~UNiOnJaCk~ wrote:I meant i wondered if there would be a lobby that seeks to use fully autonomous technology as a means of preserving the safety of personnel

Fully autonomous does not preserve the safety of personnel any more than remote controlled, arguably the opposite.

right now extreme clerics preach hatred on our streets in our capital , groups of extremist supporters shout vile, hate filled rubbish at our troops returning Home , while our police stand bye unable to do anything to stop it because our laws say they can't , my question is , is this what all those...

That then becomes very interesting from a Legal and Rules of engagement point of view. It's already a very interesting question and has been discussed for some time at the highest levels, most notably last April: http://www.stopkillerrobots.org/2015/04/humancontrol/ . However, weapons systems that ...

Tony Williams wrote:Crossrail is an amazing achievement, which I think largely down to the fact that the UK has built up a considerable reservoir of expertise in planning and delivering major infrastructure projects

If only we had built up the expertise to run and maintain them afterwards

I think that we'd do well to investigate jointly funding a hospital ship or two with the Department for International Development. The DfID could use foreign aid funds to pay for the ship to provide medical services to developing nations (much as Mercy Ships does), but then if there's a military ne...

For smaller ships, IEP is kinda expensive and the freedom of location can't really be exploited. Regarding expense, remember that up front costs are offset by the full lifecycle fuel reduction savings (and possibly emissions savings if emissions eventually get round to being taxed in a coherent man...

If that increase in power is not required because the GT is powerful enough on it's own, then CODLOG is the superior engineering solution on the grounds of less space, lower weight, lower thru-life costs, simpler, less man-intensive maintainability & increased reliability. It is a superior engi...

How dare he walk 17 miles with wounded veterans for charitable causes without having shaved :evil: That's not the issue though, is it? It's clearly ridiculous that all the regular Army can't serve their country in all the wonderful ways that they do without having shaved. The issue is that Harry ca...

ACC: as far as I'm aware the numbers are constructed around a 40 year operational lifespan, not 15 years. There are two different ways to arrive at the £100bn figure. First is based on MOD's stated intent to spend 5-6% of defence budget on running the nuclear deterrent overall, including procurement...

TT, Isn't there quite a bit of continuity between those mentioned bodies (now that the Labour defence team has been revamped... the old one even used to invite me to cocks)? Corbyn's been heavily involved with it forever. However of those actually on the defence team: - Kevan Jones was the one who ...

Maybe he shouldn't be in Army uniform then.

Heh-he, his defence team does not know what the £ 100bn, timewise, relates to. The simpletons took £38bn x 10 (bcz the Eq. Plan covers 10 yrs), got 380 and a hundred is a quarter of that. Believe me, this figure does not come from the Labour defence team. It's been bandied around by the Stop The Wa...

ArmChairCivvy wrote:PAAMS being a member of a radar family, even though usually touted as a totally British and go-it-alone solution

By who? Not the French, they're perfectly happy to say it's a shared joint solution.

Not many of the migrants are from the IS theatre - not even many of the Syrian migrants. In fact they're quite a small proportion of total migrant numbers. Solving the IS situation, if it's even possible while there is no authority capable or willing to step up to the task of government, would hardl...

Giraffe is having an update to improve UAV detection. Thought I would mention it here, although it's unlikely UAVs would feature heavily in any kind of Argentinian offensive.

So you've taken a hit and in addition to the 1.4 square meter hole just above the waterline, you have a 15 centimeter crack running down and out of sight. Oh, and there is a major fuel oil leak in one of the engine rooms. Show me how a minimally manned crew deals withe that and continues to fight t...

SKB wrote:The Suez Canals are quite valuable assets and protecting them with a couple of Mistral's would be wise.

They're getting less valuable by the minute with the recession of the Arctic ice sheet

It's an off repeated mantra from me, but automated systems and minimal manning will be the death of a lot of ships and the crews that man them. It will certainly have an effect on personnel numbers, but "the death of a lot of ships"? The automated systems will gradually replace a great de...

arfah wrote:http://www.defensenews.com/story/defens ... /72393226/
...
"Industry: Let's Compete for UK Maritime Patrol."

"Flash Gordon, L-3’s director of international mission integration, said..."

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shark bait wrote:good news for the nuclear sector. Hinckley point C investment secured.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-34306997

We badly need nuclear engineering expertise in this country.

Not necessarily. By coordinating data from multiple sensor modalities (e.g. IR) you can reduce the probability of error to a negligible amount. There are literally thousands of different specific architectures for doing pattern recognition, the neural network based ones tend to be pretty small (afte...

Despite all of the planned upgrades for the T23 I haven't heard of any suggestion to fit a Close-in-weapon-system (CIWS) which is the Phalanx CIWS. Is this a cost issue or a space limitation on the T23? It's neither, it's a structural limitation, probably topweight although this has not been confir...

True the smaller drones don't stay up long and also require the operator to be close, so shoot the operator job done. The current trials are with RP, but the electronics for autonomous vehicles is not orders of magnitude larger/heavier/more power-hungry, so expect that to be a possibility not a ful...

Some progress towards very large scale drone swarms: researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California have completed a demo where 50 modified Zephyr 2 UAVs were controlled by one pilot, a new world record. The UAVs use a mesh wireless network to coordinate their relative positio...