| Tango01 | 12 Aug 2014 10:53 p.m. PST |
… the sky. "Here's an idea for an awesome dogfighting aircraft. Make it small, light, and fast. Build it out of materials that are hard to detect on radar. Even give it a laser cannon. Oh, and don't put a human in the cockpit. In fact, don't even closely tie the drone to human ground control. Because in an aerial knife fight, a computer-controlled machine will beat a human pilot. That's the idea behind a controversial proposal by U.S. Air Force captain Michael Byrnes, an experienced Predator and Reaper drone pilot. Byrnes is calling for the development of a robotic dogfighter, which he calls the FQ-X, that could blow manned fighters out of the sky…" link Full article here
link Amicalement
Armand |
| Sajiro | 13 Aug 2014 6:02 a.m. PST |
Interesting concept. I wonder how the fighter mafia will respond to this 'Cylon' fighter. My real complaint here is that this is on open source. That means next week the Iranians will announce that they have domestically produced the first Anti-Air drone and to prove it they will have clips lifted from the movie Stealth. |
| kallman | 13 Aug 2014 7:49 a.m. PST |
Military secrets are the most fleeting. |
| Lion in the Stars | 13 Aug 2014 8:59 a.m. PST |
You need a bigass laser to damage a plane. A *really* bigass laser. The 5 megawatt MIRACL (Mid Infra-Red Advanced Chemical Laser) that the US has at White Sands takes 5 seconds on target to blow up anything from a TOW missile to a Titan rocket under boost-phase stresses. That means that catastrophic damage to a flying target takes ~25 megajoules. You'd need a 25MW laser to cause that much damage in 1 second, and a 100MW laser to cause that much damage in 0.25 seconds. You might be able to get away with a lower-powered laser if you up the frequency into visible light. |
| Only Warlock | 13 Aug 2014 10:03 a.m. PST |
With a 1MW Laser (like the Israeli MTHEL) you can kill a Rocket in flight. For a thin skinned aircraft it is certainly a similar value. They are not armored after all. Now, that is admittedly only a 5 mile range on the Laser. We are not, after all, talking about hitting a Ballistic Missile in orbit. A Laser Armed drone that could use lasers to not only engage aircraft but engage air-to-air missiles could be used to screen your strike birds and suppress SAMs. |
| Dynaman8789 | 13 Aug 2014 10:30 a.m. PST |
Currently the highest end laser that could shoot down a fighter takes a 747 to power it – for 5 shots. Granted that was a few years ago but power source design is not progressing all that quickly… |
| Only Warlock | 13 Aug 2014 12:03 p.m. PST |
That was 20 years ago. Things have changed very radically since then. |
| Lion in the Stars | 13 Aug 2014 1:48 p.m. PST |
With a 1MW Laser (like the Israeli MTHEL) you can kill a Rocket in flight. For a thin skinned aircraft it is certainly a similar value. They are not armored after all. How long do you need to keep the laser on the target? reducing the amount of time your laser needs to stay on target to do any damage means increasing the beam power. |
| Only Warlock | 13 Aug 2014 2:51 p.m. PST |
A few seconds. I've seen the video. It can actually engage 5 simultaneous Arty rounds in flight or Rockets. |
| Only Warlock | 13 Aug 2014 2:56 p.m. PST |
Lasers have undergone a Dramatic increase in efficiency even in the last decade, particularly with Solid State lasers. Efficiency is through the roof. Orders of magnitude over the old days. |
 Legion 4   | 14 Aug 2014 7:25 a.m. PST |
Whether some like it or not … in the not so distant future, military forces will have a number of "Robotic/drone" type systems introduced into their inventories … Frankly … I would have liked to have one or two T2s in each of my Fire Tms/Squads …  |
struggles to complete his SISI truck force.