thanks, but I disagree with the situational awareness bit. It's only like looking down a straw if the sensor doesn't have a contextual function, ie one camera zoomed in and a twinned camera zoomed out, showing the end of the straw in its context. Fairly simple to do and available on some platforms we already have.
You get no Sit awareness at all from a cockpit with the Mk 1 eyeball when it's 150 miles from what the radar is looking at.
The platform is just a means to an end; the critical bit is the sensors and the associated communications. UAVs in particular live or die on their comms. Because our networks don't exist in any meaningful form, ASTOR is necessarily platform-centric. UAVs are tending more to distributed systems, but it will take several leaps of vision and education before the MOD is able to find the words to set a requirement, never mind deliver, a properly networked and integrated system of systems. Until they do, self-contained platforms like ASTOR will continue to be developed in my view.