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Comment by AaronM | Hacker News Reader

Those are making a comeback.

In January, DARPA successfully launched a Dynetics’ X-61A Gremlin UAV from the bay of a Lockheed Martin C-130A cargo aircraft. The program is aiming to demonstrate the efficacy of low-cost combat-capable drones that can be both deployed and recovered from cargo planes. DARPA envisions using cargo planes like the C-130 to deploy these drones while still outside of enemy air defenses; allowing the drones to go on and engage targets before returning to the airspace around the “mother ship” to be recaptured and carried home for service or repairs.

https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/flying-aircraft-carriers-are-to...

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> Those are making a comeback.

Various projects have been trying to bring them back for something like 2 decades.

So far there have mostly been cancellations, and "slippage" (e.g. Lockheed's LMH-1, originally planned to float out in 2017, is still nowhere to be seen 5 years later; Airlander is supposed to start shipping in 2025 but the last news is they're trying to find a new location to build a facility).

I should have been more clear, the idea of launching flying things out of other flying things is making a comeback, not necessarily zeppelins in general

Don't forget e.g. the M/D-21. Or Orbital Pegasus, or... air launched cruise missiles, or...

This is an idea we flirt with, to varying success, over and over and over again.

> I should have been more clear, the idea of launching flying things out of other flying things is making a comeback

To make a comeback, it would have to have gone away. Launching pilotless flying things from piloted flying things has been very continuously a thing in the military.

(OTOH, recovering flying things to other flying things may be making a comeback.)

Good point, that's actually what I meant.

> Lockheed's LMH-1, originally planned to float out in 2017, is still nowhere to be seen 5 years later

I mean, it looks like a giant floating butt. Maybe they are embarrassed to release it.

Please tell me the aircraft exit the carrier via the cheeks.

> Those are making a comeback.

With modern missile technology one could argue that fighter jets are primarily drone launch vehicles. Sure the drone explodes instead of coming back, but still. Flies and navigates on its own, launched in air from a mothership …

Soon they’ll start landing back too I’m sure. Reconnaissance drones launched from a slower aircraft come to mind as a good use case. Or as command and control platforms for swarms of drones doing the work.

The recovery thing could potentially resolve another K-13/AIM-9B incident, but I'm not sure this will be worthwhile. If you have fuel to return you have fuel to chase the target longer and to go faster. Personally I only see recovery as a useful feature if your weapons are really expensive or you want to create air mines. Which the latter is really a terrifying thought. It wouldn't be hard to have a bunch of drones with explosives create a screen/wall and take out anything that comes close enough. Returning things with explosives on it is also rather dangerous. You arm them when sending them out and if there's a bug they may still be armed when returning.

What if you do not want to leave any evidence of your incursion? Seems quite useful in that case.

Blowing stuff up tends to leave a good bit of evidence.

Surely there’s going to eventually be drones that don’t go boom? Those would be nice to retrieve

A wall of floating drones that go boom if you come too close sounds like a terrifying likely future. Especially if they’re too small to properly show up on radar

A wall of floating drones isn't a feasible concept. Small drones have an endurance measured in minutes. And they have an operating ceiling far lower than most manned aircraft.

What if they were lighter than air drones that just use power to maintain position?

Lighter-than-air drones require significant power to maintain position in even a slight wind. They have very limited payload and can't carry much in the way of sensors. It's just completely unrealistic with current technology.

That could save a lot of money that goes into navigation tech in missiles.

I would like to see the economics of that compared to disposable, single-mission drones. Those wouldn’t have to return to the “mother ship”, so would be able to penetrate deeper into enemy territory, or carry more weapons, or be cheaper to produce.

Also, with single-use drones, the C-130 could return immediately to fetch another load of drones.

⇒ I think this would only make sense for relatively expensive drones (but then, the US Air Force likely has a different idea about what is “low cost”. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM-9_Sidewinder costs over $200k apiece)

This is a little tongue-in-cheek but also kind of serious. But isn't a single use drone also known as a missile? More seriously, the operational domain between reusable drone and missile must be very small no? Like maybe something that can fly into a building before blowing up.

