The problem with all bigger and usually driving drone thingies is that they solve a problem you don't have:
Soldiers are plentiful available and expendable.
If your drone drives in a ditch and gets stuck in mud: You're fricked.
If the same happens and a crew is around with shovels: They'll unfrick it.
Unless you're willing to accept that serious disadvantage, or have a serious advantage to make up for it (e.g. predator drones flying for days non stop) it's just not a good idea and it will never catch on.
Human life is valuable. Well except when you're wearing camo. Then you're disposable equipment.
I think it's along the same line of why everyone is making VR headsets: Because there might be a distant future where you can actually use the technology even though it's a half cooked niche application at best right now. The long term goal could be to advertise "we've been doing combat robots for 100 years, trust us lol".
VR is actually reasonably good right now. Have you actually tried a VR headset personally? They are a pretty decent replacement for TrackIR and a ggantic monitor in DCS.
I'll admit I haven't, but on the other hand I'm not going to drop 3k for that apple headset when I can get 10 pretty good screens for less than that.
Surely the competition is cheaper, but the VR headset is not solving a problem I have, so I'll wait for the time being until people can actually vouch that you don't get motion sickness and hurting eyes from the newer ones.
I think it's along the same line of why everyone is making VR headsets: Because there might be a distant future where you can actually use the technology even though it's a half cooked niche application at best right now. The long term goal could be to advertise "we've been doing combat robots for 100 years, trust us lol".
Anon, you are a bit off the mark as to the current state of VR. It's certainly not a mass-market success (yet), but an amazing product for quite a lot of niches.
Flight sims are a great example, but my personal killer app is a Counter Strike clone called Pavlov. The VR isn't just a gimmick but adds additional depth to the game. Regular counter strike is boring to me now.
As a single example: when you reload you're actually pulling out a mag and putting a new one in. And since every gun is different you need to be familiar with the real-life reloading process. Not to mention the various ways you can reload a single weapon. You also learn to appreciate guns with ambidextrous charging handles if you're a left handed shooter like me. Sometimes I even throw an empty mag as a fake flash. And all this is just the added depth to something that in Counter Strike is contained in a single button press.
>Hey guys were stuck but it's okay you just head on alone while we dig out
None of this makes sense. There is no advantage to having it manned is what you should be thinking. It will always be around infantry who can dig it out so having two guys just to ride it for recovery purpose is dumb as frick.
Those two guys could instead work as dismounts and give the unit even better situational awareness but when it gets stuck you just take the spades off the vehicle and get digging.
There is no reason for them to be inside it.
>There is no advantage to having it manned is what you should be thinking.
As stated
The technology isn't there yet to do the same thing humans do with the same level of safety involved, and even if there was people would be appalled if machines started killing people without a human in the loop.
I mean there's constant talk about "rules for AI" etc. which is purely aiming at banning le evil killer robots, in order to keep human coffins coming back, because a bullet shot by a human is inherently preferable than a bullet fired by a cold machine *yuck*.
, it's also a matter of technical ability and "muh ethics".
you are going to have to at the very least have 2 soldiers in the squad who know how the robot works and how to "talk" to it in order for it to not drive itself into a covered and camouflaged anti tank ditch made to get the one ton kill bot stuck
Its true, its true. If two forces of 1000 infantry and 10 tanks each are in an engagement, the side with more drone tanks will win as they will have the manpower advantage.
drone tanks also do not stop fighting until they are truly incapacitated
human crews will usually bail out long before the vehicle is truly incapable of fighting
And you forget that a soldier doesn't pop out of the ground and doesn't return to the ground.
A child costs the country loads of money. An intact vet has organisational abilities and experience that make him more productive than the average, fully paying for himself and them some. And Keeping birthrates up is one of the biggest headaches of the 21st century. Militarily, low casualty rates compound by letting you keep experience and high morale (civilian and military).
Treating soldiers as anything but the most precious and irreplaceable of assets is suicidal in the short, medium, and long term militarily, economically, and demographically. As Russia will discover in five to fifteen years.
