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My guess is the military is using image recognition in ADDITION to gps like you suggest. But I too don't see how that is going to help with the wind. Also I wou

My guess is the military is using image recognition in ADDITION to gps like you suggest. But I too don't see how that is going to help with the wind. Also I would assume you would drop the package several miles behind the front lines to avoid that sort of problem (Assuming the allied forces are not surrounded). Maybe they are referring to placing the camera's directly on the payload but I still don't see why that would be better then gps.

digi_owl 11y ago
Thinking about it, i wonder if it is about "intelligently" locating an alternate place to touch down when wind etc makes it impossible to reach the GPS location. Could be that right now it dumbly steers towards the location no matter if that brings it smack into a hillside or similar, thus ending up in unpredictable and possibly hostile locations.
VLM 11y ago
I find it hard to believe they can pull this off, but it is theoretically possible that they could visually look at clouds vs trees and trash blowing about to correct for the difference between surface winds and winds aloft, which sometimes can be quite a difference. If you somehow magically knew the wind vector at various heights (visually, I guess, although a mesh network of cooperating air drop parachutes would work), even relatively slow actuators could very accurately pinpoint land. Another "I can't believe it, but maybe..." is GPS doesn't have a plot of every tree or vehicle and visual could be programmed, in theory, to do something ridiculous like thread the needle of individual trees and bushes to land next to visually identified military vehicles, where ever they may be parked, or even crazier, supply on the move vehicles, so if we're hitting the ground in 30 seconds and that APC is moving at 25 MPH to the east then I want to land 20 feet away from where it'll be in 30 seconds while missing the nearby trees... Another strange visual landing idea... regardless of GPS jamming, using narrow beam optical signalling make a mesh network of dropping pallets and visually coordinate landing such that you avoid all trees vehicles and people while landing in a super convenient straight line exactly 50 feet apart regardless of how/when the pallets were kicked off the plane.
- dingaling 11y ago
  >... it is theoretically possible that they could visually look at clouds vs trees and trash blowing about to correct for the difference between surface winds and winds aloft They[0] achieved remarkable drop retrieval rates in Vietnam, often over 95% and sometimes 100%, by doing just that; having an observer on the ground report the surface conditions. The navigator had a very stressful few minutes on the run-in adjusting his previously-calculated ballistics. A easier and superior technique was high-speed dropping using reefed parachutes. The payload would descend at 100 metres / second, basically immune to crosswinds. This wasn't suitable for medicines, fuses or other fragile payloads but was fine for munitions, rations, rice and tins of peaches ( a tonne of which once squashed a jeep ). HALO dropping was also used but whilst being gentler on the payload it was less accurate and more susceptible to rigging failures. The Caribou squadrons adopted a technique later used by Blackwater in Afghanistan; fly directly over the drop-zone at 50ft, pitch-up and kick the pallets right out the back. [0] 374th Air Wing and later the Vietnamese airlift squadrons who were trained in the same techniques
  - VLM 11y ago
    Imagine semi-AI parachutes and pallets that measured their trajectory as they landed and fed that data back to the parachutes a few seconds behind them such that the landing precision increased automagically when you drop multiple pallets. Even better prioritize by contents so stuff thats tough and easy to recover by hand lands first as the guinea pig and signals back to all the other soon to arrive pallets whereas you can nearly guarantee the mortar ammo lands within 10 feet of the mortar weapon. Why you could even kick the mortar and mortar rounds off different aircraft and theoretically they'd land right next to each other in formation, whereever they happened to land. Speaking of guys on the ground using some of those "invisible" IR chemlights and some smoke grenades the soldiers on the ground could visually signal conditions back to the parachutes while the parachutes are falling... This formation of flares on the ground or whatever means hot LZ so use dense hot LZ pattern, this formation means crazy civilians are rushing the field about to get squashed so disperse, this pattern means the LZ has just been overrun so fire the thermite grenades while you're still in the air... Another strange idea, do the helo LZ thing where you try to secure three LZs to throw the enemy off, and only after the parachutes are already falling, throw smoke and the parachutes all formation fly to the pre-determined LZ. So instead of the enemy having an hour to react or tens of minutes, the troops will be resupplied a couple minutes at most after its obvious they're getting supplies.

digi_owl 11y ago

Thinking about it, i wonder if it is about "intelligently" locating an alternate place to touch down when wind etc makes it impossible to reach the GPS location. Could be that right now it dumbly steers towards the location no matter if that brings it smack into a hillside or similar, thus ending up in unpredictable and possibly hostile locations.

