Since the Chinese People’s Liberation Army Air Force operationalised the J-20 fifth generation fighter in February 2017, which made China only the second country in the
Good news but I get the impression the wars of the 2030s are going to heavily involve UAVs aka drones.
Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI? Six drones that can be replaced by just building more and launching them from a field. And the drones can be as expensive and specialized or cheap as the specific operation demands, from overwhelming an enemy with hundreds of them at once to just above a dozen of the most top of the line models.
Fighters seem like they’d have limited utility in a peer conflict. For someone like the US that likes bombing people who can’t fight back they’re quite useful. But for fighting the US and its vassals I’m not certain you need more than a kind of border force of them that can do intercepts and basic air policing around your borders. That is that in any war you’d pull them back a bit and hit the enemy with waves of drones and missiles and use them as deep defense against penetrating invaders who somehow manage to get past your ground-based anti-air (which needs to be the most effective thing as dog-fights are not an effective way of dealing with enemy air intrusion).
Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI?
The problem with relying wholly on remotely operated drones, especially over vast distances, is that they can be jammed, disrupted, or even completely overtaken, hacked and possesed by your enemy.
Electronic warfare is an absolutely huge component of modern warfare, and would be even more important in a China v US conflict than it currently is in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has seen both sides doing everything I first mentioned to the numerous, cheap, smaller and shorter ranged drones.
Even before the Ukraine war kicked off (again) in 2022, US Predator and I think even Global Hawk drones were occasionally being hacked into by ISIS/Iran, first being able to hijack the live camera feed, eventually being able to issue commands to them and have them crash themselves.
Modern 5th Gen ‘Fighter’ jets, at least those fielded by the US, basically are also, simultaneous to being a fast, stealth, air to air or air to ground missile truck, are also capable of a significant degree of electronic warfare and command and control functions that were previously only doable with dedicated AWACS and ELINT aircraft.
What that means is if you throw a bunch of drone fighters at them, they might be able to just completely jam their remote control signal, or even assert control over them and tell them to crash themselves.
I would imagine China has, at the very least, similar capabilites in their aircraft. They already have entire PLA mobile infantry regiments that specialize in electronic warfare.
Think the modern BattleStar Galactica space fleet battles that are more about hacking than anything else.
It is incredibly difficult to find detailed information about exact capabilities of this kind, muchless predict how an encounter would play out… because relevant details are absurdly classified, on both sides.
Anyway, the US approach to this problem is to have their 6th gen ‘fighter’ still be manned, but have a number of drone wingmen aircraft, which are not remotely operated from a carrier or base, but are controlled by the 6th gen fighter itself.
At least… thats the vague, general idea. Again, no specific details, and of course we haven’t actually seen any footage of any test flights.
But for fighting the US and its vassals I’m not certain you need more than a kind of border force of them that can do intercepts and basic air policing around your borders.
If your war is purely defensive, maybe?
Realistically, probably not, no.
The entire Iraqi Airforce was destroyed basically in a week or two of the US’s initial commencement of hostilities in 91, most of their ‘air border’ aircraft were destroyed on the ground, in their own territory, as well as basically all of their ground based AA, then the ground invasion began, with US aircraft enjoying nearly totally uncontested reign over the skies.
A US infantry squad with no long range AT stumbles upon 12 Iraqi t 64s and 4 T 72s a mile and a half away?
Perfect! Call in the A 10s and F 111s, or AH 64s or SuperCobras, tanks are all gone in 2 to 4 hrs.
Doesn’t work that way if the Iraqis can scramble their own fighters.
A huge reason the Russo Ukrainian war is still dragging on instead of being a decisive, lightning victory for Russia is that Russia was unable to destroy all of Ukraine’s air and anti air assets as the US did to Iraq.
The astounding battlefield benefit conferred by air supremacy (which means the enemy has no airborne or ground based assets they can effectively use against your air assets) means that both sides in any kind of large scale conflict, where both sides have airforces, not just an offensive one, are highly incentivized to first strike or pre emptive strike any enemy air assets that could possibly be diverted to the main area of operation.
… But any realistic China v US war scenario would involve offensive stikes into US/Ally territories anyway, as China really really really wants Taiwan back.
The PLA and PLAN and PLAAF are not going to be able to take Taiwan with a marine invasion without launching pre emptive attacks against nearby US/Ally airbases, US Carrier Groups, US/Ally Naval Groups, etc, otherwise all of those things would attack the troop carriers.
