More money down the toilet to Waste O'Space
 

This makes me sick to the core...

MOD Invests In Future Of Combat Air Systems

Note how the pictures of an operational RPAS in the article are all non-Waste O'Space products - there's a reason for that, they've yet to build one that will work properly on Ops! We'd be better off investing this money (£40m) in the UK car or satellite industry - at least there's some chance of a decent return for the UK taxpayer. How many would we not have to make redundant with £40m over 10 years? I reckon about 65 SNCOs/JOs or double that over 5 years.

Grrrrr!

LJ

Defence industrial capability
 

Putting aside for one moment the question of BAES and value for money (like many people on this forum, I'm not a fan):

Should the UK Govt aim to develop a serious, indigenous UAS/RPAS manufacturing capability?

My own view is that defence industrial capacity, like water, power and access to trade routes, is a strategic security question. Relying completely our allies (US or other) to always be prepared to sell us cutting edge defence tech seems negligent and naive. If we continue to rely on UOR funded procurements of US and Israeli/pseudo-French systems, we will pay a hefty price, both economically and, more importantly, in terms of assured access.

I would love to see British industry in a position (say) 10 years from now, when we were building world beating unmanned (uninhabited if you prefer) aircraft.

I believe smart, non-politically aportioned investment could see the UK competing with the Israeli UAS/RPAS industry in 5 years and with the US (on niche capabilities) in 10.

Britain used to have the world's best, most innovative aviation manufacturing sector. I honestly believe a similar situation is achievable with unmanned systems.

Israel came from nowhere to being the worlds 2nd best (arguably) UAS/RPAS manufacturer in the space of around 10 years. Why couldn't we do that?

What do others think?
I'm genuinely interested in people's considered thoughts on this.

Sun.

I believe your positive attitude Sun Who is what we all need in this country and I firmly believe that money invested in this technology is potentially well-spent. My experience of the company involved is that they do much better without Government or MOD interference - well thought out specifications - no mind changes every five minutes - some latitude for innovative solutions - professional contacts within the establishment.

What seems to have happened in the past is far too much vacillation and interference from career chasing uninformed ministry men.

Sun/LJ

I agree with you both. Baron Waste O'Space is a carbuncle on what was once a great industry that was mismanaged into what we have today - if anyone gets book tokens for Christmas I recommend this:

http://www.lightnings.org.uk/Images/...the-Clouds.jpg

I would like to see money invested into small-medium enterprises (SMEs). Companies like COBHAM are already teamed up with General Atomics and Marshalls could also be brought in to help - Rolls Royce are leading engine manufacturers so I'm sure if they saw a good opportunity to market an advanced propulsion system for a RPAS/UAS they'd be in like a rat up a drainpipe. There are plenty of other strong contenders as well - Martin Baker for example.

I just hate to see more money go down the drain to the carbuncle that is very unlikely to deliver anything good - and they haven't for years. := In fact the picture on the book above is probably their last semi-successful effort from near Blackpool, all the other successes in recent times were products of Brough, Hatfield and Filton.

CPL Clott

Sorry I don't buy this, what have they produced recently on their own that is worth selling to bail out our Nu Labour debt? All of their RPAS/UAS efforts have been a total disaster and so has their last effort to produce an ISTAR manned aircraft (adding ~£4.5Bn to the National Debt with nothing to show!).

Enough is enough - get the shareholders to invest in their own products and then if any good they will benefit.

CPL Clott

My experience of the money involved is that it produces more when spent at any UK company other than BAE

The £40m would be better spent buying another half a squadron of Reaper or a full squadron of Predator :ugh:

Sun Who (me) said:

How about we just accept that BAES are cr@p, for many reasons, and focus on what a British UAS success might look like?

Cpl Clot's suggestion of Cobham/Rolls is interesting. My own view is that we'd struggle to go direct VFR from nowt to any form of credible UCAS. How about a programme aimed at developing high-end autonomy, small-medium UAS, as a niche capability? Highly saleable to the ROTW. We already have world beating autonomy expertise in this country, residing mainly in Govt organisations, that could be shared with industry (in the right way).

I think a QinetiQ, Blue Bear Systems venture would be interesting.

Sun.

Leon,

Pred/Reaper is a class act, no doubt, and it's served us well. However, we can't operate it without US agreement (we don't have the infrastructure). Assured access, sovereignty, is a big deal for this type of capability.
Looking beyond HERRICK/ELLAMY, how might we apply MALE type UAS capability in future conflicts were the US are not playing?

Sun.

cheap building methods like this are the way forward, not the expensive stuff from BAE
3D printing: The world's first printed plane - tech - 27 July 2011 - New Scientist

Sun

If we bought the export versions (ie. the non-USAF standard birds) then we could do it all on our own. Satellite infrastructure is the easy part by either converting to X-band for our Skynet or using commercial Ku providers such as Intelsat (which most use anyway Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) | Intelsat General) or go the route of Iridium that the Customs and Border Protection Agency use (with a lot of limitations).

So I don't see infrastructure as an issue - unless you're talking bricks and mortar (which isn't a problem either).

LJ

Leon
two questions there
1) what would be the cost of the base stations?
2) how subcentible to jamming are the commercial sattelite networks? we don't want any drones wandering away...

Leon,
Yep, we could mimic DCGS using commercial satellite infra, but I don't think that's any more assured than relying on the US. Lots of effort has been put into assessing that as an option and it's fraught with issues.

