mission. Upon return, they would be parked on the other side once again and await servicing and staging for reuse. Just learning how to best stage, launch, and recover a large number of semi-autonomous jet-powered unmanned systems together will surely be a focus of any such program.
(Excerpt) Read more at thedrive.com ...
So the drones are not going to crash into their target, à la that Gerard Butler movie, but will be large enough to carry ordnance and afterwards return to the hangers?
But for maximum firepower wouldn't you want to have massive amounts of ordnance flying alongside or in formation with your little drones? Or are these drones going to run the gamut from small drones to fighter-size drones to bomber-size drones?
Or are these drones seen as some kind of new powerful laser attack platform? That'd be something!
But leaving science fiction aside and getting back to physically flying alongside the ordnance... Why do that? Just make your cruise missiles smart, then the ordnance wouldn't need the drone to babysit it and/or crunch the numbers for it, and the missile becomes the drone.
Sorry... just trying to grasp the concept here and understand the role of a swarm of drones that don't deliberately fly into the target themselves. But I do get this part of it: a swarm of drones sounds and looks super cool.
Compare to salvage fusing of a nuclear weapon.
They hope to salvage at least some destructive effect...
this was set in europe
they dont have robust access to guns there
the ones she did accidentally find sucked, so it was realistic
Most importantly, do you want the dragon to eat us?
I was thinking about diving into custom drone building with my own programming. I would be interested in swarm code.
So much fun stuff out there and the cost is so cheap to research on your own now. Need a bigger office for a bigger work bench. Love the Raspberry Pi.
Angry Drones. Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.
Prey is one of the scariest books ever written.
The red arrows and bold words have me believing.
It’s all about the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one. Unless the judge is blind.
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What if they have thousands of mosquito-size hangers?
Drones will save pilot lives. So drones will earn "their pay," right there, though I don't know if pilots themselves will feel that way, relegated to desk work.
J/K, I can't conceive of a day good pilots aren't going to be needed.
Today's drones can be flown by a teamster with a joystick and monitor from thousands of miles away.
Highly skilled real pilots appear poised to advance to bigger and better things.
Nooo, we don't want to be eaten by that old dragon! So that may be what swarming really brings to the table for us: To hold the Chinese tyrant at bay and put the fear of God in him.
That’s quite the status thimble...
Yes it is and with gene editing technology evolving exponentially there will be scary times in our future. I believe that the ChiComs are trying to creat superhuman soldiers and scientists as well as animals enhanced with human genetics right now.
The Prof sounds like one of those who were against the A-Bomb development, let alone the dropping of it. I suspect it will end the same way.
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