Heads up, Raptors on you're 6...

Despite typical Fox reporting, I'd say the video makes the F-22 look awesome. I thought F-16s were nice, wow. I'm just in awe watching the F-22 perform such graceful manuevers. Sure would be nice to fly one some day.

Originally posted by ShadowXIX
onlyinmydreams the Raptor would eat those for lunch because those are just air to ground bombers no air to air weapons. Now maybe UAVs in 20 years might be something to fear in air to air combat.

You know what I meant... eventually the production version of those robots will be armed with air to air weapons. In fact... I was even reading in Aviation Week that they were looking into putting beam weapons in those things (no joke).

Originally posted by onlyinmydreams


You know what I meant... eventually the production version of those robots will be armed with air to air weapons. In fact... I was even reading in Aviation Week that they were looking into putting beam weapons in those things (no joke).

Good point UCAVs of the future will not have any of the human limitations they will be better in just about every way and cheaper at the same time. I think the last fighter pilot in the US has already be born.

Well... they could pull a lot more G's than a manned F-22 in a close-in dogfight, should it come to that.

They could also be smaller and if both are made of the same gen stealth the UAV will be harder to see. Also if they use computers for control in the future they could have reaction times no human could match.

UCAV's, IMHO, are the first logical steps to a pilot-less fighter aircraft. I personally believe that the F-22 and F-35 are going to be the very possible last of the piloted fighter (military) aircraft. It would seriously surprise me if the US builds, for production, a 6th Gen fighter that incorporates an actual 'in-the-seat' pilot.




seekerof

imagine a super aircraft carrier sized unmanned sub or aircraft or both with mini armed ucavs inside, approaching a target area, door opens and swarms of ucavs go towards target area and an enemy craft fires at them.....they track missle, avoid it, destroys missle and enemy craft at the same time and goes to mother craft to rearm while the rest of the swarm is bombing multiple targets, imagine the fear in the enemy after one wave of attack....f22 will seem primitive..

Hey, can somebody post this video as the fox news link to the video does not work. thanks.

Try turning off your firewall, thats what I had to do to watch the video. That or download the newest Windows Media player from Fox.

Originally posted by Seekerof
UCAV's, IMHO, are the first logical steps to a pilot-less fighter aircraft. I personally believe that the F-22 and F-35 are going to be the very possible last of the piloted fighter (military) aircraft. It would seriously surprise me if the US builds, for production, a 6th Gen fighter that incorporates an actual 'in-the-seat' pilot.




seekerof

I think all of you are jumping the gun here. Pilots have about 2 generations still to go before being totally replaced by this stuff. I can imagine 40 years from now sitting with my grandson, him saying the same thing, and me going, "Yeah, yeah, they were saying the same thing in my day too..." piloted aircraft will not be replaced until unmanned aircraft are proven superior in combat. And no weapon system replaces the current one until it is proven superior. The battletank didn't. The carrier ship didn't. The jet fighter didn't even. The gun didn't. The automatic rifles and sub-machine guns didn't, either.

Making unmanned fighter craft that can fly as intelligently as a human is very, very, very difficult. If you make them where they are remotely-controlled, they are still very difficult.

The communications alone for a group of them requires an astronomical amount of processing power. And then there's always the threat that your enemy will somehow block your comms and take over your own craft.

UCAVs are coming along, and will be used in more dangerous missions for human pilots, but humans pilots are always going to be needed. And the last jet fighter pilots are definitely not the ones of this generation.

Also, you're forgetting one other thing. HUMANS LIKE TO FLY. The military and engineers are all still people. Humans like to fly these aircraft. All the generals in the Air Force are usually former fighter pilots. The "fighter pilots" and thus generals of the future are not going to be guys good at videogames.

But pilotless aircraft are a lot more complex than people realize. The human pilot is not going anywhere anytime soon.

Also, tactics change as aircraft change. There is no way they could build pilotless fighter craft and then expect them to just "go up and fight." Different aircraft employ different tactics. Meaning you'd have to have computer programmers to program new tactics into these craft all the time, unless somehow you can make the craft smart enough to "learn," and that is still a ways off before they make any computer that can learn like a human.

Remember, part of any military pilot's life is constantly studying the new tactics and weapons systems out there. And these tactics are developed by the pilots themselves, from their flying experiences. If you've just got robots up there flying around, then there really is no new way to teach them new tactics because a grounded computer programmer isn't gonna know jack about what the new tactics are in order to program them into the craft's brain.

i agree with you completely! The 6th gen will see wide usage of UCAVs and manned air combat aircraft and the 7th gen will see flights of UCAVs with manned escort for those things you cant quite easily do from 6 thousand miles away. So I believe that 7th gen will be about the opposite of 6th gen.

We most likely will see aircraft of the 6th gen that are capable of near orbital flight and full blown orbital and non orbital space combat aircraft...

All of you are thinking outrageous, the age of pilots in aircraft will never come to an end.

The reason for that is because no matter what, a human needs to be at the controls of weapons capable of such destruction.

Never entrust a weapon in the hands of a machine not capable of determining right from wrong.

The F/A-22 is in fact a marvel of technology and makes a massive leap forward in technology. The F-16 too is a very manueverable aircraft, and the F-35 is more manueverable due to TVC and thrustvectoring. To say that the F-35 relies on stealth alone would be internaly incorrect on its own.