That is that in any war you’d pull them back a bit and hit the enemy with waves of drones and missiles and use them as deep defense against penetrating invaders who somehow manage to get past your ground-based anti-air
Unless those attackers cannot be reliably targeted by your ground based AA missiles due to being stealth, and can potentially jam/takeover any drones that get near enough to target said stealth aircraft… in that scenario it makes much more sense to try and wipe out your enemy’s threatening air assets before you are threatened with a massive land invasion.
(which needs to be the most effective thing as dog-fights are not an effective way of dealing with enemy air intrusion).
Dog fights are less than ineffective, they’re likely to be things that don’t even really happen if both air superiority/multi role fighter jets are some significant degree of stealth, as is the case with the US and China’s.
You don’t send in non stealthy bombers or ground attack aircraft to an area you know has air defenses or a nearby air wing that can scramble and shoot them down.
Two opposing stealthy fighter aircraft approach each other from 50 miles away. By the time they are 10-20 miles away, one of them has superior ability to detect, target acquire, and then fire an AA missile at the other, then leaves. The other one either has no idea anything is amiss and then suddenly blows up, or gets a warning 5 seconds before impact and barely manages to flare/jam/chaff and then leave.
At no point are the aircraft in visual range of each other.
i disagree and i think this website tends to fall into jeune-ecoleism whether it be about drones or hypersonic missiles vs surface assets.
for the role you mention specifically, using drones for an air superiority fighter has a couple major problems. firstly is input lag; there is a significant delay from operator input, to the drone reacting because of latency. secondly it’s possible to disrupt the link between drone and controller. These can be solved with autonomous control systems but these will never be as smart or as flexible as a human in the pilots seat. in terms of anti drone airspace denial, all the regular a2/ad countermeasures work against large drones. for small observation drones, large SAMs aren’t worth it and have trouble picking them up on radar but various gun systems can do the job perfectly well. if you want a drone swarm, you need small drones, that means small payloads and short range which makes them counterable by gun systems. electronic warfare, hacking and jamming can be extremely effective against drones, something like 90% of ukrainian drone attacks are unsuccessful.
in ukraine specifically you have to bear in mind that drones make their own propaganda. every drone records its flight, and most are commercial and directly designed to upload and share that footage, so its only a couple clicks from the battlefield to some gore video on twitter. all other elements need to explicitly add a camera somewhere, record that footage, transfer it to a computer, and then upload it. thats another massive filter right there.
so we see a much larger share of drones action in the war than any other weapon(-s system), distorting our view.
weaponised drones further distort it: an unsuccessful attack has no significant cost, you just don’t upload it. or for FPV drones where you cant see the aftermath either way, you can still upload it and claim it a success regardless of if you destroyed your target. this further inflates their importance, because people will think they do much more damage than they actually did.
it may well be the case that drones are the future of air superiority but they are not the near future of air superiority and that’s a very relevant distinction for most DoDs.
You have to understand that china’s primary military concern is over the Taiwan strait and south China sea. They are heavily focused on naval warfare and not land based warfare. And it’s not like the Chinese don’t have significant anti-ship missile capabilities or drone capabilities.
Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI?
You’ve missed another aspect of this. Our existing fighter jets are limited in their capabilities by the meat sack that has to be inside them. We are capable of making machines that can perform maneuvers that would kill the human inside it very quickly. We limit them to prevent this.
Drone flight combat will have movement human beings wouldn’t survive.
I’m convinced that autonomous drone swarms will be the future of land combat. Take what we’ve seen in Ukraine with fpv drones and automate it on smaller drones in swarms of thousands. A single truck could open its back door and deploy thousands.
Collateral damage will occur but be calculated as acceptable in just the same way they currently calculate it for standard bombing.
You’ve missed another aspect of this. Our existing fighter jets are limited in their capabilities by the meat sack that has to be inside them. We are capable of making machines that can perform maneuvers that would kill the human inside it very quickly. We limit them to prevent this.
None of that really matters for modern, beyond visual range, aircraft to aircraft combat, or aircraft trying to evade ground launched AA missiles.
What actually matters is being able to detect a missile is locked onto you in time, what angle its coming at you from, then jamming the oncoming missile, timing your flare/chaff release correctly, then correctly timing your non hyper extreme, but properly oriented/angled evasive manuever depending on the speed and approach vector of the missile.
