I imagine they'll shrink a bit and look a little different than what we have now. I'm curious what percentage of most fighters space today are human support system versus payload capacity, fuel storage, maneuverability surfaces, engines, control systems, sensors, etc. And I also wonder what percentage of the costs per hour come from the pilot in the seat versus the maintenance of the aircraft and other operating costs.
Carrying enough fuel to go some far distances and back takes up space. Missiles and bombs aren't always small. If you're carrying a lot of payload/fuel weight, you're going to need to have enough surface to generate enough lift, etc. If we're planning on these birds to run similar-ish kinds of activities, I don't know they'll be that radically different. But maybe the missions will be radically different.
> A jet fighter can very much be considered disposable
A jet fighter still usually costs a few million to acquire, before the cost of the pilot even come into the picture. Once again, if they're gonna be built to handle the same mission profiles, I don't know the acquisition cost is going to be radically different. Probably a bit cheaper, but what costs more the seat or the engine? The stick or the hydraulics that actually actuate the wings? I wonder what the real savings are to take the seat and life support out of the plane. Like if you made something like the F-35, but no seat and no life support and no fancy targeting helmet, what's the per-unit cost? Something tells me still probably a few million. It'll be a lot cheaper to lose one in the end not having a human in the seat, don't get me wrong, and I imagine there would be less hesitation to deploy them in riskier deployments since there's no human in the seat, but I don't know I'd use the term disposable to talk about a few million dollar piece of hardware.