Air Force Converts F-16 Jets Into Wingman Drones (businessinsider.com) 152
New submitter Zmobie writes: In a new program, the U.S. Air Force has converted and tested F-16 planes as drones that are able to fly with complex mission parameters. The program is designed to use retiring F-16 jets to act as autonomous "loyal wingman" for manned F-35 jets and fly their own strike missions. Business Insider reports: "The U.S. has used F-16 drones before as realistic targets for the F-35 to blow up in training, but on Monday it announced fully autonomous air-to-air and ground strike capabilities as a new capability thanks to joint research between the service and Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunkworks. [...] But having F-16 drones plan and fly their own missions is only part of a much larger picture. The future of the U.S. Air Force may well depend on advanced platforms like F-35s commanding fleets of unmanned drones which can act as additional ears, eyes, and shooters in the sky during battles." Further reading: TechCrunch, Popular Mechanics, Engadget
AF pilots are not re-enlisting (Score:2)
Re:AF pilots are not re-enlisting (Score:4, Informative)
Flying in the Air Force has been seen as a stepping stone to flying airlines as long as I remember.
Being a military pilot has always been seen by many pilots as a way to accumulate a lot of flight time, which is the #1 requirement to be an airline pilot.
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Flying in the Air Force has been seen as a stepping stone to flying airlines as long as I remember.
Being a military pilot has always been seen by many pilots as a way to accumulate a lot of flight time, which is the #1 requirement to be an airline pilot.
My father was in the Air Force in the 70's, and even when I kid back then I remember thinking I'd grow up to be a fighter pilot then move on to commercial airlines. Alas I was too lazy and got into IT instead. Much better pay and conditions, just not the glamorous title. But I can live with that.
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Don't forget the unspoken occupational hazard of all flight crews: they get a lot more radiation exposure than any other occupation — far more than workers in nuclear energy. The levels for flight crews are well above the levels allowed for nuclear work — and its unregulated because it's not something anybody can mitigate without banning flying altogether.
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The U.S. has used F-16 drones before as realistic targets for the F-35 to blow up in training
Sorta like MS discontinuing support for new processors/chipsets in order to force people onto Win10, the Air Farce has finally figured out how to get the F-35 adopted: Destroy anything else that might compete with it so you don't have any choice.
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General Claire Chennault, the commander of the American Volunteer Group - the 'Flying Tigers" - in China before WWII, said that aviation is long hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by short moments of stark terror. Or perhaps he was only talking about flying fighters.
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General Claire Chennault, the commander of the American Volunteer Group - the 'Flying Tigers" - in China before WWII, said that aviation is long hours of sheer boredom, punctuated by short moments of stark terror. Or perhaps he was only talking about flying fighters.
My father was in the Air Force for 20 years. Him and every one I knew that he worked with were raging alcoholics (not officially, but it seems like that's all they did), so I reckon it's not just the fighter pilots.
F-35 Control and Command (Score:1, Insightful)
You assume the F-35's can even get airborne.
Not a good assumption.
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Oh they fly, sometimes.... But as it stands they cannot even fire the gun with the current software..
Re:F-35 Control and Command (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh they fly, sometimes....
...in whole or in part, certain restrictions apply, warranty void if exposed to oxygen...
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If O2 voids the warranty, O3 must make them explode..
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Read the fine print, it said Oxygen. Not what configuration thereof. That qualifies for O2, O3, H2O, H2SO4...
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So long as it's not a hot day or not raining they seem to be getting into the air at times :)
I wonder if the story about one of them inverting when it few over the date line is true or was a joke.
Re:F-35 Control and Command (Score:4, Informative)
You assume the F-35's can even get airborne.
Not a good assumption.
You do realize there are already over 200 F-35s built, flying normal training missions on a daily basis, don't you?
Re:F-35 Control and Command (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot, the eternal home of F-35 trolling.
Concerning this particular story, I actually called it a while back. It's a logical extension. The F-35 is focused about bringing a revolution not so much due to its physical design, but the level of fault-tolerant integrated information awareness that it brings to the battlefield. Having drone "wingmen" which are cheaper and not as stealthy but carry more sensors and payload to the battlefield is a natural way to augment the F-35's capabilities. At the same time it helps overcome one of the main weaknesses of drones - the ability to jam them (the main reason that humans are still considered important). When EW isn't in play, the "wingmen" can be kept at significant distance from lead craft, reducing the risk of exposing them; on the other hand, in the case of loss of signal, they can close ranks and improve the gain (since each craft, before loss of signal, knew the locations and flight plan / mission at the time of loss of signal).
