On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 22:25:54 +0000, Paul J. Adam wrote:
In message , phil hunt
writes
On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 05:26:01 GMT, Kevin Brooks wrote:
That is way beyond even our capabilities. You are talking autonomous combat
systems.

Yes. The progrsamming for this isn't particularly hard, once you've
written software that can identify a vehicle (or other target) in a
picture.

Falling off a cliff isn't a problem once you've learned how to fly like
Superman.

Trouble is, that prerequisite is harder than you might expect.

Getting a machine to tell a T-72 from a M1A1 from a Leclerc is hard
enough in good conditions

You don't have to. You have to be able to tell whether it's a
vehicle or not, and if it is, is it in an area likely to be occupied
by own forces.

: doing so in the presence of camouflage,
obscurants and when the crew have run out of internal stowage (so have
hung lots of external gear) and maybe stored some spare track plates on
the glacis front ('cause they need the spare plates and they might as
well be extra armour) gets _really_ tricky. Do you err on the side of
"tank-like vehicle, kill!" or "if you're not sure don't attack"?

I'd tend to err towards the former. note that it's a lot easy to
spot a moving vehicle than a stationary one.

Would it not be embarrasing to have a successful armoured raid broken up
by your own missiles?

Indeed. Maybe some form of IFF?

Key problem is that going up against the US loses you your comms and
observation

I doubt that that is true, assuming a competent comms network.

DR is patchy at best unless you've got good inertial guidance systems
(non-trivial). Celestial only works on clear nights

Or during daytime.

- so you're limited
to fighting wars after dark on cloudless nights with no flares in the
sky. LORAN is a radio broadcast and therefore not survivable against a
US-style opponent.

If you have lots of transmitters, many of which are dummy
transmitters, and many of which are only turned on for a short time,
using frequency hopping, it's rather harder to destroy the network.

or up high where the view is better,

It's possible that a mission might require some of the flight to be
at high level and some at low level. I imagine the missiles could
be programmed for a mission by sticking a computer with an Ethernet
cable into a slot on the missile.

This has only been done for twenty years or so in the West, so hardly a
great advance.

I never said it was; it is merely the obvious way to do it.

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