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U.S. Army Vintage Racer Concept Suggests Hypersonic Entry For Loitering UAS
- noncoml 6y agoSuicide drone? So... a missile?
- blackflame7000 6y agoNo, because it can loiter in the air for up to 2 hours in the target area before destroying its target.
- bootlooped 6y agoA Tomahawk cruise missile can also loiter over the target area. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile)
- whycombagator 6y agoPresumably you can abort mission with a drone and have it return home. Not sure you can do that with a cruise missile.
- serf 6y agothe IAI Harop is a missile that can loiter, and if no target is found can Return to Base.[0] Although, admittedly, the lines between 'drone' and 'missile' have begun to blur. [0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAI_Harop
- bostonsre 6y agoHaving your missile return home seems suboptimal.
- sibartlett 6y agoThat Wikipedia article repeatedly referred to it as a stone.
- amiller2571 6y agoSo the difference between a missile and a drone is that one can fly in circles a little long than the other?
- NovemberWhiskey 6y agoBritish Aerospace delivered an anti-radiation / air-defense suppression missile called ALARM in 1990: it is capable of flying up to 40,000 feet, deploying a parachute and then waiting for the target radar to come online as it floats down. At that time, it initiates a secondary boost motor and attacks. We didn’t used to call this a suicide drone; we called it a loitering munition.
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- nirav72 6y agoso it's a next gen Tacit Rainbow? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-136_Tacit_Rainbow https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-136_Tacit_Rainbow
- BurningFrog 6y agoSo a drone delivered bomb?
- dilyevsky 6y agoSupposedly nuclear powered missiles (if they really exist) can cruise for days
- viraptor 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto looks both like an amazing idea and something super over-engineered. It looks like it would be relatively easy to spot too... and possibly shot down?
- blackflame7000 6y agoIt would be capable of ICBM speeds but maneuverable instead of traveling in a predictable arc
- sidewndr46 6y agoI agree, the title seems very clickbaity. The "Snark" had essentially the same capabilities at the start of the cold war. It was "pilotless bomber" that promised to be cheaper than bomber crews. Basically, it was a giant cruise missile that could return home if the mission was aborted. The big runway at Cape Canaveral was built specifically for it, because it landed with skids rather than wheels. It did actually reach operational status but was quickly withdrawn.
- pugworthy 6y agoIf you know your Guardians of The Galaxy lore, think Yondu's Yaka arrows, which are literally called "drone-arrows"
- xwdv 6y agoNo, because it could cancel and go back home.
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- stubish 6y agoReally strange the 'suicide drone' branding, given this War of Terror and Suicide Bombing, or WWII and Kamikaze attacks. I wouldn't have thought the US military would want to be associated with the word. Maybe they don't, but the media isn't happy with 'loitering'. I guess 'loitering' isn't much better now I think of it, with the term mostly used regarding prostitution.
- ggmartins 6y agosuicide for my pocket (tax payer's pocket).
- colechristensen 6y agoA missile than can fly from a home far away, hover (or really probably loiter, flying in circles) not too far away from a target area, then accelerate to 5000 mph after receiving a specific target. The benefit being the lag between targeting to delivery being much shorter meaning higher mission success rates, lower collateral damage, and just more flexibility.
- sliken 6y agoDrones are presumably practical to launch, loiter, and recover. Not so much with missiles. Only in the case of ordering an attack are they similar.
- alexbanks 6y agoI thought this was some kind of suicide prevention mechanism and thought "Damn, that's so nice of the pentagon." Alas. Better days ahead.
- jcims 6y agoThe materials science development going into hypersonic vehicles is going to pay dividend in future space travel. Seems like that’s still the most dicey part of building five digit cycle reusable spacecraft.
- benaiah 6y agoThe message of "Slaughterbots" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA) seems both more prescient and more urgent than ever given this news. Our continued reckless development and deployment of autonomous weaponry without thought to the consequences is deplorable, and its consequences could be staggering.
