Naval Sea Systems Command (NAVSEA), the service’s technology development arm, announced today that LaWS (Laser Weapons System) had “successfully tracked, engaged, and destroyed” a drone in flight, during an over-the-water engagement at San Nicholas Island, Calif.
via Navy’s Drone Death Ray Takes Out Targets at Sea | Danger Room | Wired.com.
It’s a good document, showing that NATO is definitely heading in the right direction. However, you can tell that much of the experts are stuck in the mud a bit and that the US is using this document to flex its muscles in Iran’s direction.
NATO needs to form a new and clear strategic vision, one that not only updates it’s doctrine and relevance, but also shows this to the rest of the world.
Not only is the F-35 underperforming and overpriced, it’s also not an air dominance fighter. It’s a point defence fighter with the same limitations of the F-16 when it first came out. If you want to play with the big boys, you gotta have a big stick, and the F-35 just isn’t it.
Now it’s flayaway price is estimated at $135m, a lot more than the $60-$90m projected and a whole lot more than a new F-16 or even a latest model F-18.
Dump this programme, get F-22 back on the rails (if you’re American) or buy Eurofighter / Rafale / Gripen (if you’re European).
Last year, the US Air Force reported incremental unit procurement cost to buy one more F-22 in Fiscal 2010, assuming a 20-aircraft multi-year contract. The cost was $138 million.At the time, the F-35 seemed like a bargain by comparison. The official cost estimate, unchanged since 2007, pinned the average procurement cost for the F-35 between $60-$90 million, depending on the variant.Those assumptions for the F-35 now look almost ridiculously rosy. The Department of Defense released a document today revising the F-35 cost estimate by up to nearly 90% [read full story].We now know the F-35 will cost between $114 million to $135 million, adjusted for inflation. That average cost assumes the US Air Force will still buy 1,763 F-35As despite plans to draw-down to a total of 2,000 fighters, including 186 F-22s already on order.
via F-35 sticker shocks the $138 million F-22 – The DEW Line.
Opinion piece by a former CIA operative on its current lack of operational capability,
On December 30, in one of the deadliest attacks in CIA history, an Al Qaeda double agent schemed his way onto a U.S. base in Afghanistan and blew himself into the next life, taking seven Americans with him. How could this have happened? Agency veteran Robert Baer explains, offering chilling new details about the attack and a plea to save the dying art of espionage
http://www.gq.com/news-politics/politics/201004/dagger-to-the-cia
It used to be that you needed a huge cellphone network to start mapping changes in air currents, but now these guys have developed a sensor that can measure the movement and displacement of air particles using a sensor smaller than a matchstick head!
The Microflown
The Microflown is the worlds first and only MEMS technology based sensor that can measure the acoustic particle velocity. By measuring the temperature difference in the cross section of two extremely thin platinum wires placed in parallel, this extremely fast mass flow sensor is capable of monitoring the movement of air particles. Any sound field is described completely by both the (scalar) value sound pressure and the (vector) value acoustic particle velocity. Understandably, acoustic testing becomes much easier if both acoustic quantities can be measured. But the Microflown sensor platform can also be used to measure:
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structural velocity
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sound pressure
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temperature
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DC flow
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acceleration
via Microflown Technologies – Home.
well well well, not that we didn’t expect it – it’s now delayed by a year and development costs are $100m over budget allready.
Now if only the Netherlands had bought something like Eurofighter or Rafale.
F-35 Delayed Again | Defense Tech.
Looks like the Rafale provides a lot more bang for buck than the F-22, at least in close range…
In those six engagements, the F-22 scored one gun kill, but the other five dogfights ended in a draw, Air & Cosmos says. Another sources tells the magazine the F-22 scored two gun kills, with four nulls.
via UAE missile demands and more Rafale v. Raptor rumors – The DEW Line.
The US Navy had 2 flying aircraft carriers – zeppelins, which launched and recovered biplanes using a skyhook. The USS Akron and the USS Macon The Sparrowhawk aircraft had their landing gear removed and had to hit a hook that slung them in a corner in and out of the ship. No arrestor cable, no launch rail and a better safety record than current carriers. The end of the airship era ended the project, unfortunately.
Wreck of 1930s flying aircraft carrier dubbed ‘historic’ • The Register.
Boeings airborne laser has had its’ first shootdown – a short range ballistic missle, which was destroyed in the boost phase: the earliest stage in flight a missle has been shot down to date.
Airborne Laser hits 16-year-old goal — extremely quietly [Updated w/video] – The DEW Line.
This is a newly overhauled unit, zero-houred. Not bad!