The demographic shift certainly is a thing to keep in the back of the head, but last time I read about it higher mortality led to people fricking more and having more children, so a maintaining a minimum mortality of soldiers is probably even good for the state, but I am talking out of my ass now.
Still my point stands: If the alternative to sticking some people in a tank is having them run on foot, while being even more exposed, then the discussion becomes quite ridiculous.
Depends on what war is like in the future and how land drones are implemented. >Be in lowly vehicle recovery unit, not close to any major fighting >About to haul a truck out of mud when sensor suites of networked land drones detect enemy aerial drone swarm >Run over to nearest land drone >Grab a fresh anti-blinding laser VR headset that is charging on the land drone >Within seconds of getting the headset on, a beam of blinding laser light sweep across the unit from a specialized enemy drone making easy targets for the drone swarm >Jump inside small, lightly armored compartment of land drone for chance to survive any small aerial drone munition and own units APS shrapnel >Land drone moves to more protected area as units AA vehicles start to delete drone swarm. >After attack finished, wounded get hauled off to clearing by land drones to get picked up while unit gets back to work.
The problem with all bigger and usually driving drone thingies is that they solve a problem you don't have:
Soldiers are plentiful available and expendable.
If your drone drives in a ditch and gets stuck in mud: You're fricked.
If the same happens and a crew is around with shovels: They'll unfrick it.
Unless you're willing to accept that serious disadvantage, or have a serious advantage to make up for it (e.g. predator drones flying for days non stop) it's just not a good idea and it will never catch on.
Human life is valuable. Well except when you're wearing camo. Then you're disposable equipment.
you can easily replace a tank, you can't replace an experienced soldier.
also soldiers are the only ones who can take control of cities.
If you've got 100 soldiers and have the choice to either put a hand full in 10 tanks or get 5 fully autonomous tanks and everyone has a rifle in their hand, which configuration do you think is more successful?
then.
The entire discussion about "protecting human lives by not sticking them in vehicles" becomes wildly pointless if the alternative is having them run around on foot, being even more exposed.
moron, you do both. You have both the drone tanks, the big boy tanks, your IFVs, and some infantry augmented by smaller drones. And adjust your tactics so the force multiplier drones take the casualties of the infantry and the drone tanks take the casualties of the tanks.
The demographic shift certainly is a thing to keep in the back of the head, but last time I read about it higher mortality led to people fricking more and having more children, so a maintaining a minimum mortality of soldiers is probably even good for the state, but I am talking out of my ass now.
Still my point stands: If the alternative to sticking some people in a tank is having them run on foot, while being even more exposed, then the discussion becomes quite ridiculous.
>higher mortality led to people fricking more and having more children
This is not correlated beyond the factor of houses becoming vacant and poorer single women being available to be employed to take care of other people's children, same as education is also not correlated once you get past basic schooling levels (strictly what's necessary to know how to use contraception).
The correlation is with age of purchase of first house, average house size for 25-35 year olds, rate of urbanisation, government aid such as subsidised kindergartens and straight cash, cost of raising a child, and softer cultural factors (optimism about the future, societal pressures for having children, percentage of women not in the workforce)
10 months ago
Anonymous
I cant wait until we automate war so we can run through our resources even faster for no fricking reason.
If you've got 100 soldiers and have the choice to either put a hand full in 10 tanks or get 5 fully autonomous tanks and everyone has a rifle in their hand, which configuration do you think is more successful?
Also Stryker is only STANAG 4 armor rated I think? All of the UGCVs could easily reach level 6 for a much lower price because there is no internal volume dedicated to crew.
>if it was Russian it would be like $49k
on wikipedia yes, but if you look at the amount of money that leaves the treasury for each one delivered it'd be $30million.
The best part about drones is that you dont need to have ideological buy in from your soldiers. This is a great advantage for a tyranical occupation government that lacks the support of it's people.
It's better for business to sell the public the idea of heroism, pride and duty, even when that means them dying in a rainful of bullets and heavy artillery, wooden caskets and chinese manufactured star/striped flags are cheaper than veteran welfare
The technology isn't there yet to do the same thing humans do with the same level of safety involved, and even if there was people would be appalled if machines started killing people without a human in the loop.
