Taranis and microwave beam weapons.

The U.K. is pursuing development of high-power microwaves (HPMs) and laser weapons, with the UCAV certainly a clear candidate for an HPM payload.

European UCAVs

Its a small snippet from aviation week inside a large article about European UCAV tech development.

Interesting to note that the UK is developing microwave beam weapons for airborne use. seems like beam weapons are the way we are heading for future wars. Air combat will soon be very brief and very, very destructive. I can see why stealth is so needed - No stealth, instant frazzle.

very nice!



Taranis pic from an undated hand out from british Aerospace.

Taranis handout

hi there Dan,

in the link you provided was this comment :

"Ground testing of Taranis is scheduled to begin in early 2009, with the first flight trials due to take place in 2010. "

This is not true it is more likely that it will be 2008 and trials in 2009,

there is also another variant of it that has been made , it is slightly smaller and will be capable of carrier take off and landing. it is already in `evaluation `.

take care

snoopyuk

ps. glad to see you are back in the normal areas of posting...


[edit on 14-7-2008 by snoopyuk]

That’s very hard to believe Snoopy; Taranis being a little ahead of schedule I can buy into, though I’ve not heard anything about that being the case, but a variant of Taranis already being complete and capable of carrier landing is a little harder to swallow.

It just doesn’t make sense to me that a more conventional aircraft would come after an aircraft that would probably be a lot more challenging to design and build. It’s also hard to believe that the UK would have just jumped ahead of the US who, as I’m sure we all know, has followed a very long road to get where they are now with the X-47B. In fact if this was the case then we’d need access to US or French carriers to conduct flight tests which I doubt we’d get for free. Assuming that the US would be the first port of call I would imagine that they’d at least want observer status on the tests, but if that were the case then wouldn’t they be taking advantage of this and find savings from the UCAS-D programme?

I suppose Raven could fit this bill but I wouldn’t exactly call it a variant of Taranis and why use that as a carrier testbed? With a wingspan of around 3-4m it’s not really representative of a full sized unmanned aircraft either in deck footprint or handling etc. What could you get out of Raven that you couldn’t with a surrogate manned fighter?

Personally I’d need a lot more information to believe this. That’s not to say I’m ruling it out completely however, BAE can be a secretive lot .