Lockheed Martin Plans Unmanned Aircraft 322
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "Lockheed Martin's secretive Skunk Works unit--which previously developed U-2 spy plane, the SR-71 supersonic spy plane and the radar-evading F-117 stealth fighter--has big plans for its latest project: drones. Among the concepts under development, according to the Wall Street Journal: 'One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.' The WSJ's reporter also is allowed a rare visit to the Skunk Works complex: 'A factory hall was filled with the prototype of a massive helium-filled airship that one day might ferry troops and heavy equipment to distant battlefields faster and more efficiently than ships--no port or airbase needed. The blimp would float just above the ground on four hover pads, meaning that "you could literally pick a farmer's field" to set down in, says program manager Robert Boyd.'"
hope it's better than their last drone (Score:2, Informative)
Need to compete - a good idea (Score:3, Informative)
Seems like a good idea. However, if these were deployed in other arenas, where the enemy had the ability Jam the "cheap" communication, those drones would be...well...long gone. How do military communication systems handle jamming?
Re:big balloon at war (Score:5, Informative)
Given that it would be helium-filled, not air-filled, even so you'd be hard-pressed to destroy an airship outright. Shooting through the fabric walls accomplishes nothing but putting holes in them, and given that your typical airship encompasses a tremendous volume with low pressure at near sea-level, the result would be a very slow deflation (unlike letting go of a party balloon and watching it zip around the room). Also, if it is semi-rigid, it would have an internal structure capable of maintaining integrity even if it lost lift. If they can pull it off, it might be a boon to the military. There's a tiny bit of extra information about it in Wikipedia [wikipedia.org].
The Germans got there first (Score:5, Informative)
The Messerschmitt Me 262 [wikipedia.org] Schwalbe or "swallow" was the first operational jet powered fighter. It was mass-produced in World War II and saw action from late 1944 in bomber/reconnaissance and fighter/interceptor roles....etc...
Here's their Small-Business Competition (Score:3, Informative)
I recently read in the LA Times about a small company that's competing with LM on the blimps.
Apparently, Worldwide Aeros, [aerosml.com] a smallish company founded by a Russian immigrant, was one of two U.S. companies that was awarded $3 million (USD) by the Pentagon to research the concept. (The other was LM.)
Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian had been working on a project to develop mammoth airships to deliver supplies to Siberian oilfields.
You can find the article here [latimes.com]. -- Paul
Re:Oh noes! (Score:2, Informative)
In which case humans are completely superfluous. The real fighting's already being done by a kamikaze robot pilot, aboard the missile. Why do we need to put a human in harm's way aboard the missile launch platform?
That Airship has Flown... (Score:3, Informative)
Aviation Week [aviationnow.com] has already covered the fact that the airship has already flown. It looks like Lockheed is in exploration mode for aircraft right now because the traditional market of milking the government teet for manned fighter and bomber contracts has a decidedly less than glorious future.
Re:Need to compete - a good idea (Score:1, Informative)
I did some quick Googling:
Desert Hawk:
http://www.defense-update.com/products/d/desertha
Global Hawk:
http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=1
Re:big balloon at war (Score:4, Informative)
This was conclusively demonstrated a couple of years ago when a helium-filled weather balloon floated out of control into the air traffic lanes over the Atlantic. The Royal Canadian Air Force sent up a couple of CF-18 fighters to shoot it down. They emptied more than 1,000 rounds of cannon shells into it and there was absolutely no effect. The Canadian "Air Farce" were the laughing stock of the world for a while. Eventually the balloon drifted across the Atlantic, where the British air force went up and showed how it was supposed to be done. They had no effect on the balloon either.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/161148.s tm [bbc.co.uk]
Re:UAV (Score:1, Informative)
The only reason for aircraft is to project power over the horizon and out of the range of missles. A "loitering" drone armed with air to air missles could easily protect navy ships. Helicopters are better served for close ground support than the A-10.
Re:UAV (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hope it's better than their last drone (Score:3, Informative)
It's even harder than that. (Score:3, Informative)
Modern helium-filled airships employ multiple gas chambers. You would need to shoot holes in a large number of them to make a dent in it's air-worthiness.
Also, each shot the enemy fires lights them up on the (likely) acompanying Apache strike team's computer-guided weapon systems. An enemy shooter would only manage to get off a couple of good shots before they were disintegrated.