It's really a natural synergy.
These days, there's nothing about stealth that makes a craft "invulnerable"; stealth craft can be targeted and hit, and the ability to do so keeps improving. But it comes at costs. Radar systems have to be shorter range and/or larger and more powerful (harder to move/conceal and easier to target), and are more sensitive to weather. The locks you get are poor, making it not just harder to get a usable lock, but increasing the effectiveness of countermeasures. Conversely, IRST and LIDAR can offer detection of stealth aircraft at good distance if you know right where to look, or short distances if you don't, but not both at the same time. And there are physical limits (aperture) in this regard, not just sensor / processing limits. And sensors are already highly chilled, so it's not like you can mimic an improved aperture by improving the signal to noise ratio with better cooling. It all comes down to how many photons you're receiving.
Countermeasures will continue to advance, and the vulnerability level will slowly tick up - but a stealth aircraft always starts out with an advantage in that measure. To top it off, F-35, by virtue of its relatively small size, is more innately resistant to advances in anti-stealth technologies than larger systems that have to rely more heavily on shape and materials technology to gain an equivalent level of stealth.
There's a long laundry list of things people are going to want to add to F-35 with time, and I know varying people will always complain about random things from the list that it doesn't have at present. And one by one, they'll trickle in. F-35 is not meant to be an endpoint, but a starting point.
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That explains why in a galaxy far, far away with much more advanced technology than we have, no-one can hit shit with a weapon.
To be fair that was along time ago. In that same galaxy today, all the humans are all already dead, as the AI was far, far superior in battle.
Oh hell yeah! (Score:3)
F-16s aren't so obsolete because of the airframe or performance so much as avionics and weapons systems.
So 'upgrade' them to drone management, free them from the G-force limits of human pilots in the cockpit, and boom!
If they become part of a hive mind, so much the better!
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I wonder how much you could realistically lighten a F-16 with a drone conversion.
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I wonder how much you could realistically lighten a F-16 with a drone conversion.
Surely the Rebels should do this! Have you seen how fat some of their fighter pilots are?
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Who cares how fat a rebel pilot is? They ony have to sit in a chair anyway, they don't have to be athletes.
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Who cares how fat a rebel pilot is? They ony have to sit in a chair anyway, they don't have to be athletes.
When pulling high G's, yes you really do need to be an athlete and not a blob.
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And, the aircraft is capable of higher G-forces than the pilot can withstand.
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> If they become part of a hive mind, so much the better!
Macross Plus was supposed to be a warning, not a howto.
No (Score:4, Insightful)
The future of the U.S. Air Force may well depend on advanced platforms like F-35s commanding fleets of unmanned drones which can act as additional ears, eyes, and shooters in the sky during battles."
That works great until there is a jammer. In other words, it works fine against small, overpowered nations against whom there are already a myriad of options.
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Yes indeed, Mr. Harry Potter, I'm sure they never imagined you would have a jammer spell. Those defense engineers are so dreamy!
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Obviously we just need autonomous kill bots that can operate in aggressive electronic warfare environments. Can't jam standing order stored locally. And with shielding they can even survive these little guys [wikipedia.org].
What could possibly go wrong?
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Come on... anyone who's watched Futurama knows that you send waves of waves of your own men against the kill bots until they reach their programmed maximum kill count and shut down!
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It wasn't a programmed maximum kill count, it was a kill count buffer overflow.
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That works great until there is a jammer.
When jammed, a drone will compete its last mission.
In other words, it works fine against small, overpowered nations against whom there are already a myriad of options.
Nearly any plausible scenario has the US going up against small, overpowered nations.
The only non-allies with sophisticated capabilities are Russia and China, which both have nukes. Conflict with either of them will mean exchanging ICBMs, not fiddling around with drones.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
You might remember that there already have been a few wars since 1945. You can quite quickly face an equal or near-equal enemy in a proxy war.
Or even face an actual enemy with modern gear if the US (or this time someone else, it's not like other nations can't be dumb) is stupid enough to sell them, like 1979 to Iran.