I mean there's constant talk about "rules for AI" etc. which is purely aiming at banning le evil killer robots, in order to keep human coffins coming back, because a bullet shot by a human is inherently preferable than a bullet fired by a cold machine *yuck*.
More realistically an autonomous war weapon needs to be prevented from committing atrocities because how the frick do we prosecute it? Do we blame the company who prgrammed and built it? Do we pull the tank responsible to the Hague?
The technology isn't there yet to do the same thing humans do with the same level of safety involved, and even if there was people would be appalled if machines started killing people without a human in the loop.
I mean there's constant talk about "rules for AI" etc. which is purely aiming at banning le evil killer robots, in order to keep human coffins coming back, because a bullet shot by a human is inherently preferable than a bullet fired by a cold machine *yuck*.
Let's step common ground for a moment.
AI warfare it's not exclusive of robots or automatized weapons, AI itself it's a weapon that should be regarded with the same destructive capability of nukes, from propagandized media delusions, forced economical crashes, or literal skynet and T800s.
The fact is that AI is far from being autonomous, and in any way, (besides in very specific fields) it's way far from replicating human conscience and intellect.
Yes, we cannot compete against a super computer which operates in calculations, algorithms and computations, but they can't compare to a fully autonomous body build out of living cells which in every single cell operates in a similar way a super computer would.
The moral dilemma of war with semi-autonomous killing machines won't erase the destructive consequences or decrease the atrocities that war itself brings in any scenario, besides burning resources from each band without human casualties, which I can consider the only positive aspect of using AI weaponry, but still the results of capitalizing on manmade machines, unregulated and un-fieldtested will be disastrous every time.
Next generation warfare will be fully fought on autonomous machines, uncapable to concern for human lives but capable of making the choises any person with a single bit of humanity will ever do.
Well yeah, by the end of the day AI it's like barbed wire, autonomous and with a set task, but someone had to put it in a specific way so it can accomplish its mission, the ultimate responsibility is in the one who gave the order to set it, by the end of the day you can always track down the line a human to blame, most people chimping out about automated weapons are the same type who doesn't believe in evolution despite breeding domestic animals for generations.
The US takes microscopic casualties on a bad day. Seethe harder thirdie. Troops re-up so often because they unlike you have RL experience with the US armed forces.
The mere possibility of such hardware being backdoored or otherwise compromised at the software or hardware level is enough to make standardization around them dubious.
That's why reliable systems use formal verification where you can proof that a terminating program is correct relative to some formal semantics. Even if some sketchy dude in eastern europe or china has contributed code you can test the pre and postconditions.
>Cant detect targets >Cant drive autonomously through unknown terrain >Gets jammed if controlled via datalink >Control station gets an arty round or a TBM if juicy enough
A machine that cant fight reliably is one that will bog down logistics, so it makes more sense to risk your soldiers to simply break even for the resources you need to spend.
Meatbags will always have to crew ground tech that isint planes until AI good enough to understand that there is probably someone hiding in an unconspicuous box near the road out of pure context alone
Autonomous loitering munitions are loosing favor because they get decoyed really easily, hell even ones with a human in the loop eat shit
see: >Ka52 crew vikhring a grain harvester >Lancet blowing its load on an arty decoy supplied by the US >Constant 4 pixel HIMARS DESTROYED videos released by RU MoD
Probably as we reply to each other all of the UGCV companies are making automatic return and autonomous procedural combat programming for their vehicles. Jamming won't be the same issue for a UGCV as it is for say Mavic camera drones.
There will probably also be onboard controls so soldiers accompanying the vehicle can take direct control if they so desire. Whatever format those controls take will probably reflect perceived tactical value and robustness to cost of implementation. A wired connection is practically immune to electronic interference as we know.
radio interference or durability problems, US, belarus and russia started doing trials for vehicles like this and they all concluded that if you lose the connection the vehicle either just stops working or goes retarted and falls into a pit. actually more effective are remote controlled stationary weapons and putting wheels on those weapons makes them frick off on you and die.
the entire question if the thing stops working is not if but when and the answer is always in the worst moment possible.