$5M Buys the Ride of Your Life | Autopia | Wired.com.
It turns out that there is a universal human method for doing insurgency, when it comes down to the number of casualties and the timing of events. This pattern is distinct and is based on an approximate power law.
Slashdot Science Story | Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern.
It looks like the Iranians have found out that the video feeds from Predator drones are in some cases unencrypted and can be tapped into using a $26,- program called Skygrabber.
FOXNews.com – Iranian-Backed Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones.
Now it turns out that the ROVER system, a hand held video system for infantry, also recieves unencrypted video from all kinds of airborne sources, from U2’s to Harriers, Tornado’s, F-15’s, F-16’s, etc. And can be tapped in the same way.
Now this is nothing new – some guy was tapping into unencrypted military satellite feeds during the Iraqi wars – and is due in part to bandwidth limitations: the militaries are huge bandwidth hogs and there just isn’t enough to go around for all the tasks they’d like to use, let alone if it was all encrypted.
The question is, can Skygrabber tap targetted drones or is it a haphazard affair?
These guys make the original US military flight sunglasses, starting at only $70,-
The art of swordmaking has remained fundamentally unchanged for the past couple of centuries, but Dan Watson has gone and changed the way the steel is tempered, making for swords twice as tough and flexible as any of the old ways. He does this by making the molecular strands in the steel twist in a curve instead of remaining in straight lines, and by using cryogenic freezing systems to ensure that the hardening of the molecules occurs in a completely controlled and optimum manner.
Expect to pay around $20.000,- for one of these…
Angel Sword Store | Choosing a Sword | Sword, Blades, Katana, Buccaneer, Angel.
A single sheet of this applied as sticky wallpaper is enough to stop a wrecking ball. Two sheets stop small projectiles. It stretches and catches the blast debris and then elastically returns the wall to its’ former state.
Xflex Blast Protection Systems.
When sprayed over an area, after a while the bacteria covering mines start to glow grean, making cleanup a doddle.
BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Edinburgh, East and Fife | Glowing bugs could find landmines.
And it looks like the F-35 JSF will probably be even worse. This premature buckling of the landing pads by the hot exhaust fumes, mean that the pads (which you can’t just go and replace without capsizing the ship) will run out before the ship does.
The USMC has issued DARPA a request to invent landing pads that are refrigerated and non-skid in order to mitigate the effect of the planes landing on them.
V-22 Osprey, stealth jumpjet ‘need refrigerated landing pads’ • The Register.
A passenger jet is to be deliberately crash-landed as part of a scientific experiment on Channel 4 that the broadcaster hopes will be one of its biggest hits of next year.
Two pilots will parachute from the 300-seat airliner after setting it on autopilot to crash at high speed into the desert. The plane will be loaded with cameras and sensors recording the impact of the crash, which Channel 4 said would provide invaluable information about how planes react in potentially fatal accidents.
[…]
In a separate programme, Channel 4 will recreate a typical row of 1940s terraced houses before blowing them up with bombs identical to those used by the German airforce during the war, including a V2 rocket.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/nov/12/plane-crash-tv-channel-4
This is a very comprehensive flight test review of the Rafale.
FLIGHT TEST: Dassault Rafale – Rampant Rafale.
The U.S. Air Force has a morale problem with its combat pilots. The issue is lack of action for the pilots. That, plus the increased use of unmanned aircraft, and the very real prospect that the age of the manned combat aircraft may be coming to an end.
http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20091102.aspx
The U.S. Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) recently demonstrated autonomous operations by multiple “swarms” of unmanned air and ground vehicles, unattended ground sensors, video cameras and other devices linked together in an intelligent network powered by EdgeFrontier platform technologies from Augusta Systems, Inc.
via NAVAIR And Augusta Demo Operations Of Multiple Swarms Of UAVs And Sensors.
Basically using one operator to control a fleet of aircraft.
The RAF did tests on swarm UAV operations from an airborne controller in a Tornado in 2007 using QinetiQ technology called Autonomy
I wonder if they were using the fluid dynamics model to control these swarms?
This article explores why computers can’t do floating point maths, which is what makes Excel and all those online calculators such lousy mathematicians – basically because computers are binary, they can’t calculate anything after a decimal point, so the workaround is to put the number including the decimal point in a register of a certain size (say 32 bits) and reserve a few parts of the register for the decimal. Should the number you need to calculate become too big for the register, you run into trouble with rounding errors, which can compound. It then shows how nasty compound errors can become by citing the example of why a Patriot missle battery missed a Scud attack, resulting in the deaths of 24 people.
Why computers suck at maths | News | TechRadar UK.
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