Jura The idiot
General
are you sure? now I noticed
Lockheed Martin Mini-Missile Takes Flight in New Demonstration
... skipped; source:
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Lockheed Martin Mini-Missile Takes Flight in New Demonstration
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
I am pretty sure the Missile in the photo was a Sidewinder as the MHTK is about 2 feet long and the one in the earlier photo was much longer unless the photo's perspective is all wrong in which case, I give up.
Always the Pacific 
PACAF, confirmation announced 2 years ago, re balancing with Asia Pacific area in more a ANG KC-135 sqn is based to Eielson but remains very interesting know after if these 2 Sqns are in addition or others stand down out.
And 46 F-22 to Elmendorf which receive always in first new upgrade for F-22, first Block 30 and AIM-9X.
PACAF, confirmation announced 2 years ago, re balancing with Asia Pacific area in more a ANG KC-135 sqn is based to Eielson but remains very interesting know after if these 2 Sqns are in addition or others stand down out.And 46 F-22 to Elmendorf which receive always in first new upgrade for F-22, first Block 30 and AIM-9X.
Last edited:
Jura The idiot
General
Bernard
Junior Member
A bunch of new information on the Navy's newest Drone boat. If as advertised I think these would free up other ships in a Carrier task force. Have 4 or more of these (80mil all together) in front of a CBG just for a little more inexpensive sub protection.
DSD Work Embraces DARPA’s Robot Boat, Sea Hunter
By on April 07, 2016 at 12:00 PM
This afternoon, Deputy Defense Secretary and robotics booster will christen the largest in history. At 130 feet long and not quite 140 tons displacement, DARPA’s Sea Hunter dwarfs previous robotic boats, giving it the ruggedness and fuel capacity, about 70 days’ worth, to cross oceans on its own power without a manned mothership. But Sea Hunter, aka ACTUV, is still much smaller than the Navy’s smallest manned warship, the — — let alone a or . At just over $20 million apiece, it is vastly cheaper than manned craft, too.
Sea Hunter‘s size and cost open an intriguing new niche in naval operations. Imagine of small, inexpensive, and above all expendable unmanned craft scouting ahead of or escorting traditional task forces. If the roboats get blown up, it costs no lives and relatively little treasure. If the roboats survive, their sensors provide invaluable intelligence to the fleet, and intelligence can win wars.
DARPA concept of ACTUV hunting an enemy submarine.
Sea Hunter is currently kitted out as a sub-hunter, with sonar to find submarines: Its program name is ACTUV, a nested acronym for ASW (Anti-Submarine Warfare) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel. But that’s arguably a misnomer. ACTUV is designed as a modular “truck” with the physical capacity and software “hooks” to install a wide variety of payloads, DARPA program manager Scott Littlefield told reporters. (Littlefield stuck to sensors, but the possibility of arming ACTUV certainly exists).
So what’s crucial in the coming two-year test period is not any particular payload: It’s the that directs the vessel’s operations overall.
DARPA has worked hard getting the robot boat compliant with international collision regulations, or COLREGs. It has multiple redundant radars and collision-avoidance algorithms to keep it from running into other vessels, Littlefield said. The program is developing software that can distinguish a sailboat from a motor vessel, a crucial distinction under COLREGs since wind-driven craft can’t maneuver out of the way as easily. It should even be possible for ACTUV’s algorithms to understand the meaning of different bells, whistles, and horns, as COLREGs require for vessels in fog. If another craft wants to talk to ACTUV, however, the robot’s not smart enough to converse: The radio call will be patched through via satellite to a distant human.
In fact, DARPA envisions constant human supervision for ACTUV. But it won’t be like a Predator drone, where a human constantly operates the unmanned system by remote control, Littlefield emphasized. Instead, the human will plan missions and issue general orders for the ACTUV to execute on its own, for example telling the vessel an area to sweep for enemy submarines.
During testing, a human will actually ride on Sea Hunter with a full set of controls just in case, said Littlefield, the same approach used on the experimental Google car. But the long-term plan is to put the human supervisor on shore or on a ship.
Robert Work
A major goal of testing will be working out how to operate ACTUV in coordination with vessels, both manned and unmanned. (The Army is working on similar “manned-unmanned teaming” between drones and manned helicopters). Such a combination of humans and robots in a — sometimes called a “” approach — is central to Deputy Secretary Work’s vision of future warfare, the so-called . We can’t match for numbers, the reasoning goes, but if we support our relatively few human combatants with robots, we can their advantage and prevail.
Bernard
Junior Member
On-speed waters tests of DARPA’s Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV), Feb. 17, 2016.
US Christens First Ghost Ship (and The Dawn of The Robotic Navy)
12:24 PM ET
Autonomous vessels like this submarine hunter will play a growing role in future naval missions and will soon crowd the seas.
The Defense Department christened the Sea Hunter, a 132-foot robot ghost ship designed to seek out and track diesel-powered submarines across the ocean. The start of the test phase for the program on Thursday signals a new dawn for autonomous systems at sea, which, Pentagon officials say, will perform an ever-wider variety of jobs and could fundamentally change the way militaries operate on the water.
Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, The ...
The Sea Hunter is the first of a new type of ocean drone, called an Anti-submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. The goal of the program: field an autonomous ship with the range and endurance to go anywhere in the world while avoiding collisions with other ships and obeying the rules of navigation. “Current unmanned surface vessel systems and concepts are operated as close-adjuncts to conventional manned ships – they are launched and recovered from manned ships, tele-operated from manned ships, and are limited to direct support of manned ship missions. The ACTUV system will be a first of its kind unmanned naval vessel that is designed and sized for theater or global independent deployment,” reads the from 2014.
