An electric Roomba-like cart that weighs 40 tons and can accelerate to 150MPH before grabbing hold of the aircraft?

Russia is using the wars in Ukraine and Syria as training for its forces. They can do endless exercises in the motherland, but there is no substitute for real world experience.

Until we development instantaneous and completely secure communications (quantum entanglement or something fancy), a drone will be sluggish to control and vulnerable to hacking.

Have you perhaps considered it’s because it’s a shit job? Most people wouldn’t make it in the Air Force these days because the Air Force is an insufferable backwards flat top organization of the squarest people in government service. Nobody wants to remotely kill people in some fluorescent lit windowless game room,…

Next step, infantry “drone-bots”. Soon the slaughter will be remote-controlled, with non-coms and enlisted leaders directing platoons of artificially-intelligent, semi-autonomous drones... air, land, sea-based. And the technology will be easily replicated, repurposed, and appropriated by guerrilla-bot armies. It’s a…

I wouldn’t say evil. Han is Han. He’s a smuggler. What he does is survival of the fittest at best. Any way to get out of the situation at hand.

Navy helo pilot here:

You do make a good point here. If both energy need and heat dissipation can be made to keep those lasers working a rail canon capable of downing the craft will be too. Of course, these craft seem to be designed for stealth first strike missions well above ground ininstalations. AA can only do so much, which is why we…

Read “Sundiver” by David Brin. You make the laser a refrigerator. You take the energy produced by the heat, convert it into electricity, and funnel it to the laser and reject it overboard as laser power. Wa-la, its a refrigerator!

The thing with laser is that your enemy can hit you back just as hard and just as accurately. This isn’t going to be a battle where we shoot at them and we win. They’re going to shoot back and some US pilots are going to be fried in the cockpit, and then the plane is lost.

The danger is...if the rear gear ‘hooked’ on anything at ALL, as soon as they tried to lift off again, it would have pivoted the aircraft around the part where they were hooked, and they would have been inverted and in the sea before they could drop power again. It would have been totally uncontrollable.

Oh you saucy, Osprey!

Abundance of caution:

I’m surprised they don’t have some of the Polish Mig 29’s participating.

Your body breathed liquid for 9 months. It will remember.

Wait until this thing goes operational and the sailors put a strip of red LED lights swooshing back and forth across the bridge window slit.

This guy fancies himself as Ken M.

There navy is a rusted mess. The pak-fa is vaporware no stealth planes in service at all. S-400 is unlikely to be as capable as claimed, they can’t identify a Boeing 777 from a warplane. Still using dumb bombs. Navigation system can’t keep them out of Israeli or Turkish airspace. At least 20 years behind in engine…

You remind me of this guy at work I avoid.

That's kind of making everything about us. ISIS is much more a a reaction to the Shiite government in Baghdad and power structures in Syria.