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US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

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Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#61

Post by ceejayoz »

ge96 wrote: post #60
icegreentea2 wrote: post #14

Ha, I love the "rescue ops". This will not primarily be for rescue ops. This will be for supporting Marine standin operations on and within the first island chain. The marines have been trying to figure out how they can handle sustainment and logistics in that environment. You can read some wonkish article about this (back in 2022) https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/sustainment-of-the-stand-i... . You'll note that the…

Would be a cool life, you operate a converted PBY Catalina that is a cargo plane and you bum around ferrying stuff

It's a thing! https://www.instagram.com/thatmallardguy/

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#62

Post by alabastervlog »

ge96 wrote: post #60
icegreentea2 wrote: post #14

Ha, I love the "rescue ops". This will not primarily be for rescue ops. This will be for supporting Marine standin operations on and within the first island chain. The marines have been trying to figure out how they can handle sustainment and logistics in that environment. You can read some wonkish article about this (back in 2022) https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/sustainment-of-the-stand-i... . You'll note that the…

Would be a cool life, you operate a converted PBY Catalina that is a cargo plane and you bum around ferrying stuff

Tales of the Gold Monkey / TaleSpin / that one season of Archer, has been the fantasy-life I wanted since I was very young.

I mean, I'm sure any real-world version of it would actually suck, though.

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#63

Post by ge96 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #61
ge96 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be a cool life, you operate a converted PBY Catalina that is a cargo plane and you bum around ferrying stuff

It's a thing! https://www.instagram.com/thatmallardguy/

Oh man that's cool. It would be impractical but an S-38 would be cool too but I'm biased from The Aviator

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#64

Post by ge96 »

alabastervlog wrote: post #62
ge96 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be a cool life, you operate a converted PBY Catalina that is a cargo plane and you bum around ferrying stuff

Tales of the Gold Monkey / TaleSpin / that one season of Archer, has been the fantasy-life I wanted since I was very young. I mean, I'm sure any real-world version of it would actually suck, though.

Yeah I need a bathroom connected to a plumbing system for ex

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#66

Post by m4rtink »

fidotron wrote: post #20

Ground effect vehicles could be the thing that's needed to make drone based delivery a reasonable thing to do, especially around lakes. It's one of life's perennial disappointments that such things only get done in military terms and under the ludicrous notion they are rescue vessels.

I think drone based delivery is a solved problem by now, thanks to the very rapid developments in the last 2 years ?

Some of the drones are now even fiber optic guided and thus resistant to jamming by the competition!

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#67

Post by moffkalast »

K0balt wrote: post #29
nilamo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Very fast - avoids radar/detection - water based My first assumption is that this is for stealth ops. "Rescue" doesn't need those features.

TBF, You never know when you might need to sneak up on a shoreside compound, go in and “rescue” a bunch of people from their beds, and get back out undetected.

Congratulations, you are being rescued. Please do not resist.

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#68

Post by EA-3167 »

JR1427 wrote: post #8

This is like the old Soviet Ekranoplans [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lun-class_ekranoplan

It will have many of the same issues too, common to all ground-effect sea planes, namely that wave height, rogue waves, weather conditions, and the ability of pilots to remain highly focused will be major limiting factors.

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#69

Post by hammock »

icegreentea2 wrote: post #37
mlyle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This will not primarily be for rescue ops It seems like combat SAR in the maritime environment is what these are best at. > The "Viceroy" craft that Regent has mocked up on their website claims 180 mile range, 3500lb of cargo / 2 crew + 12 passengers. This is like 1/4th the size needed for minimum scale sustainment and support. Not to say that it won't be used for that in a pinch or for special operations, but it's…

The company press release states "The second phase of work will examine seaglider capabilities across missions including contested logistics and medevac/casevac". I agree that this would be useful for medevac/casevac, but I'm less sure about the search part of SAR. 180 miles is not a lot of range for searching. I still believe this is primarily about contested logistics, because the USMC still hasn't solved that issu…

Pretty sure the search mission has been taken over by sats and drones for the most part

Re: US Marines to get high-speed, radar-evading electric seagliders for rescue ops

#70

Post by throwway120385 »

lawlessone wrote: post #52
nradov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's never going to happen. Only a tiny fraction of the population live directly on lakeshores, and basically no warehouses. If drone based delivery is going to work then they'll have to fly out of ground effect to avoid structures and trees. The main advantage of ground effect vehicles is lower fuel consumption over long distances. That's not a priority for the short range battery powered drones used by delivery s…

>Only a tiny fraction of the population live directly on lakeshores, I think you are mistaken sir. I live by a lake myself and i've just talked to my neighbors, and they all live by a lake too.

My startup is working on playing soothing music on drones using differential timing of rotor speeds. We've made some impressive inroads in the past few years. We're planning on adding a model that also plays birdsong for exactly this use case in the next couple of years!
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