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Especially for air to ground attack this is true. Not having a human takes away lot's safety margin needs. The question there is the impact. If you just risk s

Especially for air to ground attack this is true. Not having a human takes away lot's safety margin needs. The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away. However a such plane also has other roles. On domestic protection a key task of alarm squadrons is to take visual contact to pilots of civilian planes who lost radio contact. Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go.

antpls 8y ago
> The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away. Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight? > Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go. With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away.
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  > Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight? Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) ) > With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away. Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks.
  - antpls 8y ago
    > Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) ) You don't know, anything that would preemptively help to save human lives should be considered. Sending unmanned fighters or drones to probe a spaceship and gather data is wiser than sending humans to the task. > Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks. Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment, your only human instinct used here is your survival instinct, which will, conveniently, save a multi-million dollars plane from being destroyed.
    - johannes1234321 8y ago
      > Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment, It's also not the speed one collects detailed intelligence in, which was the subject.
yogthos 8y ago
This approach will work for air to air as well as air to ground. You have a rocket powered drone platform that can launch micro-drones to attack targets. It could carry thousands of them and dispatch them to destroy pretty much anything around it in a matter of seconds. Same thing goes for surveillance. Have a supersonic carrier drone fly over the target area, release thousands of small drones to photograph the shit out of it in every spectrum and then relay that back to command.
- johannes1234321 8y ago
  Cluster bombs are outlawed in many countries (not in the US, though) as it's too likely to hit civilians. Also the more advanced those micro drones are, the more expensive is the deployment and the more interest an opponent has in collecting unexploded devices for reverse engineering them.

antpls 8y ago

> The question there is the impact. If you just risk some thing and money it lowers the barrier for going into action, as the risk of having to handing a flag to a pilot's family goes away. Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight? > Also for surveillance/intelligence roles a human on board can have a better overview and decide where to go. With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away.

johannes1234321 8y ago
> Let's say an hostile space alien invasion happen in 10 years : would it not be better to not sacrifice human at all in the fight? Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) ) > With technology, we can create an arbitrary numbers of new sensing capabilities into the machine. A human will be surpassed by a machine before our generation passes away. Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks.
- antpls 8y ago
  > Our plane technology is quite useless in such a situation (and considering that alpha centauri is 5 light years away and aliens likely use the same physics 10 years is quite unlikely ;) ) You don't know, anything that would preemptively help to save human lives should be considered. Sending unmanned fighters or drones to probe a spaceship and gather data is wiser than sending humans to the task. > Often times the combination of human instinct and machine capability is still the best for many tasks. Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment, your only human instinct used here is your survival instinct, which will, conveniently, save a multi-million dollars plane from being destroyed.
  - johannes1234321 8y ago
    > Sure. For how long tho. Also, when you fly a plane at twice the sound speed with a screen in front of you, you are already inside like a total simulated environment, It's also not the speed one collects detailed intelligence in, which was the subject.

yogthos 8y ago

This approach will work for air to air as well as air to ground. You have a rocket powered drone platform that can launch micro-drones to attack targets. It could carry thousands of them and dispatch them to destroy pretty much anything around it in a matter of seconds. Same thing goes for surveillance. Have a supersonic carrier drone fly over the target area, release thousands of small drones to photograph the shit out of it in every spectrum and then relay that back to command.

johannes1234321 8y ago
Cluster bombs are outlawed in many countries (not in the US, though) as it's too likely to hit civilians. Also the more advanced those micro drones are, the more expensive is the deployment and the more interest an opponent has in collecting unexploded devices for reverse engineering them.