I'm not convinced that a UAV that can do everything a manned platform can do equally well will be significantly more affordable. If,aircraft are paid for by the pound, you may save a little by removing cockpit,,seat and other life-support equipment. You will be paying more for robust and more capable systems that will be needed to compensate for the lack of a human pilot.
A UAV may fly higher and sustain higher G forces but those capabilities will,also entail higher costs as well. There will also be a large logistics tail involved in the operation of a UAV fleet which tends not to get much attention.
Manpower and training costs is 1 of the largest factors in fielding a capable manned air force. By going unmanned, the need to pay pilots (and the requisite training time measured in years) is removed. That's quite a bit of cost saving.
Logistics-wise there may not be much savings at all. However, if the unmanned fighters have a long enough range, they can potentially allow savings as they can operate from their main bases without having to re-locate to forward bases.
For a given set of characteristics – speed, range, payload, maneuverability, ceiling, etc. there is very little difference in cost between manned and unmanned aircraft. You shave some off by eliminating the pilot, but then add it back in the form of additional sensors, computers, and communications needed for effective unmanned operations.
Mostly agree, although I would consider the removal of the pilot to be a significant cost savings in itself. Cost of pilots is recurrent, but systems acquisition are one-off.
Service ceiling is limited more by the engine and inlet design than the presence of a human. At 130,000ft altitude you will be at twice the operational altitude of any jet powered aircraft built to date – wonder why? Also, as you go higher the capacity for high G maneuvers decreases because there is less air to get a ‘bite’ in.
That is based on the assumption that there are no significant advances in propulsion technology that will allow fighters to operate at higher altitudes. 1 possible technology under development is the ionospheric ramjet, but there is not a lot of info available on the internet on the capabilities of this propulsion technology.
If you are out of their sensor range, then they will be out of yours. And while you may be immune to cannon fire, building a missile to pop up to your altitude isn’t a significant challenge.
Bullets are cheap, but missiles can go faster and have much longer ranges, critical values when attempting to kill an aircraft that is almost as fast (or faster!) than your bullet.. Active radar will still work if you can guide the missile close enough to lock on, stealth technologies just reduce the effective range, they don’t make you invisible to radar, and IR systems will still work.
In my 1st post in this thread, I talked about future aircraft having cloaking fields. It sounds sci-fi, but is already being demonstrated in labs:
Physicists Create Magnetic Invisibility Cloak | Wired Science | Wired.com
Now, imagine an aircraft in a cloaking field that makes it invisible in the EM spectrum (spanning IR, UV, radar, radio and visual). How to detect and track such an aircraft?
The cloaked aircraft is probably blind since the cloak works both ways (i.e., nothing gets through the cloak from either side). Hence, the cloak will probably be turned off to allow the cloaked aircraft to see its surroundings, but turned on to hide it from incoming missiles. Such a cloak renders missiles obsolete, but is useless against bullets.
But as an alternative, how about a hyper-velocity laser beam rider along the lines of the CKEM? Only good for about 10km in the current design, but at Mach 6.5+ it gets there in about 2 seconds.
Regarding the speed of bullets, a typical rifle bullet has a muzzle velocity of ~Mach 3. If the firing platform is going @ Mach 3, that's a bullet going @ Mach 6 when it exits the muzzle. Travel time is not much more than 2 seconds either, particularly in the upper atmosphere where the air resistance is less.
Laser and IR are the long range ones, rail/EM guns and millimeter wave are mid range, sonic is short range and probably only for underwater or crowd control. I understand that they can already produce some millimeter wave DEW effects using AESA radar.
There are holes in the absorption spectrum where these are of little effect. That is why the chemical lasers they tried out used such odd chemical reactions, like deuterium-fluorine or iodine-oxygen as the lasing media, 1 or both of the reactants are present in the atmosphere is only very small trace amounts.
I understand that there are troughs in the absorption spectrum. But here's the thing about these troughs, they are known and counter-measures can be easily developed to cover this gap when lasers become operational. These counter-measures probably cost a lot less than the cost of developing and fielding laser systems.
And in areas where haze, sandstorms, snow storms, dust-storms, etc (e.g., Asian Brown Cloud [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud"]Asian brown cloud - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]) are common, lasers are not going to be of much good.
The COIL laser was a monster from the start, and it was meant as a demonstrator for the beam pointing systems. The current generation of fiber optic and solid state lasers are much more compact, and don’t involve incredibly toxic chemicals.
I am with you on a fighter sized DEW replacing conventional weapons in the next 30 years. It might be ready near the end of that period, but you are going to have to design the plane around it, so it won’t be quick to field.
I am of the view that lasers are good
outside the atmosphere, and the solid state lasers have great potential for application in space. Particularly when nuclear powered satellites are developed.
Within the atmosphere, there are too many limitations for use of lasers as a lethal weapon.
But the heat shields are very vulnerable to damage during re-entry because they are operating at the limits of the materials, a small failure can easily cascade and become fatal. That is what happened to the Space Shuttle Columbia.
I understand that issue. Hence, the idea of the Air-Borne Laser to attack ballistic missiles during exit or re-entry. However, this occurs at a high altitude and attacking ballistic missiles with lasers when they are re-entering the atmosphere is a lousy idea as the resulting debris from a successful attack will likely land in the vicinity of its target anyway.
Attacking it with lasers on the ascent out of the atmosphere is a good idea, except the need for the laser to be close enough. That's feasible for not-so-large countries such as North Korea, but not for huge countries like Russia.
The other limitation of lasers is that it is a single target weapon, since 1 laser can only attack 1 target at any one time. This means that it can easily be saturated since each attack at long range takes some time for the laser to burn through the target sufficiently to cause any damage. Hence, the MIRVs in service since the Cold War is already problematic for a laser weapon to defeat.