Blimp Requirements (Score:3, Informative)
Air weighs about 1 Kg per cubic yard (no whining about mixed units, please)
O2/N2/H20 21/78/1% mix works out to 12.29 atomic weight vs He weight of 2, so...
He weighs only about 20% of air, so it can lift 80% of the air it displaces.
Given the above:
An equipped company of 100 soldiers is about 100kg/220lbs each -- total: 10 tonnes
This would require a minimum of 125000 cubic yards of He to lift by itself, and much more for the vehicle empty weight, fuel, etc.
For comparison, an LTA 138S Airship [us-lta.com] is 160 feet/50 meters long, volume of 138,000 ft3 (3,908 m3) (5100 yd3), and lifts only 1.5 tonnes.
Scaling up from the LTA 138S, you'd need 25 times the volume - 3.5 million ft3 minimum. Not impossible, but consider the design for the CargoLifter [bbc.co.uk] which would be 850ft/260m long with payload of 160 tonnes for 17.6 million ft3/ 500,000 m3 of Helium.
What ever it would be, navigating a floating object the size of an WW II Jeep Carrier or Cruiser into and out of cornfields would not be simple in any sort of wind.
Re:UAV (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure that I buy this claim.
If the bomb was guided, as many of them tend to be, and had a system for decreasing its own velocity (i.e., is a somewhat unfortunately-named 'retarded bomb'), then it could be released from the aircraft at a very high speed, change its flight characteristics so as to shed airspeed, and then guide itself to its target.
I know I'm minimizing what would have to be a very complicated process, but it doesn't seem that difficult. A bomb follows the same type of ballistic trajectory after being released from an aircraft that a missile warhead (an inbound ballistic missile, anyway) does, and they go supersonic and have a circular error probability that's measured in feet.
I don't see any reason why it would be impossible.
Re:Blimp Requirements (Score:2, Informative)
It gains approx 20% of its lift from its aerodynamic form, which obviously requires it to have forward velocity to "fly". This results in quite a large saving in volume of lifting gas.
The lifting gas issue is actually one of the biggest problems with theses airships as it is all fine when you have the load on, but what do you do when you have unloaded. You suddenly have an enormous mass requirement. Options such as compressing and condensing the He have been considered, but not practical, loading with water / earth are options but AFAIK there is no simple solution to this problem. Added to the fact that this issue gets much harder to solve as the lifting capabilities are increased. Especially since the whole idea is to be able to land in remote locations!
Re:War without consequence - for us at least (Score:2, Informative)
All military hardware is at least partially EM shielded (or hardened)
Actual combat vehicles have greater protection and also alot of redundant systems.
The big deal with an EMP is that it creates a massive voltage surge in any conductive material. Voltage limiting gear can help greatly, as well as the ability to work around blown components with backup systems. Encasing the entire electrical system in a Faraday Cage also helps by setting up counter EM fields to reduce the Voltage surge.
Re:Need to compete - a good idea (Score:3, Informative)
Aha! I have defeated your information cloaking to see the secrets within:
Global Hawk http://www.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?fsID=1
Desert Hawk http://www.defense-update.com/products/d/desertha
Verrry tricky, appending an extra '/' to the end of the URL to make us think it was a broken link. I have added this to my bag of tradecraft for future use, at a time when you least expect it.
Good day.
</neurosis>
Re:Like the skunk works is open to the WSJ? (Score:1, Informative)
Hehe. Not so.
It was a German plane that was the first flying jet. See Heinkel 178. And it was a German plane that was the first operational jet fighter. See Messerschmitt 262. And the first operational jet bomber was German as well. Arado Ar 234. So here we got already three different companies having operational combat jet aircraft before Skunk had even its first.
Re:The trouble with unmanned vehicles... (Score:2, Informative)
Put some thought into your comments.
Re:hmm.. space elevators.. (Score:3, Informative)
The density of air is about 1.29 kilograms per cubic meter at sea level; the density of helium is about 0.18 kg/m^3. Going to hard vacuum (zero kg/m^3) only gets you about fifteen percent more lift per unit of envelope volume; the engineering hassles just aren't worth the trouble.