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Or maybe when the Russians get pissed off enough by the US they will sell sophisticated air defense systems to all enemies of the US that face invasion. And then just wait until the US runs out of cruise missles or money to build them, whichever comes first.
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And then just wait until the US runs out of cruise missles or money to build them, whichever comes first.
Already lost the money battle as the USSR which caused them to dissolve. The first will not occur. Study history or be doomed to repeat it.
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Already lost the money battle as the USSR which caused them to dissolve.
Indeed.
Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's.
It is about the same size as the economy of Texas.
Compared to China, Russia's economy is smaller than the economy of just the greater Shanghai conurbation [wikipedia.org].
Russia is not going to win a spending contest with America.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction: turns out 1945 was the last time we officially were at war. At least, if you're talking about how how it pertains to the Constitution.
Korea: just some misadventure by the 38th parallel. War never actually declared.
Vietnam: just some misadventure on the Mekong. War never actually declared. I think this movie summed it up best: Bob Hope doesn't play at police actions. [youtu.be]
Cold War: a convenient shorthand for simmering tensions between two nuclear-capable factions. War definitely not declared.
All those fun and games we had down in Central and South America? That's just the military and intelligence agencies off at summer camp. War never declared.
Remember that time when we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein because he invaded Kuwait? Nope, not a war.
You better believe we would never go to war to stop a genocide in the Balkans.
Remember that other time we put the beatdown on Saddam Hussein, because he supposedly had weapons of mass destruction? That wasn't a war either. Can you believe it?!
And the gift that keeps on giving in Afghanistan? We still haven't gotten around to declaring that a war.
Now, I'll grant you - those last two were A-OK due to an authorization for the use of military force. I'm not sure what Iraq had to do with 9/11, but G.W. can't be wrong.
Still, it ain't a war unless Congress says so.
Isn't it?
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War is like porn. I know it when I see it. Call it what you want, but painting shit white won't make it smell like roses.
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Back in my uni days I remember asking a physicist friend how an emp device would work. He flipped over a piece of paper drew a relative simple (20-30 components, a few of which would need to be fairly large capacitors and fairly large coils) that would take out all the electronics in about a 30-40m range. He said anyone who knew their engineering could
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The upper limit is the caps, not the juice. It's hard to get big enough caps to really affect UAVs. Especially since military UAVs are resilient to EMPs
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I think it is pretty hard to disrupt a drone that was designed to withstand EMP. It doesn't take a very heavy conducting shield to protect integrated circuits. And the penetration depth means it is exponential decay inside the shielding so you can't overcome it by simply using "more juice" unless you can create exponentially more juice.
Don't forget that the integrated circuits in such a device are probably going to be built a little differently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Silicon on insulator or Sapphire is used.
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There isn't a hard limit in physics for an EMP, but the inverse-square law and easy hardening techniques will make the required power (and thus the cost) get out of hand pretty quickly, unless you start deploying mankind's most compact and inexpensive power sources: nukes. Those will get you an EMP, but being the first nation in 50 years to use them in warfare will bring a new kind of political hell that you really don't want to defend against.
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but being the first nation in 50 years to use them in warfare will bring a new kind of political hell that you really don't want to defend against.
So that's an interesting question.......what do you think would happen if a country used nukes? It would probably depend on which country used them........
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but being the first nation in 50 years to use them in warfare will bring a new kind of political hell that you really don't want to defend against.
So that's an interesting question.......what do you think would happen if a country used nukes? It would probably depend on which country used them........
Odds are that we will find out in a few years. This has a bit to do with the current occupant, and a bit to do with that we simply have them. It will probably be involved with being backed into a corner, so bring out the toys.
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Back in my uni days I remember asking a physicist friend how an emp device would work. He flipped over a piece of paper drew a relative simple (20-30 components, a few of which would need to be fairly large capacitors and fairly large coils) that would take out all the electronics in about a 30-40m range. He said anyone who knew their engineering could work it out, and theres not really an upper limit to scaling the things up.
The point is, I'm kind of surprised small and non state actors havent already tried to use these against UAVs. It seems like the kind of engineering problem whos answer to problems only ever would need to be "More juice".