I feel like people that advocate for ground drones have a video-game or cartoon mindset, they just don't get what real terrain looks like, we simply do not have the tech to create bots that can navigate the random cluttered mess of a real life battlefield.
For tanks, it’s a matter of human operators avoiding bad terrain. That is much easier to automate than getting a bot which can crawl over every weird ditch and rubble pile.
>I feel like people that advocate against ground drones have a old-timey or luddite mindset, they just don't get what real algorithm can do, we simply will have the tech to create bots that can navigate the random cluttered mess of a real life battlefield.
Fixed that for you
It's only a question of WHEN, and if you didn't study it because you didn't learn the history of warfare you won't even be able to jam superior enemy drones, even less develop and produce your own in time when needed.
The error is to believe those bot will operate like human and not as tireless machine capable of non-stop lookout, inhuman targeting speed, eventually aiming autonomously gun with superior precision, headshooting human the instant it spot one.
It's also an error to think it will be "costly" when mass-producing robot is less costly than training soldiers which they aren't here to replace but to complement.
Too scared of radio control being jammed, intercepted, or not having enough range, and AI not advanced enough to make it semi-autonomous.
I'm sure recent advances in AI and drone usage in Ukraine is giving western think tanks some food for though..
Starlink deployment might also be a data point.
The prototype test part of the product cycle is the most lucrative from a defense manufacturer's point of view. You can capture the eyeballs and purchase order books of lots of brass, have legitimate ways to overcharge (costs aren't quantifiable), relatively small labor, capital requirements, timeframe is completely flexible.
Mass production on the other hand means commitments, money down, pension fund contributions, legal duties, heavy timeframes. Everything sucks. The brass don't even see the products its in a locked armory somewhere, they don't care. Everyone can roughly observe the project books and question value and compare it with international data. etc. etc.
The problem with all bigger and usually driving drone thingies is that they solve a problem you don't have:
Soldiers are plentiful available and expendable.
If your drone drives in a ditch and gets stuck in mud: You're fricked.
If the same happens and a crew is around with shovels: They'll unfrick it.
Unless you're willing to accept that serious disadvantage, or have a serious advantage to make up for it (e.g. predator drones flying for days non stop) it's just not a good idea and it will never catch on.
Human life is valuable. Well except when you're wearing camo. Then you're disposable equipment.
It looks like everyone is still making UGCVs though.
I think it's along the same line of why everyone is making VR headsets: Because there might be a distant future where you can actually use the technology even though it's a half cooked niche application at best right now. The long term goal could be to advertise "we've been doing combat robots for 100 years, trust us lol".
VR is actually reasonably good right now. Have you actually tried a VR headset personally? They are a pretty decent replacement for TrackIR and a ggantic monitor in DCS.
I'll admit I haven't, but on the other hand I'm not going to drop 3k for that apple headset when I can get 10 pretty good screens for less than that.
Surely the competition is cheaper, but the VR headset is not solving a problem I have, so I'll wait for the time being until people can actually vouch that you don't get motion sickness and hurting eyes from the newer ones.
Anon, you are a bit off the mark as to the current state of VR. It's certainly not a mass-market success (yet), but an amazing product for quite a lot of niches.
Flight sims are a great example, but my personal killer app is a Counter Strike clone called Pavlov. The VR isn't just a gimmick but adds additional depth to the game. Regular counter strike is boring to me now.
As a single example: when you reload you're actually pulling out a mag and putting a new one in. And since every gun is different you need to be familiar with the real-life reloading process. Not to mention the various ways you can reload a single weapon. You also learn to appreciate guns with ambidextrous charging handles if you're a left handed shooter like me. Sometimes I even throw an empty mag as a fake flash. And all this is just the added depth to something that in Counter Strike is contained in a single button press.
In your scenario why is the UGV just rolling around the forest without infantry? Wasn't that UGV made to support the infantry?
And how big of a tactical disadvantage would it be to put like two or three guys you'd have walking through the forest inside the tanky thing?