Have a look at the aerostats used in Afghanistan. Just pour concrete, tether the balloon high enough they can't shoot it.

https://www.lockheedmartin.com/en-us/news/features/history/p...

I think Google Loon might be great for this

“Missile” is an extremely broad concept (Wikipedia calls it “a guided airborne ranged weapon capable of self-propelled flight usually by a jet engine or rocket motor”), but I think most people think of a missile as something without wings (but quite possibly fins) where the target is known at launch time, life expectancy is calculated in, at most, hours, and that doesn’t cooperate with other missiles.

I wouldn’t see a dozen airplane- or (especially) helicopter-like drones that get launched with, say, the goal of preventing a piece of road to be used by the enemy, and that distribute themselves over the to be protected area and, Hang around for weeks as missiles.

Because they aren’t weapons, I also wouldn’t think of reconnaissance drones as missiles, even if they are rockets that follow a pre-planned trajectory and then crash. That’s getting close to an edge case, though.

Any military hardware not coming back needs to be destroyed so it doesn't fall into enemy hands. If they aren't missiles they are at least bombs.

> I think most people think of a missile as something without wings

Don't cruise missiles have wings?

Maybe. If I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomahawk_(missile), I can’t tell whether those things that point out from the main body produce lift (which, I guess, is the difference between a fin and a wing)

I added “quite possibly, fins” because I thought of that missile, but could hav been more explicit, and yes, those may be wings.

Eventually the space between drones, missiles and mines will get populated on any coordinate in between. Pure forms will continue to exist, but maybe we can hope that mine use will drop, getting substituted by alternatives ("perching missiles" or whatever they would be called) that don't outlive their conflicts quite as much.

Specifically, a cruise missile. Those can look at terrain and follow landmarks, among other things.

Yup. One place where this binary gets problematic is what's called "loitering munitions" - basically a cruise missile that stays up in the air for a while looking for targets, and when its sensors pick something up it hits like any missile.

Very similar devices developed from drones tend to instead get called "suicide drones".

One possible way to distinguish the two might be the level of communication with a controller or launch platform, but even then the line isn't quite clear - what about a CLOS guided missile?

My understanding is that a missile is usually about hitting the target soon. A suicide UAV can do surveillance, maybe launch secondary munitions, and hover around quite a while before delivering its main payload. You might even be able to recover the UAV for a second mission if you decide to not use the suicide charge.

There's a whole spectrum: UAV, loiter munition, missile. It's pretty cool!

Sounds like the carrier class from Starcraft

What the US Space Force might be actually planning if they had unlimited budget, would be a permanent space station with unmanned drones and missiles in several sub-carrier types permanently hovering over a hostile country.

You control the sea, air, land, and finally space. You would have complete dominance that would render ICBM's moot.

I know this wasn't your point, but because of how orbits and the Earth's rotation works, you can't "hover" above any country that isn't on the equator. At best you can do a highly elliptical orbit that gives you maximum hang time above the target area -- but would also put you maximally far away from the ground if you wanted to deploy anything out of the station. Any realistic scenario involving putting things at specific places on the ground from space in a timely manner involves either flying it from the equator, or using a constellation to ensure persistent coverage.

I'm afraid that with rockets becoming more and more affordable, especially if Starship becomes a thing, the US army will do their own version of Starlink but instead of communications satellites it'll be weapons. It doesn't even have to be anything fancy, anything kinetic that can make it through re-entry will be able to do a lot of damage anywhere. Think a payload of tungsten or depleted uranium bullets, targeted to land in an area; I'm fairly sure they would impact with as much energy as from a gun, like the A-10 Warthog's.

Rods from God: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment

you can, however, orbit 2 or 3 molynia orbit satellites that accomplish effectively the same concept of persistent coverage over a certain geographic area. The orbit would be calculated to put the long dwell time of the apogee of the molynia orbit of each satellite over the target area.

this is far more useful for anything that is sigint/communications based, or space based radar, than anything as a weapon.