Re:Dirigible Usage (Score:5, Informative)
Well, that's true. At least, they wouldn't be running around in Iraq. They'd be running around in Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Gaza, the West Bank, Iran, etc. And of course Afghanistan, where they (the Taliban) had the whole country to themselves, and decided to let Al Queda use it for a playground. You remember the fine things they did there, like shooting women at lunchtime in the town square for offenses such as teaching their daughters to read. Sure, Saddam had no problem with daughters being taught to read, but he also had no problem gassing whole villages full of daughters, invading neighboring countries, lobbing missiles into Israel, starting a war that killed over a million people, regularly (and publicly) sending cash to friendly outfits such as Hamas and Hezbollah expressly in support of suicide bombers' families, and so on. Yes, that was just rosy, that picture. To say nothing of having his ground forces use anti-aircraft weapons against the aircraft enforcing the terms of his surrender when he was forced to give up his attempt to annex Kuwait. Secular? Who cares? A monomaniacal mass murdering aggressor that refuses to abide by his surrender terms and corruptly (well, with UN help, of course) corruptly skims billions of dollars of palace-building and weapons-buying cash off of the money intended to feed and care for his population is your idea of a just-fine situation?
Most Iraqis today -- even those here in N. America -- prefer Sadam over the US for running of the country.
Nice baseless, context-less, no-reference assertion, there! Who cares how many people do or don't want the US running Iraq? The US doesn't want the US running Iraq, either. That's the whole point of supporting the elections (in which a greater portion of the Iraqi population continually votes than even do in the US). That's the whole point of rapidly building up the Iraqi law enforcement and armed forces. Guess you're not paying attention to those areas where anti-insurgent patrols are now solely being conducted by Iraqi units? It's changing, whether it bothers your world view or not to know it. And of course, you might even check with what the people there, and in Afghanistan think. They are among the most optimistic people in the world [bbc.co.uk] about their economies and their futures.
Re:long-term occupation... (Score:1, Informative)
Communications intercepted to/from Evil Clowns like Zarqawi indicate that the insurgency is actually pretty desperate about the lack of wider Islamic support for their car bombing campaign
Your "Evil Clowns" are radical Sunni muslims, and Sunni comprise around 30% of Iraq's population. Shia muslims comprise 60%, and have been keeping (almost) quiet all the time.
Fun fact 1: the Shia have a central clergy [wikipedia.org], unlike the Sunni. This is where the order to keep quiet came from, and they're in Iran.
Fun fact 2: the very central myth of Shia Islam is about self-sacrifice in battle [wikipedia.org]. Unlike the Sunni, they consider each of their Imams a martyr, and believe each Imam was a perfect example to follow [wikipedia.org]. Consequently, they have a particularly extensive history of suicide killings, most prominently including the original Assassins [wikipedia.org].
Fun fact 3: although Ayatollah al-Udhma Yousof al-Sanei has (only this January, long after various Sunni authorities) issued a Fatwa [wikipedia.org] that forbids Shia from doing suicide attacks, Shia Islam holds Fatwas to be fallible (i.e. reversible) and in fact the Shia clergy has been consciously using "temporary Fatwas" before. Sunni Fatwas are much more a matter of public opinion, and rarely (in theory, shouldn't) contradict.
Fun fact 4: unlike Sunni, the Shia are allowed to conceal [wikipedia.org] their religion when that avoids them arm (such as in seething Iraq), i.e. they certainly occupy a couple of positions we don't know they do.
Conclusion: Zarqawi need not worry long. When the Israelis bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, Zarqawi has his number of allies roughly tripled, gets a startling (to a Sunni) number of would-be-suicide-attackers, and receives a massive supply of "missing" weapons from Saddam's army that finally get pulled out and used. All it takes is a Fatwa by the Grand Ayatollah broadcast on al-Djazeera, and you can bet your bottom dollar the text has been ready for months.
Zarqawi is also going to get his ass kicked by the Shia as soon as the common enemy is out of the country, but that`s another story again...
Many of their mid-level managers are getting wacked, too, which takes a lot of the fun out of it.
I've always wondered how the US know they've killed someone more imporant than just the average soldier. They don't exactly wear shoulder bands, do they? The news reports always say things like "convoy was thought to have contained al-Qaeda's top officials" - thought by who?