>Hey guys were stuck but it's okay you just head on alone while we dig out
None of this makes sense. There is no advantage to having it manned is what you should be thinking. It will always be around infantry who can dig it out so having two guys just to ride it for recovery purpose is dumb as frick.
Those two guys could instead work as dismounts and give the unit even better situational awareness but when it gets stuck you just take the spades off the vehicle and get digging.
There is no reason for them to be inside it.
>There is no advantage to having it manned is what you should be thinking.
As stated
, it's also a matter of technical ability and "muh ethics".
you are going to have to at the very least have 2 soldiers in the squad who know how the robot works and how to "talk" to it in order for it to not drive itself into a covered and camouflaged anti tank ditch made to get the one ton kill bot stuck
>Soldiers are expendable
Absolute meme.
A single infantryman costs multitudes more during his career than whatever this thing is worth.
Its true, its true. If two forces of 1000 infantry and 10 tanks each are in an engagement, the side with more drone tanks will win as they will have the manpower advantage.
drone tanks also do not stop fighting until they are truly incapacitated
human crews will usually bail out long before the vehicle is truly incapable of fighting
You keep forgetting that corpses don't get salary or pension.
And you forget that a soldier doesn't pop out of the ground and doesn't return to the ground.
A child costs the country loads of money. An intact vet has organisational abilities and experience that make him more productive than the average, fully paying for himself and them some. And Keeping birthrates up is one of the biggest headaches of the 21st century. Militarily, low casualty rates compound by letting you keep experience and high morale (civilian and military).
Treating soldiers as anything but the most precious and irreplaceable of assets is suicidal in the short, medium, and long term militarily, economically, and demographically. As Russia will discover in five to fifteen years.
The demographic shift certainly is a thing to keep in the back of the head, but last time I read about it higher mortality led to people fricking more and having more children, so a maintaining a minimum mortality of soldiers is probably even good for the state, but I am talking out of my ass now.
Still my point stands: If the alternative to sticking some people in a tank is having them run on foot, while being even more exposed, then the discussion becomes quite ridiculous.
The spouse or next of kin do in any civilized society
Depends on what war is like in the future and how land drones are implemented.
>Be in lowly vehicle recovery unit, not close to any major fighting
>About to haul a truck out of mud when sensor suites of networked land drones detect enemy aerial drone swarm
>Run over to nearest land drone
>Grab a fresh anti-blinding laser VR headset that is charging on the land drone
>Within seconds of getting the headset on, a beam of blinding laser light sweep across the unit from a specialized enemy drone making easy targets for the drone swarm
>Jump inside small, lightly armored compartment of land drone for chance to survive any small aerial drone munition and own units APS shrapnel
>Land drone moves to more protected area as units AA vehicles start to delete drone swarm.
>After attack finished, wounded get hauled off to clearing by land drones to get picked up while unit gets back to work.
>Soldiers are plentiful available and expendable.
moron, this is why russia is losing so badly.
experienced soldiers are very valuable.
Moreover, soldiers can’t come home after a war and contribute to GDP (and society and family and culture) for 30+ years if they’re dead.
you can easily replace a tank, you can't replace an experienced soldier.
also soldiers are the only ones who can take control of cities.
Answer
then.
The entire discussion about "protecting human lives by not sticking them in vehicles" becomes wildly pointless if the alternative is having them run around on foot, being even more exposed.
moron, you do both. You have both the drone tanks, the big boy tanks, your IFVs, and some infantry augmented by smaller drones. And adjust your tactics so the force multiplier drones take the casualties of the infantry and the drone tanks take the casualties of the tanks.
>higher mortality led to people fricking more and having more children
This is not correlated beyond the factor of houses becoming vacant and poorer single women being available to be employed to take care of other people's children, same as education is also not correlated once you get past basic schooling levels (strictly what's necessary to know how to use contraception).
The correlation is with age of purchase of first house, average house size for 25-35 year olds, rate of urbanisation, government aid such as subsidised kindergartens and straight cash, cost of raising a child, and softer cultural factors (optimism about the future, societal pressures for having children, percentage of women not in the workforce)
I cant wait until we automate war so we can run through our resources even faster for no fricking reason.