Although not to the same level of accuracy as "hovering" over a specific longitude along the equator as in geostationary.

The constellation idea sounds even more effective than the "hover" idea of the GP. With a constellation you could achieve "coverage" over large parts of the earth and essentially attack any country at a moment's notice. I think military higher-ups have been aware of this potential since the days of the space race. It's a big reason why the weaponization of space has been a geopolitical taboo for many years.

Like the “Brilliant Pebbles” concept by Edward Teller and Ronald Reagan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles

Thanks for the info. Hadn't ever thought about it - makes sense.

There is a weird hole where nation-states would love something with the rapid, global deployment capabilities of a nuclear tipped ICBM, but without the nuclear payload for fear of a MAD type retaliation. "Prompt strike" I think is the term. The trouble is, you'd want to be able to deploy such a weapon, but also be very, very clear it's not a nuke, just like a single building sized bomb or something.

Perhaps that's a use case for some type of space based directed energy weapon if you could somehow minimize the atmospheric losses to maintain effectiveness.

There's also the arsenal bird's from Ace Combat which loiters with 80 of what's more or less the X-47B's strapped to it's bottom.

Those were such a pain in the ass. Everything about that game just hurt me. I should play it again.

There is also the long storied history of the Helicarrier:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicarrier

In every Marvel movie I watched the Helicarrier was shot down before it could do anything useful. I imagine a real life version would suffer the same fate.

Why can't we have cool things like this? Fuel?

Right? Would be cool. That things feels like its the equivalent of the Yamato of the air eventually just being one giant target to expensive to operate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato).

One of my favorite cartoons growing up was the japanese series "Space Battleship Yamato", where in the future the Yamato was rebuilt as a spaceship. Good memories! (I wonder, though, if I would still enjoy it, were I to re-watch the series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Battleship_Yamato_(1977_...

It was amazing how often that show ran across problems that could be solved with one big gun...

Like many modern computer games:

Mission brief: "You have a mission of the utmost..."

Me: clicks skip "Go in, shoot stuff, got it."

> Why can't we have cool things like this? Fuel?

Gravity. This thing is going to be huge, weigh many, many thousands of tons. Having it fly on vertical thrust is probably going to take more fuel than it can realistically carry, and certainly more than you can realistically supply it with. If you're going to do something like this, I think you need to look at lighter-than-air airships. Or maybe something hybrid?

Only militaries could afford such a monstrosity. What operational advantage would it actually provide? "Looks cool" doesn't really cut it.

Aren't black, radar-resistant zeppelins rumored to be the source of silent nighttime UFO sightings?

this is the first i've heard of this. links? not trying to be a jerk at all; i just like learning more about far out rumors like this.

I couldn't find what he was talking but found this interesting pdf that's more or less related to the topic. Clearly something close to what he's talking about is being considered and researched, at least as early as 2005. https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/technical_reports...

I think it's been raised in the context of a fair few sightings where there's supposedly been a very large craft moving silently and relatively slowly, e.g. the 2000 Illinois sightings (referenced in a great song by Sufjan Stevens). I was looking into this one a few years ago and found references to a private company testing blimp platforms for military purposes around that period, although I can't find it off the top of my head.

More recently, the object spotted hovering off Hawaii last year that resulted in fighters scrambling was also proposed to be a modern balloon-based drone, of which there are a few currently being developed.

Edit: here's a source arguing that the Illinois sighting was a regular advertising blimp

https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4435

Emphasis on the "rumor and speculation" aspect but it's been chattered about for many years:

Stealth Blimp: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=Stealth+Blimp&atb=v269-1&ia...

(in Protoss voice) Carrier has arrived. (?)

Good video on the subject, including the intermediate step that never left the drawing board - a 747 crammed full of "microfighters" as a flying aircraft carrier for manned fighters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drnxZlS9gyw

“Drone Mothership” is both a great business idea and band name.

This was a very interesting read. Thanks!

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