more surveillance.

Just what we need!

Presumably this is intended to be deployed over 'friendly' territory, as I can't see it having the speed/agility/defenses to defeat a 'defensive attack'.

I guess the CIA / MI5/6 etc have their pre-orders in already.

Cloak of Invisibility, please!

Also, if successful, it probably means that google will buy about 1000 of them to create a *live* google earth. Drool.

It would work over occupied territory* if total air superiority had been achieved.

ie Iraq for the next 100 years.

>"Aurora's Vulture design is codenamed "Odysseus", no doubt alluding to the extremely lengthy voyages the craft is intended to make."

Well, either that, or they're expecting it to get hopelessly lost for years at a time. And then when it finally does find its way home, it kills all its mum's new boyfriends.

Or maybe they just mean that it is extremely clever but will be undone by its own hubris?

Good luck with that.

I would guess the most likely outcome is lots near misses and/or collisions, rather than a working multisection platform that can add and remove sections as and when required.

But I'm sure the animations look great, the marketing materials are polished, and they'll burn a load of cash before anyone realises it won't work.

Then again that's probably the whole point!

The PR of China shot down a satellite orbiting at 120km, So the USA did the same a month later. Your 60km ceiling has been doubled! The Z-Wing will have to have Anti-Interceptor defence, so would naturally be regarded as an offensive weapon by non NATO countries.

"Odysseus will also use X-wing style tail units"

and remember to set your deflector screens to double front.

It uses Z-Wing AND X-Wing technology??? The Force is strong in this one!

The brown robe, thanks...

Good luck with that. Solar power with no sun. At all. None. Nada. Zero. That would be impressive if they could manage it.

Black XWing, obv.

The assumptions here seem to be that these would be camera platforms and would only look straight down. At six miles up, curvature of the earth should give a horizon close to 120 miles away (? - too lazy to do the math...).

While resolution near the horizon would doubtless be crap for image-based intel collection, at altitude, several of these cruising in a path over international waters and South Korean territory could, in theory, put almost all of North Korea under surveillance. And the atmospheric blurring that might hinder photographic work at distance wouldn't affect signals collection at all.

Maybe they will be storing our entire DNA databases and planning our rebirth each generation. (Aeon Flux Balloons?)

Biggest advantage these would have over a geosynchronous sat is not being 30,000km away from their surveilance targets.

A geosynchronous sat has one major problem, its looking through dozens of miles of atmosphere (straight down, more if its not looking at the equator) this doesn't give the best images possible, obviously.

A polar sat gets around this problem (mostly) by orbiting over the poles and looking (mostly) straight down, problem here is it can't keep station above a target.

A plane such as this can get both advantages.

As to whether it can cope with the couple of hours of day light a day at higher latitudes close to the solstices, this remains to be seen. You have to remember though that most high-school concepts of the poles having 6 months of daylight followed by 6 months of dark aren't particularly accurate, especially when you start looking at altitude as well.

If you can sort of cut off the light to the solar panels....

How about a really big paintball gun?

And you could probably disguise it as an oil pipeline.

Nah, not likely, they will all be deployed over territories closer to the equator where conditions are more favourable to pursuing the real strategic mission of a multi billion dollar stratospheric surveillance platform, which, as any fule kno, is to peek down ladies tops.

Oh, I'm sure they wrote "Bolstering the nations strategic intelligence gathering capabilities" or some similar word salad on the project brief, but they had their fingers crossed. And they were sniggering.

Also, am I the only one making "Star Wars" noises in my head ?

<-- finally, an excuse to use the Paris icon!

If done right the modular nature of these craft could be quite advantageous. Imagine if they could link an indefinite number of these together, releasing units in need of service back to a landing zone, sending up new units to replace any which have failed or been shot down.

If these things could be produced more affordably than the missiles required to shoot them down you could make countering them a futile pursuit by cranking them out like sausages.

Such a numerical cost advantage could theoretically last until an affordable low-cost rail-gun platform is available, which isn't likely to happen any time soon.

You could go over-board and flood a territory's skies with billions of them, blocking out the sun and imposing a prolonged artificial night until they capitulate to whatever demands you impose.

(I might have gone a little far with that last part.)

I'm not sure these boffins have really got a handle on how hostile the environment is up there. I'm thinking solar etc radiation levels have got to be fierce.

I would doubt that any government would allow the public access to a live Google Earth. It would be deemed a security risk.

Bloody kill joys.

When you build a scale model the loadings and characteristics of the model are completely different to the full size unit so you have to make adjustments to wing loading, speed etc to make it work. The full size Z plane thingy is so like a model in it's basic characteristics. Now how do you model that?

The non-military uses of these craft...

Cell-phone relay for use after a devastating disaster, real-time monitoring of forrest-fires or floods...

Downward-looking radar to spot smugglers crossing the Gulf of Mexico...

Better meteorology data...

Instead of releasing balloons with throw-away sensors, use one of these craft with a set of sensors to record the data. Not only would they be able to get more accurately-placed readings(balloons drift, and two balloons released, one after another, may end up miles apart before they get to the correct altitude), but during the time between the readings, these craft can do other jobs.

A smaller version of these craft may actually be cheaper in the long run, too...

(Helium, latex balloons and sensor packages aren't cheap... )

"latex... aren't cheap"

Jeez, tell me about it!

I can think of one way.

"wouldn't affect signals collection at all."

That is it. The three-letter agencies are interested in this.

Imagine the aircraft circling close to the Chinese coast in 25 km height.

I think this is the formula: l=sqrt(2*re*h+h*h)

l: maximum microwave interception distance

re: radius of earth

h=height of aircraft

For h=25km that would be 564 km !

For the anglo-saxon readers, that would be about 352 miles of "signals intelligence horizon". Much better than looking down from the 36000 km of a geostationary sat. The signal will be much stronger, simply due to smaller distance. Some stuff may only be possible this way, because of small signals. Think of a general chatting over his GSM phone :-)

"every watt-minute of power"

Watt-minutes are units of /energy/ *not* power

Cool kit though. :)