If you do not do that entire dance timed and angled correctly, a few extra G range of possible manuevers is not likely to make a difference.
Air to air missiles do not need to physically contact their target before explosing to combat neutralize them, they haven’t since at least the 80s if not earlier.
An Aim 9, for example, has a kill radius of about 30ft, they detonate via proximity fuses, not contact fuses. There are many larger AA missiles with larger kill radii than that.
Just barely juking one likely means you are still dead, you have the get the thing to entirely lose lock and veer significantly away from you (or you from it), such that it isn’t likely to regain lock again.
Also your drone has to deal with network latency, like playing in a laggy video game server, due to being remotely operated from potentially hundreds of miles away, further decreasing reaction time, so good luck with all that timing.
Or, maybe you did the missle’s job for it by pulling a sustained 12 G manuever that caused the drone’s wings to rip off.
Doing insane evasive manuevers to lose a missile lock is mostly movie/video game stuff… it looks really cool and makes the viewer/player think that incredible skill gives you a bonus life, but reality doesn’t work like that.
EDIT: The absolutely main, primary wrong impression you will get about intense, military aircraft flight from only watching movies and playing video games is the idea that aircraft bodies are basically solid blocks of homogenous metal that can only be broken by weapons damage.
Movies very rarely depict an aircraft pulling up or turning or diving so hard, at a high speed, that it basically rips itself apart from the drag.
This is because it almost always kills the pilot.
You have to watch like airshow disaster videos to see what that actually looks like.
Even flight simulators don’t really depict this visually. MSFT Flight Sim / FSX will just give you a ‘overstressed’ pause/fail screen, but doesn’t bother to actually render your 777’s wings fucking snapping off. I don’t think DCS even does, but its been quite a while since I’ve played, might be wrong.
Arcadier/less realistic games (Ace Combat, Battlefield Series, Warthunder on anything other than full sim mode?) basically never depict this either.
I’ve actually only been able to even kind of simulate this properly in a game with a heavily realism modded Kerbal Space Program.
Maneuvers do not need to be performed by a human either. They’re undertaken faster by direct on-board computers that are then augmented by pilot. A 50-100ms latency will be completely offset by the machine’s ability to react and think being vastly superior to any pilot.
If you are describing computer assisted, fly by wire systems… you’ve basically got it backwards.
The human inputs a desired command to the yoke and pedals, and the computer translates this from an absolute, direct command to the control surfaces, into a smoothed out set of inputs that takes into account all the other flaps settings and trim levels and slight difference in thrust between different engines and accounts for a difference in center of gravity due to different fuels tanks being differently full or empty and all that kinda stuff.
If you are describing a system on board an aircraft that engages some kind of autopilot for evasive manuevers in a missile lock scenario, that’s news to me and I’d love to learn more about it… as far as I am aware, especially on a military aircraft, you’ll have systems like ‘removedin betty’ that’ll scream commands at you, but I’ve never heard of a system that takes control away from the pilot and then makes extreme manuevers.
(Outside of the recent Boeing Max MCAS problems, they were not designed to do extreme manuevers, but malfunctioned due to software bugs and instrument failures… oh and Boeing didn’t fucking tell the pilots it was even on the aircraft, nor how to actually turn it off when it fucked up)
As for the network latency, it could be significantly worse effective latency than your 50 to 100ms depending on distance and atmospheric conditions causing packet loss, the signal may be being relayed through a variety of different systems… but all the specifics on that are or would be very classified.
And, I mentioned it in my other reply in this thread but not to you, but its relevant here:
You can jam a drone operator’s signal. Happens all the time right now in Ukraine. That means your feed cuts out and you completely lose control.
Even worse, you can hack into it, hijack it, and gain control of the drone.
These are extremely significant problems with remotely operated weapons of war.
One potential solution to this is having an extremely advanced autopilot, to the point that its functionally an AI, running locally onboard the drone fighter jet, to make its own decisions should remote operator contact be lost.
But uh… go watch some Tesla FSD videos to see how that can go wrong…
any war will have to involve quantity has a quality of its own against fancy systems, so idk why they do them.
Drones have vulnerability to loss of control (be it your satellite constellation blown up or rf interference), but outside of that (which signifies full blown, edge of nuke, war), pilots would be useless.
