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I imagine it's not a novel idea, but taking something along the lines of an airliner/AWACS platform and stuffing it full of drone pilots in cubicles and using l
by shabble 13y ago
I imagine it's not a novel idea, but taking something along the lines of an airliner/AWACS platform and stuffing it full of drone pilots in cubicles and using line-of-sight optical or tightbeam microwave comms direct to your drone herd[1] a few hundred km away would be pretty hard to block. Tightbeam comms also make it a lot harder to find than a radar emitting AWACS, and you can have multiple redundant controllers for your drones to avoid a SPoF if it does get found. Being closer to the action and avoiding satellite uplink means you don't have nearly the same latency issues as current drone controls do.
The increased performance of unmanned vehicles, as well as the cost savings of the whole life-support system (and perhaps, reduced pilot risk = lower training/HR embodied costs as well) seem like they might make such a system practical.
[1] Taking it a step further, you have a central control platform surrounded by defensive drone cloud responsible for point defence, active sensors (which you don't want to do personally since it tells enemies exactly where you are), and mesh/onion routed control links to your offensive drone swarm (so enemies can't infer the controller location from lines of sight intersections to the stuff they can see).
Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting.
- jacques_chester 13y ago> Even even further down the line, distribute the human controllers into the defensive swarm, so they're hard/impossible to distinguish from the "dumb" drones, and less of a Single Big Target worth hitting. You'd look for the larger drones that never pull turns over 8.5g.
- greedo 13y agoJamming doesn't need to always block the source transmitter, you can also block the receivers on the drones by flooding the frequencies, or spoofing GPS, etc etc. At this level though, it's just easier to send up a fighter to shoot the drone down, since most drones are on par with a Cessna 172 in terms of performance.
- shabble 13y ago> Jamming doesn't need to always block the source transmitter, you can also block the receivers on the drones by flooding the frequencies, or spoofing GPS, etc etc. AFAIK it works by lowering the signal/noise ratio to the point the channel is useless for it's intended purpose. Something with extremely tight focus via aimable directional antenna or phased array, along with spread spectrum hopping would be extremely hard to jam, because you need to get enough energy into the channel to mess with it. GPS jamming can be countered by a better inertial nav system, and even the tightbeam comms themselves can be used to locate approx positions with enough links. Regarding combat capabilities, is there any fundamental reason for their relative lack of performance beyond it being unnecessary/risky with high-latency comms? From a quick scan of current costs, you could get >10 Avenger/Predator C drones (~15M ea) for a single F-35 (~200M) or F-22 (~150M). I suspect (but am utterly unqualified to say) that such an encounter would go badly for the (human) fighter, especially if everyone has modern AMRAAM or similar BVR weapons ("... we only need to be lucky once").
- greedo 13y agoWell, the Avenger/Predator drones can't engage in A2A combat; they lack radar for tracking and targeting another aircraft. They could use an infrared missile like the AIM9, but that is often cued via radar as well. Plus, the Predators maneuver like crap. I don't have the specs at hand, but I think they're g limited to under 3g. A single F-35 would have no trouble defeating 10 Predators.