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Robotic Aircraft To Supply Troops
Posted by
samzenpus
on Thu Jun 19, 2008 01:46 AM
from the battle-platform-soon-to-come dept.
from the battle-platform-soon-to-come dept.
Cowards Anonymous writes "PC World reports on a prototype driverless aircraft designed to shuttle hundreds of pounds of supplies to soldiers in war zones. Dubbed a flying Humvee by Frontline Aerospace's CEO, the robotic vehicle can fly 600 to 1,000 miles carrying a full cargo of 400 pounds. It's about the size of a large SUV, weighing in at 2,400 pounds and measuring 21 feet long and up to 26 feet wide."
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Submission: 'Flying Humvee' robot ships supplies to troops by Anonymous Coward
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My eyebrows are raised... (Score:5, Interesting)
Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.
I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.
Re:My eyebrows are raised... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
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Exactly - it's the ONLY way to ensure that the whole 12-pack makes it all the way back from the beer run.
On the other hand... (Score:5, Insightful)
1. from the same Wired page:
Seems to me to be:
A) saying that it's reasonable possible to make it, since there are no big surprises to be expected from anything in it, and
B) kind of a lame complaint. Innovation by combining existing elements is really the norm. The train was equally just an exercise in packaging a steam engine (which technically wasn't new, since it had been done before to pump water out of mine shafts) and a cart. Guns appeared as a packaging exercise between a bell and some funny powder used in fireworks. Nobel's dynamite was an exercise in literally packaging nitroglycerin and diatomaceous earth. Etc.
Basically, I'm sorry, but the age of discovering something completely new and based on nothing that came before it ended, I dunno, in stone age or so. Ever since, all we make is built on stuff that came before it.
2. Picking on the guy's credentials, again, I have some problems with it:
A) I see no incredible claim in there. It just says that he was trained as an engineer and worked as a manager. Hardly "all over the place" or incredible. I see a dozen people every day when I go to work, which fit the exact same bill.
B) they don't say that any of his claims are false. Did he lie about it? Did he get fired for incompetence from any of those companies? Does he have some history of not achieving what he promises? Or WTF is the problem? It should be easy to prove whether he actually was a manager at Intel or Toshiba, no? So tell me if he lied, not some lame attempt at making it sound ridiculous by itself.
C) seems to me to be exactly what they need for the job, especially once they said that there are no obvious flaws with the idea. You need someone who can organize research, development and production, hence, a manager.
D) it's, at best, an ad-hominem and as per points 2.A to 2.C a pretty lame one.
Now I'm not saying they should necessarily give him money, but the Wired article is an exercise in journalistic stupidity at best.
Parent
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Re:My eyebrows are raised... (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, 400 pounds is a nice package size for one clandestine operative and all his gear. Hmm...
Parent
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Obviously, my knowledge of such stuff is less than yours, since I've never been in the military or done air drops ...
:-P
One guy with 400lbs of crap? How clandestine can you be? Give me 400 lbs of crap in the middle of nowhere, and the enemy is going to hear me grunting and cursing for miles.
I guess it's enough that you could break it into smaller loads and move it. It just seems a lot of weight for one guy. Th
It's harder than it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
Throwing some satchel by hand, on the top of something that moves at 288 miles per hour... well, if you can do that, you're Superman.
Parent
I'm tired of this shit (Score:2, Insightful)
I really am tired of hearing about all these new "safer" ways of killing people. Your still fucking killing people. Stop it you sick fucks.
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Re:I'm tired of this shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:I'm tired of this shit (Score:5, Interesting)
If you guys got a surplus of these things in the future, I'm sure someone would think of some non-military use of it...
Parent
Not much choice, I'm afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
Or to put it otherwise, ask the USSR how they felt in 1941 about still having mostly old BT tanks and outdated aircraft. What saved them were the new and vastly superior T-34. Or ask Poland about how well their cavalry divisions did when attacked by tanks.
Seriously, it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma. Being a pacifist with no (modern) weapons only works if everyone else around is. Otherwise, well, you have to have the deterrent of being the guy with the biggest stick.