The F-35 is not that stealthy, nowhere near as stealthy as the F/A-22. The F-35 is manueverable, affordable, small, and will do the job right.

The F/A-22 will do the job and give more, however is limited to certain aspects, as the cost range, and it is only an Air Force fighter.

UCAV's will play a large role in future development of fighters and the succession of wars. But UCAV's will be controlled from the ground and will not be completely automonous, as I have said, never entrust a machine with no determination of right or wrong with a weapon.

But there will come a time when there are more UCAV's than manned fighters, but what I can say for certain is that we will always have manned fighters.

Shattered OUT...

ShatteredSkies your giving future A.I a bum rap. In the future Computers will be smarter the humans millions of times smarter it may take 500 years or 50 years but it will happen sooner or later.

If we ever get true selfaware AI in the future whos to say they cant be trusted more then humans. We as humans have already proven we cant be trusted with such weapons look at how many wars we have how many people we kill. Machines on the other hand have thus far only done what we humans program them to do. They have no hate or prejudice no evil they dont make mistakes humans make mistakes.

To err is human

They are the perfect killers and leaders, no emotions will get in the way so no wars caused.
BUT
Machines have no concience or sense of mercy.
They , in my eyes will never be better than humans due to the fact that every leader has to be imperfect, or he or she is not a leader.

Originally posted by devilwasp
They are the perfect killers and leaders, no emotions will get in the way so no wars caused.
BUT
Machines have no concience or sense of mercy.
They , in my eyes will never be better than humans due to the fact that every leader has to be imperfect, or he or she is not a leader.

The perfect person is not the person who leads, but the person who follows.

Shattered OUT...

Computers I doubt will replace human intelligence anytime soon. Computers are good at COMPUTING; actual REASONING is a bit different.

And no machine will ever be entrusted no matter if it has emotions or not; Isaac Asimov made that point very clear in his books and the movie, "I Robot," they made, based off of the same book, makes the same point. Who's to know that a computer may not reason that taking over humanity is better for humanity's own good??

Computers will NEVER outdo the human brain's potential. Remember, we humans currently only use like 10% of our brain's potential at most. And modern computers still have a loooong way to go. They are also finding that computers, in order to have anything close to human intelligence, are going to have to be made most likely out of organic material, not metal and plastic.

Remember, we humans are machines too. We are incredibly, incredibly, INCREDIBLY complex machines, but technically, we are machines. We are machiens made of carbon, iron, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.....we take in food, the food is utilized by our cells (mini-machines containing even lots more mini-machines), that break down that food and utilize it to grow.

And that means that IF a computer ever does become the human brain's equal, or similar to it, it is not going to be an electronic, "machine-like computer." It will be a machine made out of organic material, only this time organic material pieced together by humans, instead of by nature.

Our brains actually do have the computational power of computers in certain aspects, just those parts are left untapped. Whenever a person is like literally a human calculator, they usually act like a total retard in terms of normal social skills, because since their brain's computational section is very active, their other parts are not. Some believe most people are actually like this, just the computation parts of our brains are inactive moreso which is why "normal" people can't live without a calculator or mathematics, yet a "retarded genius calculator-type" can have no social skills or even care about people, yet computer numbers all the time. For example, one famous guy on this saw a tap-dancing show once and literally counted EVERY tap the dancer made, from start to finish.

But computers have to be able to reason, to create art, to create beautiful music, etc........no computer is even close to that.

Also, there's the programming. The computer is one thing, but the program itself is usually what runs it. The A.I. in the game Halo is not your Xbox being smart, it is the program running on your Xbox.

So computer science as a field has a long ways to go as well. Making a computer that can run a program as smart as the human brain is one thing; making the program is another thing. Also, no one knows if our brains are jsut biological computers that run some sort of super, super intelligent "software," or if it is our brains themselves that are smart.

Also, we humans do not fully understand good or evil. There is something innate in us that makes us feel certain things are good and certain things are evil. But there is no true definition to the subject.

If some computer goes out and murders 50,000 people and you tell it that is wrong, it may say, "Why?" And you go into this and that, etc....on good and evil, and at the end, the computer is still confused.

Because computers operate on logic, and logically, good and evil do not exist. There is NOTHING logically wrong with murdering a bunch of people unless it somehow brings harm to you. The concepts of good and evil that we humans understand (and that thus tell us doing such an act is just wrong) go beyond logic.

So computers and A.I. have a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong way to go before ever matching a human.

You can make computers better at certain activities than a human, but that is it. No weapons of mass destruction (that term sounds funny now) are going to be put at the "hands" of a machine that has ultimate control.

I completely agree there Broadsword...

They are already working on organic systems that control F-22 sims (Rat-brained pilot anyone?)

The future looks bizarre, but until then, UAV's and Pilotted aircraft will be a team.

I don't see pilots leaving just yet, but eventually this might happen...although I hope not, flying is an adventure, even if it's in combat...well esspecially in combat...

The F-35 is not that stealthy, nowhere near as stealthy as the F/A-22. The F-35 is manueverable, affordable, small, and will do the job right.

A common misconception, the F-35 is said to be just as stealthy as an F-117, if not, more so. While not as stealthy as the F-22, it still has a lot of stealth under its belt.