61–70 of 137 posts
I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
This is actually an important part of what makes a stealth airframe "stealthy", along with other stuff.
I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/6312/why-are-ai...
"Airplanes are riveted, not screwed because they are the product of engineers, not lawyers."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not necessarily. If the factories that build the robots are taken out, for example. Someone (even a robot) still has to build them.
It turned out to be pretty hard to take out Germany’s factories in ww2.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means f…
The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low. Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
(I'm pretty sure Musk could make them reusable. /s)
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> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker. This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.
Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.
https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
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The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low. Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.
True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.
The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.
Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?
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At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot. You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engage…
Stealth is less effective against long range radar, stealth is more effective closer in against targeting radars. When you're high up you can have pretty long 'line of sight' so it's not unreasonable that these could fly way way ahead. 100 miles and way more is not unreasonable. You basically get 'double standoff'. I can see this as being almost as effective as manned stealth and if they are cost effective they could…
If the unmanned aircraft are the ones flying far ahead, taking the risk, and extending the standoff envelope, then why is the human still sitting in the forward fighter rather than supervising from a safer node further back?
At that point it seems like the architecture is optimizing for tactical latency and current doctrine, not necessarily for the cleanest end-state.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
At 10-mile intervals you're maintaining a high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. If the command aircraft is 10 miles away and the enemy is jamming the link, the drone is going to be making split-second (potentially) lethal decisions without the pilot. You're right about them both costing about the same, so the real leverage only comes if these drones can stay out of the engage…
> high-bandwidth, low-latency mesh network in a contested electronic environment. Hard to win at jamming, when you're further away and the opponents are frequency agile. 1. They can use directionality more effectively to their advantage 2. Inverse square law works against you (unlike e.g. jamming GPS where it works for you). 3. They can be frequency agile, strongly rejecting everything outside of the 20MHz slice they…
My concern is less total link loss than what happens under degraded or intermittent connectivity. If the wingman still depends on the manned aircraft for tasking or weapons authority, then the interesting question is how it behaves when the link is noisy rather than gone.
That feels like the real hinge in the concept.