- mc32 6y agoNo one is going to stop development for fear the other will have the advantage. For controls on this to work, there would have to be a treaty governing development among the big nuclear powers —then they with their big sticks dictate the rules to the rest. In the vacuum of that everyone will feel they have to develop or get left behind. Additionally something like this (the enabling of political “decapitations”) is only seriously countered by MAD. So nothing would keep Colombia from developing their own and taking out Maduro for example if they were reasonably sure a better alternative would rise in VZ.
- kragen 6y agoNot the big nuclear powers — they should be relatively easy to get onboard, because preventing proliferation of nuclear weapons is comparatively easy compared to preventing proliferation of drones. The ones to watch are the smaller countries who have in effect lost their sovereignty to the nuclear powers: maybe Colombia, but also Taiwan, Canada, Ukraine, Spain, Brazil, Iran, the UAE, Egypt, Bangladesh. More worryingly: Daesh, Baruch Goldstein's fan club, the next Anders Breivik, the janjaweed, Boko Haram, Voluntad Popular, antifa groups, the collectively fired Minneapolis Police Department, the Hells Angels, MS-13, etc.
- mc32 6y agoI agree there, except for the domestic organizations. They could develop crude drones but not the hypersonic loitering kind —I’m not even sure they’d need that. Hypersonics only make sense when you need to penetrate stiff air defenses and get to destination to neutralize the big armament from reaching altitude. They could be used by the US, Russia, China, India, Pak, Israel to “decapitate” “rouge” regimes incapable of retribution. Mexican and ukranian drug orgs? maybe crude non hypersonic for whatever political purpose. Or imagine the ndraghetta having the crude variety during the time they tried offing magistrates quicker than the state was able to convict the perps... or the Italian red brigades... !!
- kragen 6y agoAs I understand it, my grandfather helped to develop a suicide drone that got to its target area at hypersonic speed in the late 1950s. For the Pentagon. It was called the Minuteman ICBM, and it entered service in 1962. Is it possible to get a less misleading title on this article than "Pentagon Has Tested A Suicide Drone That Gets To Its Target Area At Hypersonic Speed"?
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- garmaine 6y agoIt would be misleading to call an ICBM a drone.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kragen 6y agoIt would be even more misleading to say an ICBM wasn't a drone, but that the "Vintage Racer" munition was a drone. As the article points out, some "drones" have better survivability than ICBMs do, but those aren't the ones the article is about.
- johnghanks 6y agoYou are being so pedantic it's not even funny. An ICBM isn't a drone in _any_ sense of the word.
- kragen 6y agoI'm not being pedantic. You're talking nonsense.
- AlanSE 6y agoThe word "loitering" distinguishes it pretty far from that. It's also important that, unlike ICBMs, this is positioned to be something which would be used in more than theory.
- praveen9920 6y agoCurrent cruise missiles are optimised for long range but not for final target accuracy, they actually use onboard offline terrain data to cruise to their target. Accuracy of 99% is considered bad as it might mean collateral damage. Also final target is predefined and aborting or changing target is non-trivial. With these so called "suicide drones", human operators can actions based on current situation, like, pinpoint the target based on realtime images, that actually means limiting collateral damage because of machine errors. which also gives them ability to abort if situations have changed substantially.
- kragen 6y ago> It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine – a gun – which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished. — Dr. Richard Jordan Gatling
- mc32 6y agoYou have a point, but he wasn’t completely wrong. Though it contains the assumption your advantage is indefinite. In reality the foe catches up. So he was right but it only holds true while you maintain the advantage.
- _jal 6y agoWhich in turn leads to "all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
- kragen 6y agoTell it to the Zulus who got massacred by early machine-guns or the Congolese who couldn't successfully rebel against the atrocities of King Leopold's machine-gun-armed forces, the atrocities that inspired Heart of Darkness. Even before the opposing side caught up (around 1965, by my reckoning) the effect of the machine-gun was precisely the opposite of "exposure to battle and disease [being] greatly diminished". Some would argue especially before that time. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473201 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23473201
- dwighttk 6y agoThat sounds like a fast missile
- foxyv 6y agoSo it's essentially a cruise missile with a long active time and datalink based terminal guidance?