Hacker News Reader

Comment by spacefight | Hacker News Reader

For a few hundred dollars, someone will make the drones self aware with pre planned routings along optically recognizable waypoints. No more need for a comms channel.

What then?

View on HN

Tomahawk missiles were doing exactly this and more back in the 1990's. Shoot off a few and they would communicate amongst themselves, detect (or get blown up by) threats, and alert the other Tomahawks in the swarm who would then reroute to avoid that threat. Additionally, the missiles shared weighted target lists and knew if a missile on the way to a target was destroyed or disabled, and so would reroute in-flight missiles -if needed- in order to hit the highest-priority targets.

That is still relying on comms which I pointed out will be solved eventually (if it hasn't already).

Tomahawks can operate fully autonomously with no substantial loss of functionality. Indeed, picture a swarm of one, and you're operating in this mode. The missile commlinks serve to enhance the missile's effectiveness; they are not the sole source of its effectiveness.

Here's something for you to puzzle over:

Your missile has up-to-date topographical maps of an area, and as-up-to-date-as-possible maps of all known anti-missile sites in the area. Thing is that you're not going to know about all of the anti-missile sites: many sites are portable (thus they move around), and some remain offline and nearly impossible to detect until enemy command determines that that site can kill a missile.

If your missile doesn't have commlinks, how do you tell it to avoid anti-missile sites discovered after the missile was launched?

Additionally, a careful reading of the comment that you replied to will reveal that the Tomahawk has -since the 1990's- been a fully autonomous missile fully capable of flying a pre-determined path to a target. Indeed, that is the least interesting part of the missile's capabilities. In short, we've had "self aware" warhead-tipped "drones" since at least the 1990's.

Thanks for all the insights about the Tomahawks. What OP is refering to is cheaper, smaller and therefore in much more numbers deployable fighting drones. Each and every anti-missile site, be it fixed or portable has it's limits on what they can defend against.

I also assume that OP was refering to drones that could go through current missile defence systems because they can't be easily identified, neither visually nor with radar.

Yes, we (or at least you guys in the US) had them in the form of expensive, capable systems, but not at a smaller, cheaper or whatnot scale.

Also, can't Tomahawk launches not be detected by a some signatures they emit? I assume that modern mil space radar systems are able to do that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com