Perfect
For "defending" against the citizens. seems a lot of new military gear is being made like that.
Aerospace firms are competing for a "classified" UK MoD contract to build a robotic military stealth aircraft which would be able to hover like a helicopter or fold its rotors and fly as an aeroplane. The "novel air concept" would be able to operate "within urban canyons" and deploy radical new weapons such as microwave or laser …
A bit like Blue Thunder's Project THOR, it'll be used in a "domestic extremist" context in UK cities, Kabul not being known for its urban canyons any more than say, Henley-upon-Thames.
Those novel payloads? They'll drop boxes of Jeffrey Archer books to either bludgeon us to death http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8282067.stm or as an act of inhumanity, make us read them as the jamming gear will stuff all the ebook readers or similar devices
Get the fuck out of town, I live in Handsworth.
What happened to all those groovy "non-lethal weapons" they were playing with a few years back? Getting sprayed with fast setting silly-string is somewhat preferable to aerial rockets or rayguns.
Time to look into short range jamming technology me thinks.
Lewis --
Considering the "with the emphasis on ship based operations" phrase; would this tie in, then, with your reports re: the decision to leave off the catapults from the RN's next-gen aircraft carriers and the general downplaying of the naval air arm?
S/VTOL drones and a bunch of enlisted ratings sitting at consoles 500km out at sea on an otherwise (semi-) useless aircraft carrier -- this looks like the missing piece that explains the whole plan.
Or am I crediting the powers that be with too much intelligence by assuming that there WAS any actual plan all along...?
of future war. Everything they seem to do for "future war" seems to be to do with fighting in urban areas. I don't know if this is because the truly fear that one day we will have to go to war with another post industrial nation, or if they have been reading too many post apocoliptic comic books, but either way they come up with some cool toys.
"What happened to all those groovy "non-lethal weapons" they were playing with a few years back? "
They are for governments who care about the results of using this kit on their *own* people or their international reputation.
"Time to look into short range jamming technology me thinks."
Your hoping they will use mobile phone frequencies? Logic suggests a satellite link on top. With global arms vendors on this that would likely be one of those nice (expensive) conformal phased array antennae.
Mind you when they see the eye watering sat charges they might just go with the mobile SIM card route instead.
A Predator (roboplane, not invisi-alien) can hang around for a while, can carry worthwhile weapons payloads, travels at not-bad speeds, and doesn't need to risk a pilot around those urban canyons where catching a wing on a building is terminally bad news. And it's small enough that a Predator which does snag a wing is only going to wipe out a couple of cars, whereas a full-sized manned plane is going to flatten the whole street. It should also be fairly straightforward to rig a Predator for building avoidance, so that it can fly itself safely in the event it loses comms temporarily.
For that matter, why do we need the jet capability either? The Eurocopter helo that Brit cops use has a rated max speed of 165knots. Even in a straight drag race, that's faster than most cars (including heavily-modified sports cars), and in any environment involving obstacles (junctions, corners, other road users) it's guaranteed to have the edge.