Good news but I get the impression the wars of the 2030s are going to heavily involve UAVs aka drones.
Why have one heavily trained pilot able to pilot exactly one plane who stands a good chance of dying if it gets shot down when you can have one heavily trained pilot sitting in a drone base safely away from the battlefield commanding 6 drones with or without the help of specialized AI? Six drones that can be replaced by just building more and launching them from a field. And the drones can be as expensive and specialized or cheap as the specific operation demands, from overwhelming an enemy with hundreds of them at once to just above a dozen of the most top of the line models.
Fighters seem like they’d have limited utility in a peer conflict. For someone like the US that likes bombing people who can’t fight back they’re quite useful. But for fighting the US and its vassals I’m not certain you need more than a kind of border force of them that can do intercepts and basic air policing around your borders. That is that in any war you’d pull them back a bit and hit the enemy with waves of drones and missiles and use them as deep defense against penetrating invaders who somehow manage to get past your ground-based anti-air (which needs to be the most effective thing as dog-fights are not an effective way of dealing with enemy air intrusion).
The problem with relying wholly on remotely operated drones, especially over vast distances, is that they can be jammed, disrupted, or even completely overtaken, hacked and possesed by your enemy.
Electronic warfare is an absolutely huge component of modern warfare, and would be even more important in a China v US conflict than it currently is in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine has seen both sides doing everything I first mentioned to the numerous, cheap, smaller and shorter ranged drones.
Even before the Ukraine war kicked off (again) in 2022, US Predator and I think even Global Hawk drones were occasionally being hacked into by ISIS/Iran, first being able to hijack the live camera feed, eventually being able to issue commands to them and have them crash themselves.
Modern 5th Gen ‘Fighter’ jets, at least those fielded by the US, basically are also, simultaneous to being a fast, stealth, air to air or air to ground missile truck, are also capable of a significant degree of electronic warfare and command and control functions that were previously only doable with dedicated AWACS and ELINT aircraft.
What that means is if you throw a bunch of drone fighters at them, they might be able to just completely jam their remote control signal, or even assert control over them and tell them to crash themselves.
I would imagine China has, at the very least, similar capabilites in their aircraft. They already have entire PLA mobile infantry regiments that specialize in electronic warfare.
Think the modern BattleStar Galactica space fleet battles that are more about hacking than anything else.
It is incredibly difficult to find detailed information about exact capabilities of this kind, muchless predict how an encounter would play out… because relevant details are absurdly classified, on both sides.
Anyway, the US approach to this problem is to have their 6th gen ‘fighter’ still be manned, but have a number of drone wingmen aircraft, which are not remotely operated from a carrier or base, but are controlled by the 6th gen fighter itself.
At least… thats the vague, general idea. Again, no specific details, and of course we haven’t actually seen any footage of any test flights.
If your war is purely defensive, maybe?
Realistically, probably not, no.
The entire Iraqi Airforce was destroyed basically in a week or two of the US’s initial commencement of hostilities in 91, most of their ‘air border’ aircraft were destroyed on the ground, in their own territory, as well as basically all of their ground based AA, then the ground invasion began, with US aircraft enjoying nearly totally uncontested reign over the skies.
A US infantry squad with no long range AT stumbles upon 12 Iraqi t 64s and 4 T 72s a mile and a half away?
Perfect! Call in the A 10s and F 111s, or AH 64s or SuperCobras, tanks are all gone in 2 to 4 hrs.
Doesn’t work that way if the Iraqis can scramble their own fighters.
A huge reason the Russo Ukrainian war is still dragging on instead of being a decisive, lightning victory for Russia is that Russia was unable to destroy all of Ukraine’s air and anti air assets as the US did to Iraq.
The astounding battlefield benefit conferred by air supremacy (which means the enemy has no airborne or ground based assets they can effectively use against your air assets) means that both sides in any kind of large scale conflict, where both sides have airforces, not just an offensive one, are highly incentivized to first strike or pre emptive strike any enemy air assets that could possibly be diverted to the main area of operation.
… But any realistic China v US war scenario would involve offensive stikes into US/Ally territories anyway, as China really really really wants Taiwan back.
The PLA and PLAN and PLAAF are not going to be able to take Taiwan with a marine invasion without launching pre emptive attacks against nearby US/Ally airbases, US Carrier Groups, US/Ally Naval Groups, etc, otherwise all of those things would attack the troop carriers.
