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The concept of "carriers" might change as they start to carry smaller unmanned planes - quadcopters tend to be at a disadvantage to fixed wing drones when longe
by PeterisP 5y ago
The concept of "carriers" might change as they start to carry smaller unmanned planes - quadcopters tend to be at a disadvantage to fixed wing drones when longer ranges and longer loiter times are required.
The solution to ship-killer weapons is decentralization, replacing a single juicy target with many dispersed targets. A Predator or Bayraktar sized drone designed for naval operations could be launched from a "dronecarrier" much, much smaller and cheaper than the current carriers.
- zeusk 5y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjUdVxJH6yI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjUdVxJH6yI
- littlestymaar 5y agoYou don't necessarily need a light UCAV to make this work, for the record the variant B of the F35 is easier to deploy from smaller boats than a TB2 or a predator while also being orders of magnitude more capable.
- nradov 5y agoThe size of carriers is driven not so much by the size of strike aircraft (regardless of whether they're manned or unmanned), but rather by the need to launch larger AWACS aircraft, conduct flight operations in heavy sea states, provide enough hangar space for maintenance work, and carry enough aviation fuel and munitions for several days of high intensity operations. Even a slight decrease in size severely impacts those areas. In other words, carrier effectiveness doesn't scale linearly with size; a 20% reduction in size might result in a 40% loss of effectiveness. And a hypothetical drone carrier probably wouldn't even be much cheaper.