FARA - Future Armed Reconnaissance Aircraft

[lucklucky]

6 hours ago, bfng3569 said:

Call me old fashioned i guess, i just feel there's still a use and need for a man in the loop so to speak.  

Pilots cant be jammed or hacked.  Maybe that's over thinking the situation and undervaluing autonomy.

And they already designed 2 from scratch, that parts done already.

So are they supposed send a pigeon from the helicopter or fly over land forces and drop a message? 😝

And that implies that what they have seen and wrote in the message paper is real...we just have to go to naval recon historic records to see the number of errors.

Cooperative aircraft only survived in WW2 with aerial supremacy.

Edited February 15, 2024 by lucklucky

[bfng3569]

On 2/15/2024 at 6:33 PM, lucklucky said:

So are they supposed send a pigeon from the helicopter or fly over land forces and drop a message? 😝

And that implies that what they have seen and wrote in the message paper is real...we just have to go to naval recon historic records to see the number of errors.

Cooperative aircraft only survived in WW2 with aerial supremacy.

i was thinking smoke signals.  Maybe like the smoke generator from a tank, mount it the engine exhaust.....

and armed recon helicopter  with a pilot can still shoot.

[bojan]

While manned platforms also need to use coms, they need them much less then unmanned ones.

[lucklucky]

29 minutes ago, bojan said:

While manned platforms also need to use coms, they need them much less then unmanned ones.

That is correct until AI arrives in force.

[Cajer]

3 hours ago, bojan said:

While manned platforms also need to use coms, they need them much less then unmanned ones.

You still need a datalink for video or radar contacts etc otherwise you’re getting no recon. Unless you want to rely on verbal communication in which you still need radio at minimum, and you’re opening yourself up to all sorts of misreporting that we saw from naval recon in ww1/2.

Without data links your platforms are more or less useless, and with drones you’re risking fewer resources and logistical load.

You also don’t need constant control of the drones. They can be programmed to fly a route and just stream back what they see or even have software to auto classify what they see and just send back a much reduced dataset of type, number, location, and heading. This would have much lower bandwidth requirements and higher throughput than voice based recon reporting and can handle jamming better

Edited February 17, 2024 by Cajer

[Josh]

Target auto recognition will probably replace the human element and the live feed requirement in the near future. We are already seeing this in Ukraine; I suspect by the time FARA could have been fielded it would be obsolete. I doubt there will be any AH-64 replacement either.

[bojan]

19 minutes ago, Josh said:

Target auto recognition will probably replace the human element and the live feed requirement in the near future. We are already seeing this in Ukraine;...

We are seeing sucesful auto-detection, not auto-recognition. Difference is quite important.

[Cajer]

5 hours ago, bojan said:

We are seeing sucesful auto-detection, not auto-recognition. Difference is quite important.

I know people that have trained models to distinguish between the different T series of tanks with limited web scrapped datasets.  I would expect that even early on these wouldn't have worse performance than people when they are in a stressful environment (pilots/spotters).

[Mike1158]

Last I heard, Airwolf was destroyed in an accident in Germany.

[Josh]

On 2/18/2024 at 2:24 PM, bojan said:

We are seeing sucesful auto-detection, not auto-recognition. Difference is quite important.

We are not seeing successful recon or attack with regards to helicopters, regardless. And to be frank, Russia and Ukraine hardly represent the state of the art of AI or EO/IIR technology. Nor would a future FARA aircraft either, assuming that program went through the normal long winded western aircraft production process.

[Der Zeitgeist]

2 hours ago, Josh said:

And to be frank, Russia and Ukraine hardly represent the state of the art of AI or EO/IIR technology. 

They're the hottest playground for anyone working in these areas, though. You may want to read this: https://time.com/6691662/ai-ukraine-war-palantir/