66!

[Kupsised]

Originally Posted by swiss

Drones?
I'm sure you heard about the virus which infected the US drone fleet.
So, unless you're fighting a 3rd world country this shouldn't be the weapon of choice. Way to risky if those things get hacked.

That's not the only problem with drones either. From what I've heard from other sources, they are fine for surveillance and surgical strikes, but for air to air combat they are essentially useless due to the computing power and technology not being there to have 'self-aware' air-to-air combat dones flown by computers. I always find myself wondering how effective these would be anyway. As soon as the enemy figure out the algoythms used for manouvers etc. they can easily develop algorythms to counter them. It'd be like having an airforce where the pilots always pull the same manouver and you can predict, with some margin for error, exactly what that manouver will be, making them not very effective in a dogfight.

As far as piloted UCAV's are concerned the delay in the satelite connection between pilots of UCAV's and the feed from their aircraft, although it's small, is too big to fly them in air-to-air combat where decisions must be made in split-seconds and in real time.

Drones could certainly be a part of future warfare, for example they are perfect for level bombing missions, maybe even being able to move at speeds that manned aircraft can't because of human limitations, making them even more difficult to intercept. I think though that air-to-air combat, for the foreseeable future at least, is either up to manned aircraft or UCAV's flown by manned aircraft in the direct vicinity (for example, flown by the weapons officer of a Super Hornet or the like) to remove the issues with satelite delay.