True, but you don't need one ground control link for every drone, you just need one ground control link for every active drones in the battlefield, the thousands of drones are just magazines waiting to burn through in a high intensity war
Ukrainian War Developments
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True, but you don't need one ground control link for every drone, you just need one ground control link for every active drones in the battlefield, the thousands of drones are just magazines waiting to burn through in a high intensity war
"Situation Map Update
- battle for #Mariupol -
RF DPR cleaned out the eastern part now completely
and entered the port area in the south!!"
- battle for #Mariupol -
RF DPR cleaned out the eastern part now completely
and entered the port area in the south!!"
So you expect to just fly few drones ? and then when they destroyed you are taking another airborne ?.
and no.. you actually needs multiple as what happen your control link for that one got suppressed or even out of range as they are limited by Line of sight. you then needs an airplane or a relay drone which itself needs its own control.
Unfortunately other than being a cruise missile or loitering munitions. Those "simplicities" wont apply to so called "attack drone" and the more sophistication you want to apply to it equals more price and bigger drone. It will still save lives as when it got shot down no one would die, but it stops being low cost.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
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The biggest limiting factor with UCAVs is actually runways rather than ground stations.
Even if you did have thousands of ground stations, you would not be able to use them all at the same time since you can only realistically fly so many aircraft within an area before you start to literally fly into each other.
With existing AI and the long loitering time these drones offer, you can essentially ‘park’ reserve fleets of them in a safe location close to the actual battlespace (over a friendly naval battle fleet for example) while pilots control the first wave.
As the first wave expends munitions or get shot down, reserve drones can be ‘tagged’ in to substitute for returning Winchester’d drones or those shot down fairly quickly to maintain almost fully combat effectiveness essentially indefinitely.
That is the true revolutionary power of drone combat - unrelenting maximum pressure as opposed to the locust swarms people might think based on Hollywood imaginings.
That makes things completely untenable for enemy ground forces. There is no waiting for enemy air power to move on. You move, you get hit; you fight, you get hit; you hide, good chance you get hit all the same.
The biggest limiting factor is that current standard UCAVs are all conventionally launched. That means they directly compete with manned aircraft for landing and take off spots at limited airfields.
As such, I don’t think you can fully unlock the total potential of drones until you can solve that problem and develop some sort of mass launch and recovery mechanism for UCAVs that doesn’t also impose limitations and constraints on manned aircraft operations.
Until that happens, I think there will be a natural limit to how many UCAVs China might procure because more would just end up parked as back ups and you only need so many back ups. That’s probably still in the region of thousands of units so it’s not like it’s not going to be a fundamental quantum leap in combat capabilities. But it’s not going to be tens of thousands.
The biggest limiting factor with UCAVs is actually runways rather than ground stations.
Even if you did have thousands of ground stations, you would not be able to use them all at the same time since you can only realistically fly so many aircraft within an area before you start to literally fly into each other.
With existing AI and the long loitering time these drones offer, you can essentially ‘park’ reserve fleets of them in a safe location close to the actual battlespace (over a friendly naval battle fleet for example) while pilots control the first wave.
As the first wave expends munitions or get shot down, reserve drones can be ‘tagged’ in to substitute for returning Winchester’d drones or those shot down fairly quickly to maintain almost fully combat effectiveness essentially indefinitely.
That is the true revolutionary power of drone combat - unrelenting maximum pressure as opposed to the locust swarms people might think based on Hollywood imaginings.
That makes things completely untenable for enemy ground forces. There is no waiting for enemy air power to move on. You move, you get hit; you fight, you get hit; you hide, good chance you get hit all the same.
The biggest limiting factor is that current standard UCAVs are all conventionally launched. That means they directly compete with manned aircraft for landing and take off spots at limited airfields.
As such, I don’t think you can fully unlock the total potential of drones until you can solve that problem and develop some sort of mass launch and recovery mechanism for UCAVs that doesn’t also impose limitations and constraints on manned aircraft operations.
Until that happens, I think there will be a natural limit to how many UCAVs China might procure because more would just end up parked as back ups and you only need so many back ups. That’s probably still in the region of thousands of units so it’s not like it’s not going to be a fundamental quantum leap in combat capabilities. But it’s not going to be tens of thousands.
Define few, in a high intensity war I'd expect active drone count in the dozens or even hundreds.
Most male/hale drones are not limited by LOS with sat comm. You're probably thinking of TB-2, but even drones of TB-2 size may upgrade to sat comm in the near future, imagine cheap small sized drones couple with starlink type network....
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Babushka mistakes Ukrainian soldiers with Russians and welcomes them with a soviet flag, then they bully her over it
Current way of handling drones is still very much like a manned aircraft, a lot of potential revolution in simplifying handling and automation. Take off and cruising can be done automatically, ground pilot only need to start working when the drones are in position.
SinoSoldier
Colonel
Reddit community has been quarantined due to widespread lack of credibility and misinformation. It's better to double check these claims before trusting them.
You also need to define what is high intensity war first ?
and Satellite have bandwidth and overall resource limitations here. Plus you add unnecessary lags to your drone which is why GCS or line of sight communication is still a necessity and preferrable for drone control.
humans tho haven't yet unfortunately solve the problem with AI's.
and the hardest limit would be the amount of radio-frequencies you can allocate for your drones. Unless you want them to interfere with eachother. One can manage with VHF for basic flight control, but for something more sophisticated providing a realtime radar data, you would need higher frequency for higher bandwidth. This higher frequency would also subject to weather and atmosphere condition necessitating high gain antenna which will in turn constrain the size of the drone, but i guess for MALE there is no antenna size constrain.
Multiplexing can help but the limits are still there.
High intensity: China vs US over Taiwan, Russia vs NATO......etc
Lag is not really an issue as long as you're not making split second decision with drones, drones for air combat like loyal wingman probably has controller aircraft nearby so it is not relevant to our discussion.
As far as limitation of comm channel available, we'd have to dig through some specs to actually discuss it in details. But just a cursory look at modern sat comm I'd say high bandwidth multiplexing is no longer a limitation, hundred mbits/s for a couple dozens channels in a local area is already doable today
Also don't count out AI, take a look in the China UAV thread. Machine vision has been solved, target recognition by AI is very mature now, swarm logic and flying has been demonstrated...etc
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