If you've got 100 soldiers and have the choice to either put a hand full in 10 tanks or get 5 fully autonomous tanks and everyone has a rifle in their hand, which configuration do you think is more successful?
Because they were more worried about filling the glaring IFV gap that the UK caused with the warrior.
>Why did the US not start making these sick ass drones for the army exactly?
in the US they probably have a marketed unit cost of like $8million per.
if it was Russian it would be like $49k, but overhere we got a lotta people with BIG salary demands, and a LOTTA bankers who want big-returns
Huh. When you count the cost for each crewman, that's roughly the value of a Stryker and its crew.
At a fraction of the capability.
Stryker can't be dropped by helicopters, carry ATGMs, and lug around an M2 all at the same time.
Also Stryker is only STANAG 4 armor rated I think? All of the UGCVs could easily reach level 6 for a much lower price because there is no internal volume dedicated to crew.
>if it was Russian it would be like $49k
on wikipedia yes, but if you look at the amount of money that leaves the treasury for each one delivered it'd be $30million.
Probably vulnerable to jamming/hacking
The best part about drones is that you dont need to have ideological buy in from your soldiers. This is a great advantage for a tyranical occupation government that lacks the support of it's people.
Always was and will be.
It's better for business to sell the public the idea of heroism, pride and duty, even when that means them dying in a rainful of bullets and heavy artillery, wooden caskets and chinese manufactured star/striped flags are cheaper than veteran welfare
The technology isn't there yet to do the same thing humans do with the same level of safety involved, and even if there was people would be appalled if machines started killing people without a human in the loop.
I mean there's constant talk about "rules for AI" etc. which is purely aiming at banning le evil killer robots, in order to keep human coffins coming back, because a bullet shot by a human is inherently preferable than a bullet fired by a cold machine *yuck*.
More realistically an autonomous war weapon needs to be prevented from committing atrocities because how the frick do we prosecute it? Do we blame the company who prgrammed and built it? Do we pull the tank responsible to the Hague?
Let's step common ground for a moment.
AI warfare it's not exclusive of robots or automatized weapons, AI itself it's a weapon that should be regarded with the same destructive capability of nukes, from propagandized media delusions, forced economical crashes, or literal skynet and T800s.
The fact is that AI is far from being autonomous, and in any way, (besides in very specific fields) it's way far from replicating human conscience and intellect.
Yes, we cannot compete against a super computer which operates in calculations, algorithms and computations, but they can't compare to a fully autonomous body build out of living cells which in every single cell operates in a similar way a super computer would.
The moral dilemma of war with semi-autonomous killing machines won't erase the destructive consequences or decrease the atrocities that war itself brings in any scenario, besides burning resources from each band without human casualties, which I can consider the only positive aspect of using AI weaponry, but still the results of capitalizing on manmade machines, unregulated and un-fieldtested will be disastrous every time.
Next generation warfare will be fully fought on autonomous machines, uncapable to concern for human lives but capable of making the choises any person with a single bit of humanity will ever do.
Well yeah, by the end of the day AI it's like barbed wire, autonomous and with a set task, but someone had to put it in a specific way so it can accomplish its mission, the ultimate responsibility is in the one who gave the order to set it, by the end of the day you can always track down the line a human to blame, most people chimping out about automated weapons are the same type who doesn't believe in evolution despite breeding domestic animals for generations.
The atrocity becomes an accident for which no one is guilty. Let's not pretend life is sacred.
ngl when i saw it was baby jeeps coming out of it i thought how cute the whole thing really is
>mama jeep
>baby jeeps
>working together
The US takes microscopic casualties on a bad day. Seethe harder thirdie. Troops re-up so often because they unlike you have RL experience with the US armed forces.
The mere possibility of such hardware being backdoored or otherwise compromised at the software or hardware level is enough to make standardization around them dubious.
That's why reliable systems use formal verification where you can proof that a terminating program is correct relative to some formal semantics. Even if some sketchy dude in eastern europe or china has contributed code you can test the pre and postconditions.
