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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> I think that days of big expensive aircraft like modern fighters / bombers are numbered. They will likely be replaced with a swarm of drones, which are smaller, cheaper and harder to detect. For $100M (the price of just one fighter) you can field 10000 cheap drones and literally blot out the sun over the field of battle.

Maybe that's true of regional militaries.

The US wants to be able to project power - often quite far from bases. The drones you're talking about just don't have much of a range.

I'm not saying they won't be used - I'm sure they will be. But there will also be much larger and more expensive drones as well.

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I could see a hybrid approach, where a bunch of drones are loaded into a mothership, possibly a repurposed bomber with a bomb bay full of drones. That gives you local control of the swarm, and a way to deliver them over much longer range.

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You've pretty much described the F-35 doctrine that the US is developing. The only major difference is that an aircraft carrier or some other ship holds the drones before launch, which makes sense as the you already need the carrier to launch the flight controller craft (the F-35)

Come on, let's be serious. What makes your idea distinct from existing weapon systems? Instead of making up new names for old things just look up what is serving the same purpose as your idea. "Drones" are just guided bombs or missiles. "Motherships" are just fighter jets or bombers.

This may result in a situation that strongly favors the defender. If it takes ten drones to shoot down a fighter but they're only 1% the cost, countries that otherwise can't project air power internationally may become capable of defending themselves at home.

> This may result in a situation that strongly favors the defender. If it takes ten drones to shoot down a fighter but they're only 1% the cost, countries that otherwise can't project air power internationally may become capable of defending themselves at home.

This exists already. Those "drones" are more commonly called surface-to-air missiles.

The limited factor is targeting: as has been well publicized, modern aircraft have been engineered with stealth in mind, which means they need to be quite close to radars before they can be detected.

The solution, which was discovered in Yugoslavia, is to use low frequency radar to detect the stealth aircraft, and wait until they get close enough (defense in depth is necessary here!) before turning on your target grade radar at the last moment.

As you might imagine, this is a difficult and dangerous process, and so has only been successfully accomplished once.

So you're saying ground based defense systems should engage in stealth as well? Attackers use stealth but can also easily spot and fly around known defense systems.

This reminds me of The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson...maybe not nanobots yet...but still..

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