And I will give anyone here good odds that if someone ever unwisely parts with said funds for development of a version that "may fly", it will be a very short lived and painful misadventure (as the vehicle inverts in a beautiful hyperbolic terminal dive). Look at other UCAV concepts currently being developed, I see far more potential for designs like Taranis (low RCS, large payload, flight-control-friendly, even as a prototype) than this sort of "transformers" approach with a tiny loadout, vast RCS, draggy ineffiient profile, lack of control surfaces, and inevitable software problems in flight. I will bet anyone here that this never gets anywhere near production.

 

Also, I can't help but thinking that it is worryingly easy to secure funding, i've seen many more interesting UAV/UCAV concepts than this, It's shocking, does anyone have any data as to what range they expect from it?

 

ReactivE

What did you guys expect it to do? Capture Bin Ladin on its first flight?

This is a development program, and early in a development program at that.  When dealing with a novel propulsion system like that you start slowly and build from there.

 

Some more from the prevaricator?

 

 

 

 

 

Form follows function. There was another pane they said that about...

 

And lets not forget another FUGLY plane...

 

...Neither of them will win beauty contest. But their utility is unquestionable. It's the same for this design. Its a forward based VTOL CAS UAS. Believe me, on my last deployment, I could have used something like this.

-DA 

 

I'm afraid I disagree, both of those platforms look and behave (aerodynamically) as planes, they rely on conventional wings, and a conventional approach to balance, center of gravity, center of pressure, flight surfaces, Both of those designs look like good solutions to the particular missions they were designed for, but crucially, neither looks (aerodynamically) anything like as clumsy and potentially uncontrollable as (in my opinion) "Exacalibur" does.

 

 

The flight control software to maintain stability on this thing is going to be COMPLEX, and particularly as you don't have a pilot on board, I think it's going to be incredibly hard to keep it stable. Can you imagine the computations involved in performing a "roll" - Look at the CGI - they just rotated it on its z-axis, no consideration for drag, pressure, gravity, when this "inverts" its going to encounter a lot of problems, just as it will when it moves from hover in to forward flight. 

 Thats why the Excaliburs flight control is autonomous. Computers today can easily handle this. Speaking of which, even a man could not control fighters like the F-16 without help from a computer due to the necessity of a FCS capable of dealing with the instability. 

I'm not against designs that push the limit of conventional wisdom, as you cited, those are two good examples, but this just looks to me like bad design. Don't reinvent the wheel unnecessarily to produce a plane that performs a very limited roll compared to just about everything out there when in foward flight. The fact that it can't hover + fire is pathetic for a system that is designed to provide an alternative to gunship support.

I always respect what you say for many reasons, but in this case I do personally think this design stinks, it looks wrong so immediately in so many ways that I feel it is a case of pushing "what is possible" as opposed to what is optimised, effective, and practical.  

 

  

 

 

 

Seems like massive compromises for small dividends to me. Darth, i'm sure that having autonomous air cover would have assisted you on operations, I just think that this particular concept is going to be far too expensive to develop to ever see the light of day, and seems a very clumsy solution to a set of challenging problems that in my opinion could be resolved in other ways.

 

The F35 VTOL does not compare to the UAV concept.

 

"http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200206/fallows"

 

But in the Marine Corps version a shaft would be connected to the front of the engine and would spin, like the engine's turbines, at thousands of revolutions per minute. The patent for the lift fan covered a system for connecting this whirling shaft, through clutches and a gearbox that joined two shafts at a ninety-degree angle, to a very large fan that would take in air from vents at the top of the plane and then whoosh it out the bottom.

The F35 VTOL feature consists of:

- One single engine

- A lift fan

- A clutch

- A gearbox

- Actuated Panel doors

- Thrust vectoring

 

While very complex in a lot of ways the VTOL F35 is still much simpler and likely to be more robust/relieable than the UAV design IMHO.