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How big of a drone are we talking here? I'd imagine that anything worth comparing against the F35 would be a rather large airplane. Furthermore, I can't imagin

How big of a drone are we talking here? I'd imagine that anything worth comparing against the F35 would be a rather large airplane. Furthermore, I can't imagine that a carrier-based drone/airplane would fly anything close to the limits of a land airbase drone/airplane. Indeed, that's why we have F35A vs F35B vs F35C. We wanted all three airplanes to be the same, but in practice it wasn't feasible. So we just shared all the parts as much as possible (and even then, that still caused a lot of problems between US Navy vs US Air Force differences). I just can't imagine the same aircraft working for both Air Force and Navy. And if its not the same aircraft, then you need different pilots, and if you have different pilots, you might as well assign the pilot who knows how to pilot the Carrier-drone onto the Aircraft Carrier.

aerostable_slug 4y ago
You don't need separate pilots when the "pilot" does their job by clicking waypoints on a map, like they do today with Global Hawk. Carrier landings will be autonomously handled by the airplane as was demonstrated just shy of ten years ago. Think "give the thing orders" rather than stick and rudder flying, especially when unmanned aircraft are handed off when they are already in-flight. We will get to the point when we give drones mission-based orders ("go do $TASK"), where $TASK is decomposed into many, many decision points that the drone or drones decide (and re-decide as the situation evolves) for themselves. Eventually we will be able to voluntarily take the human out of the loop in certain scenarios (to reduce reaction time and human error). Note that this has been the case with the Navy's Aegis Combat System for decades, with Auto-Special Doctrine. When in this mode, automated systems "consummate the engagement" in the Navy's terms, with zero human involvement. Note that this mode has never been used IRL.

aerostable_slug 4y ago

You don't need separate pilots when the "pilot" does their job by clicking waypoints on a map, like they do today with Global Hawk. Carrier landings will be autonomously handled by the airplane as was demonstrated just shy of ten years ago. Think "give the thing orders" rather than stick and rudder flying, especially when unmanned aircraft are handed off when they are already in-flight. We will get to the point when we give drones mission-based orders ("go do $TASK"), where $TASK is decomposed into many, many decision points that the drone or drones decide (and re-decide as the situation evolves) for themselves. Eventually we will be able to voluntarily take the human out of the loop in certain scenarios (to reduce reaction time and human error). Note that this has been the case with the Navy's Aegis Combat System for decades, with Auto-Special Doctrine. When in this mode, automated systems "consummate the engagement" in the Navy's terms, with zero human involvement. Note that this mode has never been used IRL.