Unless those attackers cannot be reliably targeted by your ground based AA missiles due to being stealth, and can potentially jam/takeover any drones that get near enough to target said stealth aircraft… in that scenario it makes much more sense to try and wipe out your enemy’s threatening air assets before you are threatened with a massive land invasion.
Dog fights are less than ineffective, they’re likely to be things that don’t even really happen if both air superiority/multi role fighter jets are some significant degree of stealth, as is the case with the US and China’s.
You don’t send in non stealthy bombers or ground attack aircraft to an area you know has air defenses or a nearby air wing that can scramble and shoot them down.
Two opposing stealthy fighter aircraft approach each other from 50 miles away. By the time they are 10-20 miles away, one of them has superior ability to detect, target acquire, and then fire an AA missile at the other, then leaves. The other one either has no idea anything is amiss and then suddenly blows up, or gets a warning 5 seconds before impact and barely manages to flare/jam/chaff and then leave.
At no point are the aircraft in visual range of each other.
i disagree and i think this website tends to fall into jeune-ecoleism whether it be about drones or hypersonic missiles vs surface assets.
for the role you mention specifically, using drones for an air superiority fighter has a couple major problems. firstly is input lag; there is a significant delay from operator input, to the drone reacting because of latency. secondly it’s possible to disrupt the link between drone and controller. These can be solved with autonomous control systems but these will never be as smart or as flexible as a human in the pilots seat. in terms of anti drone airspace denial, all the regular a2/ad countermeasures work against large drones. for small observation drones, large SAMs aren’t worth it and have trouble picking them up on radar but various gun systems can do the job perfectly well. if you want a drone swarm, you need small drones, that means small payloads and short range which makes them counterable by gun systems. electronic warfare, hacking and jamming can be extremely effective against drones, something like 90% of ukrainian drone attacks are unsuccessful.
in ukraine specifically you have to bear in mind that drones make their own propaganda. every drone records its flight, and most are commercial and directly designed to upload and share that footage, so its only a couple clicks from the battlefield to some gore video on twitter. all other elements need to explicitly add a camera somewhere, record that footage, transfer it to a computer, and then upload it. thats another massive filter right there.
so we see a much larger share of drones action in the war than any other weapon(-s system), distorting our view.
weaponised drones further distort it: an unsuccessful attack has no significant cost, you just don’t upload it. or for FPV drones where you cant see the aftermath either way, you can still upload it and claim it a success regardless of if you destroyed your target. this further inflates their importance, because people will think they do much more damage than they actually did.
it may well be the case that drones are the future of air superiority but they are not the near future of air superiority and that’s a very relevant distinction for most DoDs.
You have to understand that china’s primary military concern is over the Taiwan strait and south China sea. They are heavily focused on naval warfare and not land based warfare. And it’s not like the Chinese don’t have significant anti-ship missile capabilities or drone capabilities.
You’ve missed another aspect of this. Our existing fighter jets are limited in their capabilities by the meat sack that has to be inside them. We are capable of making machines that can perform maneuvers that would kill the human inside it very quickly. We limit them to prevent this.
Drone flight combat will have movement human beings wouldn’t survive.
I’m convinced that autonomous drone swarms will be the future of land combat. Take what we’ve seen in Ukraine with fpv drones and automate it on smaller drones in swarms of thousands. A single truck could open its back door and deploy thousands.
Collateral damage will occur but be calculated as acceptable in just the same way they currently calculate it for standard bombing.
None of that really matters for modern, beyond visual range, aircraft to aircraft combat, or aircraft trying to evade ground launched AA missiles.
What actually matters is being able to detect a missile is locked onto you in time, what angle its coming at you from, then jamming the oncoming missile, timing your flare/chaff release correctly, then correctly timing your non hyper extreme, but properly oriented/angled evasive manuever depending on the speed and approach vector of the missile.
If you do not do that entire dance timed and angled correctly, a few extra G range of possible manuevers is not likely to make a difference.
Air to air missiles do not need to physically contact their target before explosing to combat neutralize them, they haven’t since at least the 80s if not earlier.
An Aim 9, for example, has a kill radius of about 30ft, they detonate via proximity fuses, not contact fuses. There are many larger AA missiles with larger kill radii than that.
