Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 332 posts

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#31

Post by ethbr0 »

lumost wrote: post #9
darkclouds wrote: post #2

[flagged]

the pilot isn't the expensive kit, although the flight-hours to train them may be. Even an unmanned NGAD will probably cost ~500MM.

The flight hours + HR costs.

The key financial advantage of drones is that they don't need money to live after work, health insurance, or a pension plan. It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work.

And specifically for forward deployment scenarios: they don't require human support infrastructure pushed forward, at great cost.

Even in austere military terms, it's logistically expensive to keep a human alive on a random atoll in the Pacific.

The aircraft:supportHumans ratio is a tyranny in that each of those supportHumans requires their own support.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#33

Post by strken »

crote wrote: post #16
KingOfCoders wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a wall of RF jamming" When using AI controlled I think the poster meant local AI controlled, no RF. We probably will also see laser communication from satellite to drones, which will be much more difficult to jam.

Having AI kill humans on their own without any supervision is an extremely controversial move. It will result in friendly fire sooner or later, and the resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program. Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.

Whether the resulting controversy kills the program probably depends on whether there's a conflict between great powers in a total war, or involving pariah states who don't care about making a few new martyrs.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#34

Post by koube »

Mat3777 wrote: post #27
koube wrote: post #22

When I want to know more about the future of warfare as a hacker news reader I base my opinion on a few cherry picked twitter/reddit videos (plus literal Russian propaganda) and this makes me more knowledgable than military leaders and qualified to dictate the direction of military procurement.

How would you know who is qualified for what?

I don't have perfect knowledge of this but disagreeing with military leaders based on a couple videos is definitely non-credible. Linking Russian drone propaganda is useful to let people know that drones exist perhaps, but not for much beyond that.

Beyond that central theme, certain things don't pass the smell test in my opinion. For example:

- Lancets are winning the war. Who is winning the war is debatable but usually I hear that artillery is the decisive weapon of this war. Additionally Ukraine is winning on artillery attrition, with some claims of a 3:1 ratio of attrition, so drones are not significant on this, at least not significant enough to overturn the attrition rates.

- Russia has swarms of drones that home in on RF sources. I have seen no such thing although I am open to being proven wrong here. My understanding is that jamming has been effective for both Russia and Ukraine EXCEPT for offensives where the attackers need to extend beyond the protection of EW.

- Western weapons get less useful by the minute. This one is technically true as all armies adapt to new challenges. However I wonder what the condition of the Crimean bridge is today.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#35

Post by pydry »

crote wrote: post #16
KingOfCoders wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a wall of RF jamming" When using AI controlled I think the poster meant local AI controlled, no RF. We probably will also see laser communication from satellite to drones, which will be much more difficult to jam.

Having AI kill humans on their own without any supervision is an extremely controversial move. It will result in friendly fire sooner or later, and the resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program. Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.

So like cluster munitions then.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#36

Post by FirmwareBurner »

ethbr0 wrote: post #31
lumost wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the pilot isn't the expensive kit, although the flight-hours to train them may be. Even an unmanned NGAD will probably cost ~500MM.

The flight hours + HR costs. The key financial advantage of drones is that they don't need money to live after work, health insurance, or a pension plan. It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work. And specifically for forward deployment scenarios: they don't require human support infrastructure pushed forward, at great cost. Even in austere military terms, it's logistically expensive to keep a human a…

>It's expensive to ask people to risk their lives for work.

Unless you're in the Russian army.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#37

Post by Thoeu388 »

Highway landing and take-off on its own is useless. F35 requires extensive machinery to maintain, in needs proper airport and hangars. It is not possible to operate it somewhere from forest! And vertical landing/takeoff can not support any load, it can not even be fully fuelled!

In Czechia we are replacing Gripens that can operate from almost anywhere. It only needs a few hundred meters of road, and single truck to refuel and restock ammunition.

Our new F35 will only be able to operate from a single runway in entire country!

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#38

Post by KingOfCoders »

jojobas wrote: post #23
KingOfCoders wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what a lot of countries, like Germany (German here), for a lesson, is that your current stock of weapons is most useful in the beginning of a conflict as the conflict rapidly changes weapon development and your weapon will need heavy upgrades or they are no longer useful. All western weapons get less useful by the minute.

This could be true if it wasn't Russia using a bigger and bigger fraction of pre-1991 weapons as the war goes on. If anything, Western precision artillery and rocketry became more and more useful in disrupting Russian logistics.

The OP was about progress in Russian Lancet drone manufacturing.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#39

Post by FirmwareBurner »

lnsru wrote: post #5
pengaru wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of good RF jamming is going to do to that swarm of autonomous kamikaze drones homing right in on the RF sources...

Ukraine deployed some nice German canon designed against drone swarms. USA has laser version of it. It will be interesting fights of the future for sure.

>Ukraine deployed some nice German canon designed against drone swarms

Bruh, the German Ghepard wasn't some fancy drone cannon but an obsolete anti aircraft cannon designed in the 50's which they scrapped because present day jets fly much faster and higher than those from the '50's but it's perfect for Iranian drones.

Re: British F-35Bs to bring vertical landing abilities to highways

#40

Post by KingOfCoders »

crote wrote: post #16
KingOfCoders wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"a wall of RF jamming" When using AI controlled I think the poster meant local AI controlled, no RF. We probably will also see laser communication from satellite to drones, which will be much more difficult to jam.

Having AI kill humans on their own without any supervision is an extremely controversial move. It will result in friendly fire sooner or later, and the resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program. Laser comms are neat, but they suffer from things like clouds or smokescreens. And once you figure out the wavelength, a hostile laser comms sat can trivially jam it.

"resulting controversy is pretty much guaranteed to terminate the program."

I'm not aware of any controversy that stopped weapon progress. We have biological weapon research, atomic weapons and the US used chemical agents in Vietnam.

The US stopped tactical nuclear weapons because it thought they were not useful, not because of the protests in Europe.

SDI was cancelled because laser weapons were not feasable in the 80s, not because of the controversy.

There are more mines used in Ukraine than ever before - despite "bans". There is cluster ammunition delivered despite a huge controversy.

"clouds or smokescreens."

Sure smokescreens can only jam low flying drones? If you smoke a target the drone waits for you running out of smoke rounds.

Post reply on HN