And we all tried forcing everyone to be peaceful and put a limit to their military. Like, you know, between the two world wars. Turns out that, as the only result, a bunch of people just lied about how big their ship were, or about what they're researching. Germany for example called their tank research and prototypes agricultural tractors for a while. (I guess you can't blame a guy for having guns in his tractor too. Just ask any mid-west farmer.;)
Parent
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What saved them were the new and vastly superior T-34
Nope. What saved them was their ability to relocate the whole factories from behind enemy lines.
Its true that Germans did not have T-34/76 equivalent during 1941. But there were not enough T-34 for the Germans to kill either.
By 1943, The german Tiger and Panther were more than a match for T-34/76. And as the Battle of Kursk proved, the T-34 was inadequate to save the soviet butts.
The Tiger's 88mm gun coupled with 88mm Flak battery was more than a match for the T-34.
By 1944 the battle had swung in Soviet fa
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And even that ends up pointing at weapons largely.
E.g., yes, they relocated the industry. What did they end up producing with it? Thousands of T-34's, millions of SMGs, increasingly competitive aircraft which (combined with the Luftwaffe losses in the west and having half of it tied to defend against stragegic bombing) helped turn air superiority th
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Well the Soviets actually won the Battle of Kursk. That was firstly because they had large numbers of Ilyushin Il-2 ground attack aircraft, which did save the Soviet butts to use your vocabulary, secondly because they deployed far larger numbers of tanks that made their individual inferiority negligible, and thirdly because the newly-introduced Panth
Re:Not much choice, I'm afraid (Score:5, Insightful)
Put two and two together and you get robts ferrying supplies and real live humans doing the shooting and dealing with people. That IS common sense. I'd rather see that than people ferrying supplies and robots doing the shooting.
Parent
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I'm not saying be a pacifist, just don't kill everyone and everything that moves. I'm saying use a little common sense.
You are correct. With all the world wide WWII era carpet bombing that is happening around the world, common sense is needed.
What we need is a bomb so accurate that it can take out a target without damaging the buildings around it. The bomb would need some kind of self guidance that would allow it maneuver itself. You could even say that such a bomb would be "smart".
Back in real life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Its almost like they were TRYING to not hit any of the civilians this time...
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All that aside, however, I don't blame them one bit. This economy is about to fail. Everyone can see the writing on the wall. When it does, there is a strong possibility of the US using another 'war' as a stimulus. If I were China, I would want to make sure those hairy barbarians pick someone else to bully...
Usual high flying business cruft (Score:5, Funny)
I see quite a lot of these sorts of getups happening, someone gets some specs, waves their hands about, generates some crappy CG and utters a price of a few million. Couple of years later there's nothing really to show for it except some rudimentary framework and an empty office.
Only wish I had gotten in there first
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As epic as that image is, I'm guessing one of the C*O's kids found an old copy of, say, Specular Infini-D in a bargain bin somewhere. "Yeah, my kid can do CG!"
Not to rag on Infini-D, of course. I used to enjoy it quite a bit. In 8th grad
Re:Usual high flying business cruft (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.frontlineaerospace.com/images/stories/press_images/VSTAR_Resupply_1.jpg [frontlineaerospace.com]
I can't even tell if it's supposed to be in the air or not. If it is, those two dudes are about to get crushed/pixelated to death.
This is my new desktop background.
Parent
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So just how impractical and silly does it look?
Carryall (Score:2, Insightful)
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Hence why Iraq was important.. or something, where am I?
The Governator (Score:2, Insightful)
Poor Design (Score:5, Interesting)
The entire design of this craft baffles me.
First, ducted fans are inefficient compared to rotors. You get a lot more force out of a large diameter and small exit velocity. Its why props are more efficient than turbofans, which are in turn more efficient than turbojets. The ONLY advantage is that the fan is out of the airstream, so high velocities are achievable.
Second, it has very low wing area, meaning you have very high wing loading (bad for fuel economy). Alternatively, they could be using a lifting body (also bad for fuel economy). Considering they have the big fan duct running through the center of the body, the body cannot provide much lift anyway, leaving the fan (even worse fuel economy).