Below is footage from some ACTUV trial runs. The vessel can travels 27 knots and was designed to stay at sea for as long as 70 days, but the actual voyage duration depends on fuel burn.
Although the ship is designed to sail unmanned, a human operator will maintain contact and make sure the ship is obeying nautical rules and is on mission. “The human being is not joysticking,” said DARPA program manager Scott Littlefield. Rather the operator stays in the loop via what DARPA calls sparse remote supervisory control. The ship perceives its environment via F- and X-band radar, the ship automatic identification system (required on ships of greater than 300 tons), and a camera. DARPA is working with the Office of Naval Research on a stereoscopic camera and software that can do advanced image recognition of other ships that it encounters. If a second vessel meets ACTUV on the open sea and needs to make bridge-to-bridge contact, the remote human operator will do the talking.
ACTUV is designed to track the new, quieter generation of diesel-powered submarines, a rising concern for the Pentagon, and with a price tag between $200 million and $300 million they are proliferating. Iran currently has 17 diesel attack submarines; China, 53. “Some observers about the Navy’s ability to counter Chinese submarines,” according to the Congressional Research Service, or CRS. Cases in point: in 2006, a Chinese Song sub surfaced five miles from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk. And last October a Chinese attack submarine trailed and simulated a missile attack on the carrier USS Ronald Reagan off the southern tip of Japan.
These sorts of incidents are where ACTUV could help close a critical gap. And there are other sea monsters out there, including mines.
Responding to a variety of threats will require different modules and sensor payloads on the ACTUV, which DARPA is exploring with the ONR. Just days before the christening, Matt Klunder, a retired rear admiral and former ONR chief, was at the Pentagon discussing work that the company Harris, where he now serves as vice president for Defense Department strategy, is doing in new sensor payloads and what they mean for future autonomous vessels.
“Now we’ve also got these incredibly small micro-payloads that we can put on these autonomous platforms that make them unbelievably effective in terms of a multitude of missions for the Navy, Marine Corps, Army, Air Force, pick one. It’s really given us an ability to now scale these autonomous platforms into many, many multi-function missions,” Klunder told Defense One.
Klunder spearheaded autonomy research at ONR. During that time ONR developed the Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, or CARACaS, a small cube not much bigger than a paperweight that with a few other modifications can turn any boat into an autonomous vessel. That led to a key demonstration of next-generation swarming capability on the James River in 2014. Some 13 small, rigid-hulled inflatable, or RHIB, boats were outfitted with CARACaS and the ability to conduct coordinated maneuvers in defense of a ship.
“Now we’ve got these micro-payloads down to the size of my hand, literally. So now I can stack many, many multi-function capabilities,” he said, “There are electronic capabilities that you could put on that ghost ship, as Now, think about not just one of them, but potentially more than one of those ACTUV ghost ships on the blue water, potentially with a number of different mission payloads. You might have something that would be very intriguing and make our adversaries very concerned.”
Autonomy, the Navy Way
It is this unique approach and embrace of autonomy that in many ways separates the Navy from the other services. Air Force leaders, for instance, are allergic to the terms “drone” and unmanned vehicle, preferring instead “remotely piloted aircraft,” or RPA. They take great pains to remind the press of all the manpower that goes into a combat air patrol with a nominally unmanned Reaper or Predator. A ground crew launches the drone, a second crew, often out of Creech Air Force Base, in Nevada, takes over the mission in flight. There’s a pilot, a sensor operator, and data analysts all watching carefully. “For every RPA combat air patrol there are nearly 200 people supporting the mission in various capacities,” U.S. Air Force public affairs last year, as though this inefficiency were an asset.
Many Navy leaders, meanwhile, have recognized that autonomous vessels, whether specifically designed or retrofitted, aren’t just a part of future naval dominance, they are key. “You can listen to the senior leadership in the Pentagon today, there are so many dynamic and troubling hot spots around the globe now, it’s not just one or two places, it’s everywhere,” says Klunder. “I would almost offer to you that they need these low cost numerous, autonomous vehicles and platforms to keep our nation and our partners’ national security safe. You cannot do it with just these exquisite, specialized platforms. We do need them in very high risk scenarios but I will also tell you that because we need to be all over the globe all the time to combat terrorism and extremist forces and to keep our partner’s secure, we absolutely need the ability to convert these existing platforms to very effective war-fighting capabilities with autonomy and with micro-payloads.”
One of the more controversial of those expensive, exquisite platforms is the littoral combat ship, or LCS. At $440 million per ship, it can modified for submarine hunting, mine clearing, and escorting larger valuable ships. But for all the cost, and to the ship’s armoring and guns, against Chinese anti-ship cruise missiles. Many of the primary jobs that the Navy is envisioning for the LCS are all tasks that the ACTUV, with a target cost of around $20 million per unit, might do as well.
Excellent Jura !
Some comments, very interesting for futur LCS with a decent armament and the prize is not really more big and much more capable.
Ofc SSBN-X to funded is a problem need to be fixed idealy with a special budget for help USN and also some LA RCOH, but nice shipbuilding plan with especialy in 2020's 4 DDG/FF/FFG by year with a ramp up for FY Ship. budgets 2017/21 : 14.7 to 16.8 billions.
Forecast but according we see very probable in 2021 USN is at its peak with
11 CVN now 10
33 big AA ships now 30
148 main combattants CG+DDG+SSN now 138 : + 10 !
And about 20+ LCS now 6
For strength the best from 2005 and removal of first Ticonderoga and Spruance.
Last edited: