Chinese UCAV/CCA/flying wing drones (ISR, A2A, A2G) thread

[mack8]

To me it's obvious that the PS one is made from a mish-mash of Type A and Type E.

 

[Deino]

Hey, it's not only me who's watching Weibo?!

 

[phrozenflame]

Sorry for the late reply, but I was still at school until now.

Here I found it:

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I just cut out the relevant part ...

View attachment 160501

And here my layman's attempt to sort them a bit + adding the names according to @huitong's CMA-Blog

View attachment 160503

What role is type-C optimized for?

 

[tphuang]

They also raised some interesting prospect about AI pilots. Every time a PLAAF pilot figures out a way to beat one the knowledge of that event gets added to the AI's data structure, and with a data sync all the other instance of the AI also learns about it unlike human pilots who have to do classes and presentation to peers to dissimulate the knowledge. Depending on who trained the AI you might get different AI "personalities" and quirks. They suggested maybe future export model UADF could have a "Peshawar trained AI" as opposed to PLAAF trained.

another reason why I'm optimistic of UASF after reading this and listening to the guancha show. If we've seen how much vacuum robot, robot dog, self driving cars and LLMs have improved over the years, it would be surprising to not see UASF having similar improvement curves. And with that, you can get some pretty rapid improvement over time.

Being networked missile carrier sounds like that should be a CCA Gen 1 kind of thing instead of CCA Gen 2/UADF?

Can CCAs fly at supersonic speed, launch at high velocity and then scoot away?

and let's say UASF isn't able to shoot down the enemy CCAs initially and get close enough for dogfighting, it can just eat those smaller CCAs for lunch.

Longer term, UASF can perform OCA roles & escort roles. I don't think you can expect CCAs to do the same.

I would think that for aerial combat laser based communications might be better. Atmosphere is thinner and you might get hundreds of kms of range.

so the tech for this still needs some help to work in combat scenarios and also a lot of this is going to require having sufficient power generation.

Pilots are not just additional institutional costs but scaling bottlenecks for force capacity.

A key point that people should do well to remember

 

[vincent]

I see no reason that the larger CCAs would necessarily have a lower replacement price than the manned legacy aircraft, at least for the foreseeable future. Things might change if you try to price in the pilot of course, but I'm not sure how you'd do that.

There is an old saying: Fighter pilots worth their weights in gold.

 

[siegecrossbow]

What role is type-C optimized for?

Air to surface but focuses more on loitering time, probably subsonic.

 

[dingyibvs]

There is an old saying: Fighter pilots worth their weights in gold.

Well, 70kg of gold is only worth about $7 mil, so maybe not that useful a saying anymore!

 

[Heliox]

Well, 70kg of gold is only worth about $7 mil, so maybe not that useful a saying anymore!

Probably not in China but in the cost-inflated environment of the US military, a recent RAND report states that cost of training a fighter pilot ranges from US$6m (F16) to US$10m (F35).

So probably technological complexity has kept pace with rise in gold prices after all

 

[dingyibvs]

Probably not in China but in the cost-inflated environment of the US military, a recent RAND report states that cost of training a fighter pilot ranges from US$6m (F16) to US$10m (F35).

So probably technological complexity has kept pace with rise in gold prices after all

I actually meant it the other way around lol, a UADF type CCA in the US will probably cost at least $10 mil.

 

[test1979]

Side bomb bay of unmanned fighter