Hardened components and builds. These EMP devices can work pretty well against commercial and unhardened equipment, but when you know someone is going to try this, you prepare accordingly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Now the biggie in EMP isn't discharging a big cap, it's discharging a thermonuclear device. The major problem again is that EMP pulse, unless you are lucky enough to be where you catch a serious radiation pulse - you are likely to have more problems than that in that case. https://en.wi [wikipedia.org]
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That works great until there is a jammer. In other words, it works fine against small, overpowered nations against whom there are already a myriad of options.
The whole idea of AI is that you don't need constant communication. Load mission parameters before takeoff, set and forget. Nothing you can think of mid flight can't be thought about pre-flight.
Re:No (Score:4, Funny)
From the system requirements section: "Always-on Internet connection required for software license verification by Raytheon."
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A pre-assigned mission is great when you have something pre-assigned, rather than providing support or searching for targets of opportunity. And when the target isn't at risk of moving. And when there's a predictable and unimposing threat picture to deal with. Etc.
But you're absolutely right that a craft can carry out a "rote" mission on its own without any need for external communications.
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That's exactly it. You keep distance when jamming isn't an issue and you close ranks when it's problematic. The closer you are, the higher the gain.
Even with a complete loss of signal, the drone knows where you last were and your last flight plan, so it's not going to get lost from you.
the obvious path toward future warfare (Score:2)
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The real goal is to run down all other aircraft to try to force the purchase of as many F35 Pigs as possible as fast as possible so that the Pig can be scrapped because it is shite and then everyone needs to buy the FX 10000 including vassal states because more profit. Reality is looking for ways to spend as much money as possible, claiming massive costs whilst carving as much as possible off as profits, less than 30% is now considered poor performance. Learn to eat, tanks, ships and planes because you will
Half the *required* software open source, Walmart (Score:2)
> The network, control, and autonomous maneuvering technology are mostly in existence.
And available at Best Buy. Hobby drones can be programmed with a mission amd sent to go fly it autonomously. Hobby drones can accept updates in flight. They have "return to home" failure modes. Many of them are based on an opensource software package that does most of what a military drone would need to do, and is modular so new capabilities can be added fairly easily.
Reminded of the argument about postal jeeps (Score:3)
So back when the US Postal Service decided to retire the postal jeep in favor of the Grumman LLV, rather than offer them for sale they decided to have them crushed. They played both sides of the argument. When asked why they were being retired they said because they were no longer good for delivery, and when they were asked why they were being crushed instead of sold they said that they didn't want the competition buying and using them. So they were too good to sell, and too bad to leave intact?
This point with the F16 and other airforce aircraft strikes me the same way. "X is too poor an aircraft for modern missions." "X is useful as a drone aircraft with no pilot." Which is it? I mean, we're in an era where asymmetric warfare is the norm. If we were specifically geared-up to fight the Soviet Union throughout eastern Europe then perhaps the weapons systems that we currently have might be getting obsolete against what Russia has in the pipeline, or even against potential adversaries like the Chinese, but we're generally fighting opponents that use consumer-grade drones to drop handgrenades on their opponents, or against opponents that don't even have what we would consider to be proper uniforms or unit structure. It seems a little silly to declare existing technology obsolete when it's meeting the needs.
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Well, if you were selling the F-16, that would most certainly cut into the F-35 sales. Consider: For one F-35 that may or may not ever be actually battle worthy, you could get 5 F-16 that have proven time and again that they are.
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Personally, I love the idea of using older platforms as meat shields in the worst case and cheap force augmentations in the best. For missions where
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Personally, I love the idea of using older platforms as meat shields in the worst case and cheap force augmentations in the best. For missions where the F16 would've been just fine, we can continue to use it without fear of putting pilots in danger.
I just don't see a downside.
You are using the better plane as the"meat shield". The F-35 is one size fits all by committee design, and just like an Escalade pickup, or Honda Ridgeline, doesn't perform any task very well. A tactic like this, where it is protected by a lot of other planes might be it's best use.
I'll take an Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrttt! any day over this.
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You are using the better plane as the"meat shield". The F-35 is one size fits all by committee design, and just like an Escalade pickup, or Honda Ridgeline, doesn't perform any task very well. A tactic like this, where it is protected by a lot of other planes might be it's best use.
I'll take an Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrttt! any day over this.
