DARPA has caught a Gremlin drone in midair | Hacker News Reader

DARPA has caught a Gremlin drone in midair

defensenews.com

74 pointsLogonType1054 comments

There’s a video of the capture at https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2021/11/05/darpa-nabs-g...

Direct link to video on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4T6Vr4a1hY

(this works better with https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/privacy-redirect/p... )

A modern take on an old idea. Nearly 100 years ago airships were carrying biplanes that they could launch and recover, allowing the biplanes to reach places that were out of range from airports.

Here's a biplane being launched [1]. Here's a returning biplane docking [2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTGBFY82Gik

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FIm5qt5JrQ

Hence the zeppelin action sequence in the last crusade!

Fire the sound guy who thought this was a good idea. Just what I want in silent technical demonstration video - heavy guitar and drums. I guess they thought it was underwhelming and needed the help.

That's a producers choice.

Producers are like managers; Sound "guys" are like developers - reluctantly doing things managers prescribe

Wouldn't it be easier to just fly the drone in through the back door of the C-130?

Probably substantially riskier. If you miss or go in too fast, you take out the C-130.

That said, helicopters already do it with boats. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz24kWbFxRY

I imagined some sort of a net to catch it. But, you're right.

Stuff can't fly when the airspeed drops to zero. The drone would not be able to stay in the wind shadow of the mothership and would drop down below it.

Perhaps the future will bring electromagnetic clamps like the Arsenal Birds seem to have in Ace Combat 7.

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/acecombat/images/4/4e/AC7_...

broken link

Soon we can have nonstop nuclear airliners (that land only once every five years), where passengers are exchanged with shuttles.

nuclear airlines... Two words I don't think will ever be in a commercial offering. For one, can you think of the TSA theater that will precede such a flight :)

Well, you would hope so.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-powered-a...

(from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8680110)

that's a properly horrible idea from security point of view, even when ignoring 9/11 example

How are they getting in and out, is it Keanu-style "Speed" exchanges with people dangling mid-air in space suits at 35000 feet?

I'd guess you capture the entire capsule, have the people walk in/out inside your plane, and launch the capsule again.

I guess the shuttle could be docked to the side, and people could just walk over.

Interesting aerodynamic and geometric problem... More likely is to have the shuttle flying from the under side and people ascending stairs.

I mean. I'd buy a ticket.

These drones look virtually identical to some cruise missiles. I wonder what this would entail for the defense of whatever airspace they enter. Seems like these could be used as somewhat cheap decoys.

This is already a concept - you swam airspace with a bunch of cheap(er) missiles to let the ones that count through. Or, ships now just launch a salvo and hope SOME get through. The problem is that for something to be as big as, and got as fast as even a Tomawhawk (which is slow), it's still going to cost.

If this is in Defensenews just imagine all the shenanigans out at Dugway that are still classified... probably five years ahead of this.

A rough rule of thumb from watching stealth aircraft development and the subsequent retrospective stories over the years: what you don't know is about 15 years ahead of what you do. It might be that things have compressed since then, and it might be that stealth was always a special case, but it wouldn't surprise me if the absolute cutting edge is still that far ahead in some areas.

This is the expectation, and the reality is that the government still uses Windows XP. Stealth tech and other military signature detection/evasion techs are probably just exceptional.

great point- I think it's strongly correlated to budget. JSOC? probably 10 years ahead due to unlimited/black budget.

The average gs-13 commuting to the Pentagon? Bottom of the barrel tech.

From your profile--do you mean hacking in the software development sense or the security sense?

in the for-fun / i'm such a shitty person i can't believe i hacked this together sense :)

the rest is... classified. but quite boring.

Reminds me of the Dark Knight Rises opening scene

That's an actual system dating back to the 50s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fulton_surface-to-air_recovery...

You're thinking of the TDK opening scene, where the fulton system is used.

The TDKR opening scene involves a in-air "capturing" of an airplane flying at low altitude by another plane, with the help of some daring abseiling between the planes.

What would be the counter defense against one of these things? Would it be hard for an adversary to fly a smaller drone with explosives and a strong magnet and simply attach to one of these drones and wait for its return?

Ah! Capture is so much harder than destroy. Capture development can take a huge budget and years to get right.

Destroy is different. Destroy is all about cost-effectiveness. An explosive decoy might work. But would a missile be cheaper? How about a hairnet stretched across its path? Maybe just some shapes drawn on a building to confuse it's navigation, make it crash into a wall.

Luckily these are the kind of things I don’t actually worry about but realize there must be teams of people who do exactly that.

Prob have them have radio signatures that mimic the planes and have a swarm fly

So basically this is a Carrier from Starcraft? Love it.

Wait until they get Oblivion inteligence and weaponary.

Considering the lower and upper bounds on the death toll this sort of technology will be responsible for ... that is a bit ghoulish.

In fact, one of the worst aspects of this is that it will enable people who think "wow this is cool, just like Starcraft!" to kill hundreds of people without ever even having to confront the amount of damage they are doing.

Totally agreed. I found myself mesmerized watching the short video [1]; wow cool tech, nice views... but there are serious ethical implications for the engineers working on these systems. Let's not forget that our work as technologists does not exist in a vacuum.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4T6Vr4a1hY

To be fair, work on recovering drone aircraft in midair can be employed for a whole lot more than just military purposes.

I could imagine it being useful for search and rescue missions

Can you imagine how this would the increase the search radius of a air rescue mission? One search and rescue flight looking for survivors could launch a half dozen drones each extending the explored area by thousands of square kilometres per hour.

How often are drones used for anything of that sort? Any actual examples? Or are you just purely fantasizing?

Just found a quick example.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-northern-ireland-foyle-west-5...

Drones are pretty quickly being adopted by search and rescue and firefighting organizations. No reason to think that's gonna stop.

https://www.birminghamtimes.com/2021/11/video-drone-rescue-s...

"Search and rescue" seems to be given as the use-case for every new development in robotics. Is it basically a meme in that field by this point?

Hah, I actually thought of Gallente ships from Eve.

Since we’re terrans not protoss, this is an assault galleon, not a carrier.

This is to replace aircraft carriers as a force projection capability. Truth is, in any shooting war with a near-peer our carriers are extremely vulnerable and there aren’t all that many of them. Lose the carriers and you collapse US military doctrine.

I don't know why we keep building (= paying for) carriers the way that we do. A tanker hull conversion is about as strategically useful and would be a fraction of the cost. Survivability is a moot point when you can swarm a big radar target with hundreds of missiles. Not fancy hypersonic ballistic missiles but just regular old missiles too. When you accept all of that, there's no way you'd commit your CIC and "brains" to the big fat floating target.

No, carriers should be floating airstrips and if a shooting war breaks out with China, they need to leave. And now that you've saved $100 billion a year in operating costs, you can build properly stealthy destroyer class ships, that can launch and recover smaller CAP drones, to do all the real work for a fraction of the operating costs.

Because carriers are a massive engineering project whose benefits to the economy can be spread between a number of states and congressional districts allowing them to get funding approval. Smaller ships would require much less. A carrier group is basically a floating military base that generates a lot of economic activity. The US military is first and foremost a welfare program for our weapons manufacturers; it’s why we spent the last 20 years throwing teenagers into a meat grinder with no real mission objectives other than to destroy a lot of equipment so it could be replaced.

I agree with you that carriers are a relic of the 20th century. Manned aircraft probably are too, which negates the need for carriers (which I expect we will see in the next major air war).

What about a big boat?

How would you put the big boat mid air for them to catch?

the old HN switch-a-roo?

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