That's one of the attractions of autonomy (for strike missions, that is, ISR would still be a struggle I think). However, that level of UAS cap would still be several years off for UK industry to achieve, even if we invested seriously now. I think a more realistic goal would be development of something in the WATCHKEEPER mould - only not sh!t. A proper ISTAR TUAV, with cutting edge sensors and weapons, a good level of autonomy and enabled by forward deployed and/or 'self-hop' VHF relay. All doable. I assess UK industry could deliver that for Defence inside 6 years IF we invested based on need not greed. Admittedly a big ask.

Sun

Randy said:

My view is that the answers are:

1) prohibitive but innovative solutions might reduce the cost significantly.
2) very.

Sun

When it comes to autonomy, it saves little on bandwidth or infrastructure as the "collect" is the big bit (2-12 mega bits per second depending on your sensor's capabilities) and the command link is the small bit (100-500 kilo bits per second depending on the complexity of the aircraft). Also, it is very unlikely that the required levels of autonomy would ever be ethical or morally accpetable - have a read of this very good paper by Elizabeth Quintana sponsored by the British Computer Society and RUSI http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/RUSI_ethics.pdf

In answer to the question on the cost of base stations, they're about 15% of the cost of the air vehicle and in the £40m estimate that was for a "system" (ie. Aircraft, ground control stations and the rest to make it work). The satellite link is not very easy to jam unless you have something like a Satellite Earth Station (SES) which would have a dish many metres accross - it would quickly become a target for a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile if it started to try and jam. The parabolic dishes looking away from the ground where potential jammers might be is difficult to jam as the gain upwards from the aircraft's dish is about 50dB whereas backwards it is probably 1-2dB. Furthermore, dispersing your military datalink within commercial bandwidth is very shrewd as an attack on it may well cease commercial signals from the enemy's country and also its allies/neighbours.

Finally, with RPAS/UAS/UAVs still on the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) then exports to the ROTW is highly unlikely for now (for more google MTCR). So trying to invest in this in the expectation of HUGE export sales is flawed. Making a dozen or so aircraft and associated ground equipment is not going to keep this area of industry afloat.

LJ

PS. Warning I'm now powered by Real Ale!
PPS. Before anyone asks, ASAT against something like Intelsat is tricky as it is a long way away compared to all of the ASAT shots taken against Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites. Also, you run the risk of denying a large portion of the Geostationary Earth Orbit (GEO) belt which would probably trigger a new World War. Also, you would need a spare Ariane lying around to do it!

Leon

Jamming a parabolic dish outside of the main lobe is, as you say, difficult. The jammer would need to position between the satellite and the RPA to be effecfive (ie. Flying above it). A good example is to look at the jamming of fighter RADAR using a dish - the highest gain is along about a 2 degree beamwidth. So a jammer is only effective along the bearing of the jammer that may be mounted on the target aircraft or a jamming aircraft protecting a COMAO package on the same relative bearing. The fighter RADAR will probably be unaffected outside 4-5 degrees of its sweep unless the jammer is pumping out gigawatts of power and then maybe another 5 degrees might be affected. Against an RPAS, a SAM would be cheaper, easier and likely to be more successful - or if it's single engined then wait for the engine to quit!

I also doubt whether they will be able to produce anything better than that can be purchased off the shelf more cheaper and with better chance of delivering on time.

iRaven

This is only what I have read - I have no idea or qualification - I'm just mentioning it because it might be relevant: the justification I have read about autonomy and bandwidth is that you don't need bandwidth during transit to/from the point of use - hence the total bandwidth required when you have one asset on the way, one on station and possibly even one returning would be less.

On the other hand,I speculate that possibly one doesn't switch on the bandwidth-hungry stuff until the right moment anyhow even with the non-autonomous vehicles.

T43562

Your reading would imply that the system's operator is not interested in seeing where it is going and also not doing ad-hoc collect en route to the target - ask most recce mates and their is a lot of ad-hoc collect en route at times. Also some payloads may be collecting several hundred kilometres from the target.

Anyway, commercial bandwidth isn't that expensive - certainly at lot less than Typhoon's hourly cost per hour!

iRaven - thanks, I agree.

LJ

I don't wish to be argumentative since I have no basis on which to do that but some things occurred to me:

I can see the case for autonomy lasting for short periods - then an operator can switch between several aircraft, checking on the output from each one. This way the airspace could have huge numbers of them. I think that satellites have undergone this kind of change - from one being flown by many people to many being flown by one person since they can look after their own manoeuvring much more. The full video recording could be retrieved on return for analysis.

The second thing I was thinking about was that autonomy in flying might be the smaller part of it all. If you could put some really significant computers into the aircraft you could get them to notice and record things of interest so that you'd avoid transmitting pictures of empty desert or blue sky. e.g. google's face recognition stuff that they use to blur photos in streetview could equally be used to look for specific people, types of vehicles activity etc.

I'm no expert, but I can't help but feel the 3D printing technology that Southampton University is using to made drones is going to knock the bottom out of the current market structure
Combine it with off-the-shelf equipment and phone / comms monitoring would be easy, even encrypted comms. In theory, assuming the target country has a G3 phone system you could even control it remotely via phone -- though that has obvious drawbacks!
As for targetting - yes existing commercial image / face recognition technology is probably good enough to go after specific buildings or people. You could probably just embed it into a mobile phone chip
Whether that would give the required reliability though is another question

All I'm trying to point out is you could make them cheap and cheerful. Swarm tactics maybe?