Even if better plane being is used as the "meat shield" that doesn't change anything. If the F-16 drones end up doing all the work, the pilot will still be protected in the definitely better stealth of the F-35 and if a piloted plane needs be in close proximity then it makes sense to put the pilot in the safer plane. Even if it was a piloted F-16 guarded by two autonomous F-16s, it's a great idea. Just because I used the phrase "meat shield" doesn't mean the only purpose of the F-16 was to die, it provid
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Even if better plane being is used as the "meat shield" that doesn't change anything. If the F-16 drones end up doing all the work, the pilot will still be protected in the definitely better stealth of the F-35 and if a piloted plane needs be in close proximity then it makes sense to put the pilot in the safer plane.
It's making an assumption that the F-35 is the safer plane. Always look for the weak link. Take out the weak link, and you are working your way toward air superiority.
The top brass has a saying that we are always ready for the last war. And no one listens. We are wonderfully prepared for extremely asymmetrical warfare. We can beat the living shit out of peopel living in the middle ages. Let's just pat ourselves on teh back, and declare ourselves the winner, world without end, amen.
Meanwhile, this comp
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Anti-science typically means anti-science-that-doesn't-involve-killing-people-and-breaking-stuff. Declining empires tend to hang on to military capability for a long time.
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Anti-science typically means anti-science-that-doesn't-involve-killing-people-and-breaking-stuff. Declining empires tend to hang on to military capability for a long time.
But things happen pretty quickly these days. And we never know where the big discovery will come from.
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I think the next big discovery is a lot less likely to come from the US than it was a few years ago.
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I think the next big discovery is a lot less likely to come from the US than it was a few years ago.
You aren't kidding. Now that we've decided that the laws of physics can be invalidated by a simple majority vote, science is going to be stifled. You never know what research will be politically offensive.
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OK, you made me spit tea out my nose. (Score:2)
F16s are obsolete because Americans pilots are too big for the cockpits.
OK, you made me spit tea out my nose.
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You know, this didn't even occur to me.. that drone wingmen might not just be sensor and force augmentation, but dogfighters. But my understanding is that auto-dogfighting is actually getting very good these days, so the ability to auto-dogfight without G-limits is no insignificant argument in favour of the conversion.
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You know, this didn't even occur to me.. that drone wingmen might not just be sensor and force augmentation, but dogfighters. But my understanding is that auto-dogfighting is actually getting very good these days, so the ability to auto-dogfight without G-limits is no insignificant argument in favour of the conversion.
And then you add smaller compact and dense drones, and very soon you wind up with the ultimate drone [wikia.com]
Didn't we already have a movie about this... (Score:2)
...if I recall, one of those autonomous drones got hit by lightning, went haywire and decided it wanted to blow up all sorts of things.
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Number 5 is .... Alive!
Not malfunction, not malfunction...
Re:Didn't we already have a movie about this... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Number 5 is .... Alive!
Not malfunction, not malfunction...
Gotta admit, Stephanie had pretty nice software.
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...if I recall, one of those autonomous drones got hit by lightning, went haywire and decided it wanted to blow up all sorts of things.
Yeah - well that kinda falls under the "cool story bro" movies division. Aircraft are hit by lightning fairly often - apparently once per year per aircraft - whacky metric, so a lot are hit multiple times.
Last time a plane had a know lightning hit big problem was in 1967. Now it's just a pucker string moment. https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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The F35 is defiantly a failed IT project... The current software barely lets the thing fly... Forget any weapons.... Oh no, that's planned for a couple of software revisions from now... In programming terms... We haven't figured out how we are going to do that yet, so we don't know how long it will take or if it's even possible on the hardware we have...
Seriously, this software development program is in serious trouble. We will be lucky if they get it flying well before its hardware goes obsolete..
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maybe they should hire musk to fix it since LHM cant do it apparently
Implication (Score:3)
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I've always thought it was funny when the DOD tried to
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So the Pentagon finally realized that the F-35 is SO bad it needs an F-16 escort? And what's the logic behind sending a non stealthy aircraft as wingman for a stealthy one?
The F-35 isn't particularly stealthy in the strategic sense, it's just hard to get a missile lock on. If anything, the F-16s will ensure no missile locks onto the F-35 until the F-16s are used up.