VLM 11y ago

I find it hard to believe they can pull this off, but it is theoretically possible that they could visually look at clouds vs trees and trash blowing about to correct for the difference between surface winds and winds aloft, which sometimes can be quite a difference. If you somehow magically knew the wind vector at various heights (visually, I guess, although a mesh network of cooperating air drop parachutes would work), even relatively slow actuators could very accurately pinpoint land. Another "I can't believe it, but maybe..." is GPS doesn't have a plot of every tree or vehicle and visual could be programmed, in theory, to do something ridiculous like thread the needle of individual trees and bushes to land next to visually identified military vehicles, where ever they may be parked, or even crazier, supply on the move vehicles, so if we're hitting the ground in 30 seconds and that APC is moving at 25 MPH to the east then I want to land 20 feet away from where it'll be in 30 seconds while missing the nearby trees... Another strange visual landing idea... regardless of GPS jamming, using narrow beam optical signalling make a mesh network of dropping pallets and visually coordinate landing such that you avoid all trees vehicles and people while landing in a super convenient straight line exactly 50 feet apart regardless of how/when the pallets were kicked off the plane.

dingaling 11y ago
>... it is theoretically possible that they could visually look at clouds vs trees and trash blowing about to correct for the difference between surface winds and winds aloft They[0] achieved remarkable drop retrieval rates in Vietnam, often over 95% and sometimes 100%, by doing just that; having an observer on the ground report the surface conditions. The navigator had a very stressful few minutes on the run-in adjusting his previously-calculated ballistics. A easier and superior technique was high-speed dropping using reefed parachutes. The payload would descend at 100 metres / second, basically immune to crosswinds. This wasn't suitable for medicines, fuses or other fragile payloads but was fine for munitions, rations, rice and tins of peaches ( a tonne of which once squashed a jeep ). HALO dropping was also used but whilst being gentler on the payload it was less accurate and more susceptible to rigging failures. The Caribou squadrons adopted a technique later used by Blackwater in Afghanistan; fly directly over the drop-zone at 50ft, pitch-up and kick the pallets right out the back. [0] 374th Air Wing and later the Vietnamese airlift squadrons who were trained in the same techniques
- VLM 11y ago
  Imagine semi-AI parachutes and pallets that measured their trajectory as they landed and fed that data back to the parachutes a few seconds behind them such that the landing precision increased automagically when you drop multiple pallets. Even better prioritize by contents so stuff thats tough and easy to recover by hand lands first as the guinea pig and signals back to all the other soon to arrive pallets whereas you can nearly guarantee the mortar ammo lands within 10 feet of the mortar weapon. Why you could even kick the mortar and mortar rounds off different aircraft and theoretically they'd land right next to each other in formation, whereever they happened to land. Speaking of guys on the ground using some of those "invisible" IR chemlights and some smoke grenades the soldiers on the ground could visually signal conditions back to the parachutes while the parachutes are falling... This formation of flares on the ground or whatever means hot LZ so use dense hot LZ pattern, this formation means crazy civilians are rushing the field about to get squashed so disperse, this pattern means the LZ has just been overrun so fire the thermite grenades while you're still in the air... Another strange idea, do the helo LZ thing where you try to secure three LZs to throw the enemy off, and only after the parachutes are already falling, throw smoke and the parachutes all formation fly to the pre-determined LZ. So instead of the enemy having an hour to react or tens of minutes, the troops will be resupplied a couple minutes at most after its obvious they're getting supplies.