Re: Since we had this discussion about UAVs and F22s etc...
Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2015 9:06 pm
I dont agree that it is that big of a problem and clearly neither does the US Airforce.
a discussion forum for Polywell fusion
https://talk-polywell.org/bb/
A team at NASA's Langley Research Center is developing a concept of a battery-powered plane that has 10 engines and can take off like a helicopter and fly efficiently like an aircraft. The prototype, called Greased Lightning or GL-10, is currently in the design and testing phase. The initial thought was to develop a 20-foot wingspan (6.1 meters) aircraft powered by hybrid diesel/electric engines, but the team started with smaller versions for testing, built by rapid prototyping.
Looks like a refined variation of something I saw on youtube a couple months ago.Ten-engine electric plane prototype takes off
Tom Ligon wrote:The numbers our controls guys rattled around for smaller UAVs suggest to me that if your control inputs are half a second late you are just plain doomed. Really big craft could stand longer, but in general they hate any kind of delay, and tens of milliseconds make them cranky.
Which argues against using stick-to-surface control (what the RC guys use when flying models they can see directly) when sitting in some place civilized and controlling a remote piloted vehicle somewhere half a world away. But I don't think anybody in the business is doing stick-to-surface. The aircraft has at least some degree of autonomy, and its control system is closing the loop fast. All a pilot is doing is essentially programming an autopilot from a remote location. The really critical thing is to have some human judgement deciding what to look at and especially what to shoot at. There is generally a delay of some seconds in the command structure to authorize deadly force. You want to minimize it but a few hundred milliseconds is only likely to be critical in air to air combat.
As long as the craft are flying themselves, I see no problem with some latency in the pilot's inputs.
The drone will be semi-autonomous, your not directly flying it so much as giving in general commands (move left / right / up / down) and actions (shoot / take picture / drop bomb / ect..) whilst letting the on-board programming interpret those commands and translate them into flight control surface movements and so forth. There will be a noticeable lag between the time the plane sends sensor data, the human analyzing that sensor data and the time to send the command back to the plane. In some roles that lag doesn't effect the mission profile or success rate, target selection prior to the drone getting close like what happens for an airstrike isn't an issue because there is little requirement for split second judgements. Same with taking photographs or just patrolling an area, there is no need to make rapid decisions in a small amount of time. Something like Close Air Support on the other hand requires the pilot to visually confirm the targets and attack vector after they are on site. This isn't something that can be pre-programmed in ahead of time because ground forces will be in very close proximity to each other and the chance of fratricide grows astronomically the further the execution the target and vector are selected. This is probably the single biggest reason the A10 is so amazingly effective at doing CAS, they can get on site, stay on site and the pilot can select targets and attack vectors that best fit the situation and they can do this on a second by second basis. Air interdiction is similar, whenever your intercepting an unknown possibly enemy aircraft, you must wait till your close enough to identify it and then execute the kill or no-kill order, maybe even communicate for it to turn around or escort to the nearest airbase. Those all require human judgement and potentially could require split second decisions be made should things not go "as planned".Things like CAS and interdiction / air superiority are things that require manned pilots while surgical strikes and surveillance lend themselves very well to unmanned remotely operated vehicles.
Do not project your beliefs onto the Airforce, your not that good. The Airforce most certainly believes there will always be a need for human pilots, they have zero intention of replacing all human pilots with drones. What they are doing is looking for ways to replace expensive piloted aircraft with cheap remotely piloted drones as a means to save an extraordinary amount of cash, which is a smart thing.Skipjack wrote:I dont agree that it is that big of a problem and clearly neither does the US Airforce.
Do not project your beliefs onto the Airforce, you're not that good. USAF is not a monolithic group think that all approach this issue with the same beliefs. What they have done in the past is no measure of what they will do in the future.palladin9479 wrote:Do not project your beliefs onto the Airforce, your not that good. The Airforce most certainly believes there will always be a need for human pilots, they have zero intention of replacing all human pilots with drones.
I never said they would replace ALL human pilots with drones, but drones will make the majority of planes and they will go in first. Humans will stay in the background and will pick off what left over after the attrition of the enemy.palladin9479 wrote:Do not project your beliefs onto the Airforce, your not that good. The Airforce most certainly believes there will always be a need for human pilots, they have zero intention of replacing all human pilots with drones.Skipjack wrote:I dont agree that it is that big of a problem and clearly neither does the US Airforce.
The other way of looking at this is that we can presently afford, and could for the foreseeable future, to field human-powered fighters, when most of our opponents can't afford to. When is the last time any of our pilots got into an honest dogfight? There will probably never be another ace ... not enough targets because nobody wants to play our game. We've been using fighters as bombers instead.GIThruster wrote:
What Tom is saying makes good sense. If you give a drone enough AI to dogfight, you can use it semi-autonomously, and the aircrafts' frames can be built to make much harder turns in the sky than the human body can take, so it is the dogfighting role that drones will eventually shine brightest in. Taking pilots out of harm's way when delivering air strikes is nothing new. If we can use X-47b's instead of Tomahawks, then there may be an economic advantage, but it will be a very long time before we see it. Dogfighting drones that can pull 12 gees. . .that's an advantage one could leverage immediately, and if we don't we will be in no position to provide air superiority against those who do.
Pilots have to come out of the plane eventually. The human body is too fragile to withstand the gee loading future air battles will generate.