Third, they chose a joined box wing. Box wings can considerably reduce losses from the tip vorticity, but there is so little lift coming off those wings, there's no purpose. The only purpose to joined wings is that they provide structural rigidity to large, light, high aspect ratio wings for high altitude, long endurance craft. This is obviously not the case here.
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If it scores DARPA funding, it will have served its purpose
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The ducted fan might be safe to operate from a dirt road because it is mounted high and somewhat unable to suck stones into the works.
The idea seems to be to set up camp along a country road or remote strip. Call in the UAV, load/unload and relaunch it for a fast low altitude sprint to the next camp.
Landing and takeoff would happen stalled at low spe
Re:Poor Design (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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It seems to me like a GPS steerable parachute drop from a C-130 would be a better use of resources. The C-130 can carry a lo
Re:Poor Design **for cargo hauling** (Score:2, Interesting)
A humvee hauling military cargo wouldn't put 400 lbs in the trunk per trip, it'd put 1500 lbs on a trailer.
These are the beginnings toward a good concept since cargo hauling is dull, dirty & dangerous. But VSTAR needs to scale up considerably instead of racking up expensive flight hours with 4 round trips when comparing to a Humvee's operating cost. The key is not the round trip speed but its servicing to keep it flying.
"Sc
Re:Poor Design (Score:5, Informative)
The wings on this aircraft don't seem designed for the mission profile described. Supporting forward infantry is a short-range low-speed mission profile. I expect the wings to have a low rake angle, and to be fairly chunky across the airfoil section. Low-speed wings are blunt and fat; high-speed wings are angled and skinny.
At best, this is an "artist's misconception" drawing. Avionics, engine and fuel are going in the fuselage, as there's no room internal to those wings for anything but structure. Where did the payload go? Oh, "inside"
Parent
Sounds familiar (Score:4, Funny)
I seem to recall that they had something like this before. Quite a bit faster. Very good at getting its cargo to the waiting soldiers. A bit rougher on the payload, perhaps (and the soldiers).
I believe it was called a Cruise Something-or-other.
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A Tom Cruise Something-or-other? Uh oh, there's a group of religious whackjobs at my door...
Woefully inefficient... (Score:2)
So it can carry 1/6th of its weight in cargo? Damn that's lousy...
With aircraft, weight is huge. Every pound of weight you have to lift dramatically increases the amount of fuel you're going to burn. And when you're starting off with a heavier than hell plane, which can only haul a tiny amount, you're just throwing away fuel. And guess what? Bringing in fuel for equipment is just as much a logistical problem as getting supplies to troops in the field
Re:Woefully inefficient... (Score:4, Informative)
Well, actually, that's a fairly conservative estimate...
"a person performing hard work in the sun at 43 degrees C requires 19 liters of water daily." http://www.aircav.com/survival/asch13/asch13p02.html [aircav.com]
"A general guide for planning to meet the water requirements in an arid zone is 3-6 gallons per individual per day" http://www.cs.amedd.army.mil/dphs/EQB/doc/Instructor%20Manual/L004LP%20Water%20Supply%20LP.doc [army.mil]
Interesting... Because most of them appear to be quite alive...
Parent
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Laugh all you want at 400 lbs of cargo space, but if that can deliver even 30+ lbs of critical equipment to 12 soldiers who wou
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This is an order of magnitude more capability. I can see why they'd want this.
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The point isn't that 400 lbs is that much per se, the point is that 400 lbs of ADDITIONAL cargo could be a big deal if it requires zero man power to get it there and arrives quickly.
Your zero manpower is like the zero pollution vehicle. It's not counting the pilot (this is a remotely controlled vehicle, not an autonomous robot), the maintenance guy, the fuel handler, the cargo loaders, the guards at the air field that's set up for it etc. I'd be surprised if a unit handling these would have less than 10 man per flying vehicle.
Well, I for one... (Score:3, Funny)
Finally ... (Score:2)
seen it before (Score:2)
Large SUV ? (Score:2, Funny)
Yes, that's exactly the size of my Jeep.
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For comparison, a Cessna 152 [wikipedia.org] is generally the same size, and has a 500+ lb payload capacity. I'd rather see a fleet of autopilot 152s doing forward support.
Progress. (Score:2)
This is stupid crap (Score:2)
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