A soldier is cheaper to replace than a drone and AI isn't there yet to reliably be useful in such combat situations.
None of the drones here are infantry replacements.
A soldier takes at least 18 years to make and it ends up being one less pair of hands to build the thing with.
It's not like the government cares how much time, effort and money your parents spent on raising you though.
>Cant detect targets
>Cant drive autonomously through unknown terrain
>Gets jammed if controlled via datalink
>Control station gets an arty round or a TBM if juicy enough
A machine that cant fight reliably is one that will bog down logistics, so it makes more sense to risk your soldiers to simply break even for the resources you need to spend.
Meatbags will always have to crew ground tech that isint planes until AI good enough to understand that there is probably someone hiding in an unconspicuous box near the road out of pure context alone
Autonomous loitering munitions are loosing favor because they get decoyed really easily, hell even ones with a human in the loop eat shit
see:
>Ka52 crew vikhring a grain harvester
>Lancet blowing its load on an arty decoy supplied by the US
>Constant 4 pixel HIMARS DESTROYED videos released by RU MoD
Probably as we reply to each other all of the UGCV companies are making automatic return and autonomous procedural combat programming for their vehicles. Jamming won't be the same issue for a UGCV as it is for say Mavic camera drones.
There will probably also be onboard controls so soldiers accompanying the vehicle can take direct control if they so desire. Whatever format those controls take will probably reflect perceived tactical value and robustness to cost of implementation. A wired connection is practically immune to electronic interference as we know.
radio interference or durability problems, US, belarus and russia started doing trials for vehicles like this and they all concluded that if you lose the connection the vehicle either just stops working or goes retarted and falls into a pit. actually more effective are remote controlled stationary weapons and putting wheels on those weapons makes them frick off on you and die.
the entire question if the thing stops working is not if but when and the answer is always in the worst moment possible.
I feel like people that advocate for ground drones have a video-game or cartoon mindset, they just don't get what real terrain looks like, we simply do not have the tech to create bots that can navigate the random cluttered mess of a real life battlefield.
Isn't DARPA already making a walker robot?
For tanks, it’s a matter of human operators avoiding bad terrain. That is much easier to automate than getting a bot which can crawl over every weird ditch and rubble pile.
ogeeey
>I feel like people that advocate against ground drones have a old-timey or luddite mindset, they just don't get what real algorithm can do, we simply will have the tech to create bots that can navigate the random cluttered mess of a real life battlefield.
Fixed that for you
It's only a question of WHEN, and if you didn't study it because you didn't learn the history of warfare you won't even be able to jam superior enemy drones, even less develop and produce your own in time when needed.
The error is to believe those bot will operate like human and not as tireless machine capable of non-stop lookout, inhuman targeting speed, eventually aiming autonomously gun with superior precision, headshooting human the instant it spot one.
It's also an error to think it will be "costly" when mass-producing robot is less costly than training soldiers which they aren't here to replace but to complement.
Why are they so stupid? Even if it didn't almost crush the guy, it'd still be moronic to film yourself having to help it down a slope.
Trying to keep the prototype from being broken obviously
they like sacrificing young white men to moloch too much
Harder to navigate in the real world without a nodegraph or navmesh
Too scared of radio control being jammed, intercepted, or not having enough range, and AI not advanced enough to make it semi-autonomous.
I'm sure recent advances in AI and drone usage in Ukraine is giving western think tanks some food for though..
Starlink deployment might also be a data point.
The prototype test part of the product cycle is the most lucrative from a defense manufacturer's point of view. You can capture the eyeballs and purchase order books of lots of brass, have legitimate ways to overcharge (costs aren't quantifiable), relatively small labor, capital requirements, timeframe is completely flexible.
Mass production on the other hand means commitments, money down, pension fund contributions, legal duties, heavy timeframes. Everything sucks. The brass don't even see the products its in a locked armory somewhere, they don't care. Everyone can roughly observe the project books and question value and compare it with international data. etc. etc.
tl;dr develop, don't produce.
they can't make wallmart tier drone like dji anymore, how would they make something that complex,
Herro
Batteries are shit and operational range is very limited.