Originally Posted by
GLIDER 90
Afternoon All
With understanding that the RAF Sentinel R1 Aircraft will be withdrawn from service in 2021. With a short service life I would have thought with all state of the art equipment and surveillance & Airborne Battlefield equipment it would have gone on for another 30 years?
Glider 90
The thing about "state of the art" electronic equipment is that by the time you get it into service it is no longer "state of the art" and 5 years later it's antique in computing terms.
e.g. Yellowgate, a 60's / 70's tech ESM system entered service in the mid 80's lumbered with 8 inch Floppy Disk drives and processors incapable of dealing with the amount of data.
The ASTOR project dates back to the 90's - remember the 286 386 486 PC's? Productivity programs without GUI's? Hard drive capacities measured in MB not GB or TB?
The only positive reason to keep it IMHO is that Vlad is more likely now than at any time since the Cold War to send masses of tanks across the North German Plain - exactly what ASTOR was designed for in the first place.