The F-35 has nifty radar that lets it target an enemy without the enemy being able to just home on the radar. The F-16s have never been given that - the avionics are pretty old. While I doubt this is the case, it's theoretically possible for the F-35s to identify targets and the F-16s only turn on their radars w
Well, that's not new.... (Score:2)
I worked at a place that converted F-4's into radio controlled drones way back in the 80's.... Of course, the idea was for them to tow targets to train the anti-aircraft gun crews and missile testing, but the idea is not new.
Kinda defeats the purpose (Score:5, Insightful)
Defeats the purpose of a F-35 doesn't it? Let's build a super stealthy aircraft and then have multiple none stealthy aircraft going into battle with it. Basically the F-16s will be saying, "There is an F-35 in the neighborhood, look harder and you will find it.
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F-35 is not super stealthy, or it wouldn't be exported, like it happened with F-22.
So (Score:1)
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Defeats the purpose of a F-35 doesn't it? Let's build a super stealthy aircraft and then have multiple none stealthy aircraft going into battle with it. Basically the F-16s will be saying, "There is an F-35 in the neighborhood, look harder and you will find it.
You have a point...almost. The *exact* same argument was used way back in the Dark Ages (1970-1990) when the US DoD was struggling to find a way, any way, to counter the increasing numerical gap and decreasing technological gap between US forces and Soviet forces. One just had to look at a sitrep from the Fulda Gap in southern Germany -- Warsaw Pact had 270 Soviet tank divisions and 4500 aircraft vs NATO's meager 115 divisions and 1500 aircraft -- to see that the balance of military power was tilted ver
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Defeats the purpose of a F-35 doesn't it? Let's build a super stealthy aircraft and then have multiple none stealthy aircraft going into battle with it. Basically the F-16s will be saying, "There is an F-35 in the neighborhood, look harder and you will find it.
You know you don't always have to have a F35 present with every F16. The price of the F16 means you can have hundreds of them in the air flying decoy sorties, while the real mission utilises the F35's
Looks like Stealth predicted the future (Score:2)
Clever move (Score:4, Funny)
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Try to build wraith, end up building command center. Sounds legit!
Meanwhile all you needed to do was research cloak for your Banshees (A10s).
Heh, F-35s are that bad, eh? (Score:2)
They need protection by the aircraft they're supposed to replace?
Now where did they get that idea? (Score:2)
I wonder what the guy who came up with this idea used to do as a kid [youtu.be]...
Sounds good until it shoots ME (Score:3)
The F-16 is a fantastic plane. Effective, fast, and cheap as hell. Why we don't have swams of the damn things I don't understand. It can match or beat 90% of the things our opponents fly, and for the remaining 10%, we could continue to use the F/A-18, F-15 and the F-22 and F35s that we have on hand.
If we lack pilots for the F-16, making them autonomous sounds great. They are a cheap platform, $20 million or so each. Which is one quarter to one sixth as much as an F-35. At six-to-one costs, flood the damn skies with the things. Even if the enemy shoots some down, overwhelm them in numbers and let the F-35s make easy kills.
Just keep the sharp end aimed over thataway, thanks
throw out the one advantage (Score:2)
Does anyone else (Score:2)
What can go wrong? (Score:2)
Somehow this reminds me of something... [youtube.com]
So much wrong with this... (Score:2)
The F-16 is a pretty decent fighter. However, using it as a drone attached to an F-35 doesn't make a lot of sense. Just off the top of my head:
- The F-16 is designed for a human pilot. All the systems and design put around accommodating a human make the F-16 a damned expensive drone. It's also much bigger than it needs to be. Finally, the the airframe and general design stops at what a human can tolerate. A purpose-built fighter drone could have massively better performance (for example, higher G's).
- Pilot
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- The F-16 is designed for a human pilot. All the systems and design put around accommodating a human make the F-16 a damned expensive drone. It's also much bigger than it needs to be. Finally, the the airframe and general design stops at what a human can tolerate.
My understanding is that the F-16 is perfectly capable of exceeding a 9G turn, it is the pilots who are not capable. I could be wrong about this, but even if it cannot exceed a 9G turn, it can likely keep itself in that turn much longer than a human would be able to endure. So perhaps not a total waste, and certainly better than just scrapping them.
jamming (Score:1)
Only one word (Score:1)
Watchbird
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/29579/29579-h/29579-h.htm [gutenberg.org]
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More Like "Top Drone"...
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All female cast, just like the Ghostbusters reboot.
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