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Old 06-03-2020, 12:14 AM
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MT2008 MT2008 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Spartan198 View Post
Air Force Magazine reports the service wants its Skyborg drones to “autonomously avoid other aircraft, terrain, obstacles, and hazardous weather, and take off and land on its own”. That opens up a whole raft of other, less dangerous missions including refueling other planes, acting as a flying communications node, collecting intelligence on enemy forces, and even search and rescue.
OK, so I don't know if I'm missing something here, but absolutely every capability mentioned in this snippet from the article is something that other UAVs have been doing for years - there already UAVs that can serve as comms nodes or ISR assets, and aide CSAR. (One exception: Aerial refueling, and even that's something that the Navy's MQ-25 will be able to do - and which NASA already demonstrated with RQ-4 Global Hawks years ago.) Not sure if the fault here lies with the originating article in Air Force Magazine, or the Popular Mechanics author, but my immediate reaction here is, "Cool, but not really all that impressed," which I'm pretty sure isn't the effect that they were going for...

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mazryonh View Post
And I was just busy killing Skynet quite a few times while developing my page for Terminator: Resistance. However, I wouldn't be so quick to say that these new drones are revolutionary. Here are two articles outlining how using drones, let alone AI-piloted ones, doesn't actually save money and may be more ineffective than human pilots in capable planes--when your own ass is on the line, that survival instinct can really kick you into gear.
Both of those articles that you linked are from 2013. A lot has changed since then - particularly when it comes to machine learning and sensor capabilities. Though I don't disagree with the overall notion that it will be very difficult for UAVs to replace manned aircraft in all roles (not only for technical reasons, but also bureaucratic reasons).
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Last edited by MT2008; 06-03-2020 at 12:35 AM.
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