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Wow, I read your comment just as the movie top gun started on my TV. I really wonder what air-to-air unmanned dog fight would look like. Are drone swarms a thi

Wow, I read your comment just as the movie top gun started on my TV. I really wonder what air-to-air unmanned dog fight would look like. Are drone swarms a thing yet? a sky filled with drones would be terrifying. I would hope modern jets deploy drone like missiles manned by ground crew for dogfights,but if I learned anything about F22 and F35, they spend trillions to basically let middle parties steal the money and the tech is something designed decades ago. If I was china I would pop out hundreds of thousands of cheap drones to augment radar capabilities all the stealth tech would be useless if the adversary has millions of eyes at different altitudes each capabale of visual/infrared/lidar detection of fast moving objects. US intel seems spread thin, I wonder if they do enough spying to know what their enemies are capable of. Chinese R&D has been catching up fast these last few years.

NikolaeVarius 7y ago
Missiles are drones that are not supposed to come back.
- beckingz 7y ago
  Some missiles even have longer endurance than small drones.
  - StavrosK 7y ago
    Per kilometer, all of them do.
- badrabbit 7y ago
  Missiles have a target and they use a guidance system. What I meant was piloted without a predefined target to make evasion difficult.
nradov 7y ago
The weapons and tactics you describe might be possible in a few years but today they're science fiction.
- divbzero 7y ago
  Top militaries can be several years ahead in secret capabilities. Curious how much of what’s described is actually operational today.
lainga 7y ago
6th-Gen fighter concepts include drone "wingmen" under partial control of fighter pilots in their own fighters. e.g. Japan's I3 Fighter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_fighter ed.: and yes, the F-22 and F-35 are 5th generation and decade-old tech. There is unfortunately a lot of lead time on fighter development. I think the F-15 was relatively speedy at 9 years from selection to roll-out (1967 - 76).
- CoolGuySteve 7y ago
  I've always wondered why there's a guy in the plane at all at this point. Doesn't it severely limit the maneuverability of the aircraft to have a liquid-fueled brain piloting it around rather than some remotely controlled semi-autonomous solid-state electronics?
  - lainga 7y ago
    You could make an argument about drone jamming and autonomous behaviour not being quite there yet... I think that's what the "wingmen" are for. The paradigm we're moving out of was one where you'd get high-quality sensor data from a specialized patrol or AWACS plane like an E-3, which would send information to ground, which would relay it to the fighters. Now, platforms like the F-35 often have better sensors than patrol planes do; and despite still having a person inside, are better at evading missiles than big patrol planes are. So it's more like the fighters take on the role of the patrol planes; the human inside decides what to do, probably assimilating information from other fighters; and sends the drones out to do acrobatics. And there's no need to run that information through a ground station first.
    - angry_octet 7y ago
      Still a place for AWACS, bigger RADAR allows different frequencies, much wider field of view, lots of power. Usually they would communicate with fighters directly to update their picture (voice & link). Ground controllers usually take a back seat to what AWACS says. The difference with the drone wingman (wingbot?) is that the controller is in the air and close by, and she can point a powerful X-band radar at the drones to use as an un-jammable comms link (high power, better geometry). If the manned aircraft were also to merge then they could be jammed because the geometry would be wrong, but for short periods the wingbot tactics are mainly dominated by physics (energy, shot flyout and engagement envelopes).

NikolaeVarius 7y ago

Missiles are drones that are not supposed to come back.

beckingz 7y ago
Some missiles even have longer endurance than small drones.
- StavrosK 7y ago
  Per kilometer, all of them do.
badrabbit 7y ago
Missiles have a target and they use a guidance system. What I meant was piloted without a predefined target to make evasion difficult.

nradov 7y ago

The weapons and tactics you describe might be possible in a few years but today they're science fiction.

divbzero 7y ago
Top militaries can be several years ahead in secret capabilities. Curious how much of what’s described is actually operational today.

lainga 7y ago

6th-Gen fighter concepts include drone "wingmen" under partial control of fighter pilots in their own fighters. e.g. Japan's I3 Fighter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_fighter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I3_fighter ed.: and yes, the F-22 and F-35 are 5th generation and decade-old tech. There is unfortunately a lot of lead time on fighter development. I think the F-15 was relatively speedy at 9 years from selection to roll-out (1967 - 76).

CoolGuySteve 7y ago
I've always wondered why there's a guy in the plane at all at this point. Doesn't it severely limit the maneuverability of the aircraft to have a liquid-fueled brain piloting it around rather than some remotely controlled semi-autonomous solid-state electronics?
- lainga 7y ago
  You could make an argument about drone jamming and autonomous behaviour not being quite there yet... I think that's what the "wingmen" are for. The paradigm we're moving out of was one where you'd get high-quality sensor data from a specialized patrol or AWACS plane like an E-3, which would send information to ground, which would relay it to the fighters. Now, platforms like the F-35 often have better sensors than patrol planes do; and despite still having a person inside, are better at evading missiles than big patrol planes are. So it's more like the fighters take on the role of the patrol planes; the human inside decides what to do, probably assimilating information from other fighters; and sends the drones out to do acrobatics. And there's no need to run that information through a ground station first.
  - angry_octet 7y ago
    Still a place for AWACS, bigger RADAR allows different frequencies, much wider field of view, lots of power. Usually they would communicate with fighters directly to update their picture (voice & link). Ground controllers usually take a back seat to what AWACS says. The difference with the drone wingman (wingbot?) is that the controller is in the air and close by, and she can point a powerful X-band radar at the drones to use as an un-jammable comms link (high power, better geometry). If the manned aircraft were also to merge then they could be jammed because the geometry would be wrong, but for short periods the wingbot tactics are mainly dominated by physics (energy, shot flyout and engagement envelopes).