Just barely juking one likely means you are still dead, you have the get the thing to entirely lose lock and veer significantly away from you (or you from it), such that it isn’t likely to regain lock again.
Also your drone has to deal with network latency, like playing in a laggy video game server, due to being remotely operated from potentially hundreds of miles away, further decreasing reaction time, so good luck with all that timing.
Or, maybe you did the missle’s job for it by pulling a sustained 12 G manuever that caused the drone’s wings to rip off.
Doing insane evasive manuevers to lose a missile lock is mostly movie/video game stuff… it looks really cool and makes the viewer/player think that incredible skill gives you a bonus life, but reality doesn’t work like that.
EDIT: The absolutely main, primary wrong impression you will get about intense, military aircraft flight from only watching movies and playing video games is the idea that aircraft bodies are basically solid blocks of homogenous metal that can only be broken by weapons damage.
Movies very rarely depict an aircraft pulling up or turning or diving so hard, at a high speed, that it basically rips itself apart from the drag.
This is because it almost always kills the pilot.
You have to watch like airshow disaster videos to see what that actually looks like.
Even flight simulators don’t really depict this visually. MSFT Flight Sim / FSX will just give you a ‘overstressed’ pause/fail screen, but doesn’t bother to actually render your 777’s wings fucking snapping off. I don’t think DCS even does, but its been quite a while since I’ve played, might be wrong.
Arcadier/less realistic games (Ace Combat, Battlefield Series, Warthunder on anything other than full sim mode?) basically never depict this either.
I’ve actually only been able to even kind of simulate this properly in a game with a heavily realism modded Kerbal Space Program.
Maneuvers do not need to be performed by a human either. They’re undertaken faster by direct on-board computers that are then augmented by pilot. A 50-100ms latency will be completely offset by the machine’s ability to react and think being vastly superior to any pilot.
If you are describing computer assisted, fly by wire systems… you’ve basically got it backwards.
The human inputs a desired command to the yoke and pedals, and the computer translates this from an absolute, direct command to the control surfaces, into a smoothed out set of inputs that takes into account all the other flaps settings and trim levels and slight difference in thrust between different engines and accounts for a difference in center of gravity due to different fuels tanks being differently full or empty and all that kinda stuff.
If you are describing a system on board an aircraft that engages some kind of autopilot for evasive manuevers in a missile lock scenario, that’s news to me and I’d love to learn more about it… as far as I am aware, especially on a military aircraft, you’ll have systems like ‘removedin betty’ that’ll scream commands at you, but I’ve never heard of a system that takes control away from the pilot and then makes extreme manuevers.
(Outside of the recent Boeing Max MCAS problems, they were not designed to do extreme manuevers, but malfunctioned due to software bugs and instrument failures… oh and Boeing didn’t fucking tell the pilots it was even on the aircraft, nor how to actually turn it off when it fucked up)
As for the network latency, it could be significantly worse effective latency than your 50 to 100ms depending on distance and atmospheric conditions causing packet loss, the signal may be being relayed through a variety of different systems… but all the specifics on that are or would be very classified.
And, I mentioned it in my other reply in this thread but not to you, but its relevant here:
You can jam a drone operator’s signal. Happens all the time right now in Ukraine. That means your feed cuts out and you completely lose control.
Even worse, you can hack into it, hijack it, and gain control of the drone.
These are extremely significant problems with remotely operated weapons of war.
One potential solution to this is having an extremely advanced autopilot, to the point that its functionally an AI, running locally onboard the drone fighter jet, to make its own decisions should remote operator contact be lost.
But uh… go watch some Tesla FSD videos to see how that can go wrong…
we’re in ace combat 7 now
Lmao this is not a bad idea if you could somehow engineer a jet that can folder its wings so tightly it could fit.
They look like this in flight
just a big engine with stubby wings and weapons lol
Where do the missiles go though?
I mean, other than this thing basically being a missile.
internal weapons bays apparently
i love ace combat, but it doesn’t do realistic ammunition counts or weapon storage lol
You mean to say having 60 missiles isn’t realistic?
any war will have to involve quantity has a quality of its own against fancy systems, so idk why they do them.
Drones have vulnerability to loss of control (be it your satellite constellation blown up or rf interference), but outside of that (which signifies full blown, edge of nuke, war), pilots would be useless.