Almost 1 In 3 US Warplanes Is a Drone 328
parallel_prankster writes "A recent Congressional Research Service report, titled U.S. Unmanned Aerial Systems, looks at the more-prominent role being played by drones. In 2005, drones made up just 5 percent of the military's aircraft. Today one in three American military aircraft is a drone. The upsides of drones are that they are cheaper and safer — the military spent 92% of the aircraft procurement money on manned aircraft. The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War."
Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this a legitimate comparison?
I mean, Lego is reportedly [businessweek.com] the world's #1 tire manufacturer, just based on the number of tires it produces, but it's not exactly an automotive powerhouse.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Informative)
I'd say it's only a legitimate comparison if drones and manned aircraft were used in comparable roles. Can a single drone take the place of a single manned plane for a given mission? In some cases yes, in other cases you may need 3 drones to take the place of a single fighter jet - especially in combat conditions.
Sort of like with Legos... how many Lego tires would you need to replace a single Goodyear on a car? Adjust for that and you get a more useful comparison.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Funny)
I am not sure that any amount of Lego tires would fit onto a full-sized car. People, do not replace your spare with a trunk full of Lego ones.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Manned aircraft also have more down time for maintenance. If a drone fails, you are out the cost of the drone. If a manned aircraft fails, you lose the cost of the aircraft and the lives of the crew. Dead crews are bad PR.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:4, Insightful)
Manned aircraft also have more down time for maintenance. If a drone fails, you are out the cost of the drone. If a manned aircraft fails, you lose the cost of the aircraft and the lives of the crew. Dead crews are bad PR.
Meh, they'd just do like they always do and either not tell anyone, or make up some story about how the plane was shot down while engaging in a 6 on 1 dog fight, heroically saving the nation from flying terrorists...
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:4, Informative)
You are wrong when claiming it has not been used off a carrier. The reliability of drone carrier launches and captures has proven better then a piloted aircraft. Unfortunately, you will need to apply for a higher security clearance to obtain the evidence but there is some video evidence on the Internet if you look in the right places.
Every advanced aircraft in the US arsenal is in a developmental state of varying degrees. The F-15 has been in development since 1970. People think they really know the actually status of US military technology development but they really don't. Secrecy has been compromised in some areas either by accident or even deliberately but there are also some systems that are actually secret.
You cannot compare drone operators to an actual pilot. Drone operators experience no G-forces and there is great difference between sitting in a cockpit for an extended amount of time compared to a sitting in a cushioned lounge basically playing a video game. Even a jet flying in a straight line subjects a human pilot to constant G-forces. Drone operators also work in shifts. A manned jet can't change pilots in the middle of the flight operation. Drone operations are also conducted with multiple personnel present at all times to monitor the on-going operation. The B-2 has a pilot, copilot, and flight engineer and the copilot can give the pilot some down time. Most F-15 variants and all F-22's are single pilot platforms. Although there are certain types of manned jets like an A-6 that do have 2 personnel aboard the primary responsibility for flying the plane is relegated to a single pilot. The other co-pilot is usually operates the radar, communication, navigation, and weapon systems. And the co-pilot is exposed to the same G-force fatigue as the pilot.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.
The bigger concern is capture - like what happened in Iran. What would be particularly scary is if an enemy can take control of the drone, and either launch weapons at us or our allies, or at a civilian population - could you imagine if a Syria or Iran managed to take control of a U.S. drone and use it to attack protesters? Or a mosque, or a school? They could claim it was the U.S. doing the attack, and further incite hostilities amongst their people and cement their hold on power.
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, the more important question is capability. I mean, I don't really care if it takes 3 drones to do the job of 1 manned aircraft if they can do the same job, and the drones cost less than 1/3 the cost of a manned aircraft. If you have cheap, "disposable" drones, you don't care if they get destroyed by the enemy - no pilot, no casualties.
Where a drone is of particular usefulness is in situations where your pilots might rebel and refuse to carry out your orders. Like launching a Hellfire or dropping some napalm into a crowd of your own nation's domestic civilian protesters.
Drones don't refuse to carry out orders or object on moral, humanitarian, or legal grounds. They don't leak mission details to reporters or investigators/prosecutors, even years later. What dictator or ruling elite wouldn't cream themselves over the idea of having a tame "Skynet" do most of the "heavy-lifting" of the suppression, enforcement, and punishment work of controlling a captive population under tyranny?
Drones (unarmed...for now) are already being used domestically. There are already calls from some in civilian law enforcement for armed drones for use against violent suspects. This is scary stuff. I can imagine only too easily how "mission creep" and incremental expansions in the laws could see widespread domestic civilian LE use of armed military drones in the relatively near future.
For that matter, seeing what the US government will already do and what lengths they will already go to openly, I would be shocked if there weren't already armed drones being used domestically by the military and/or one of the alphabet agencies, or a "we don't exist" special department that handles the tracking and elimination of "domestic civilian enemies of the state".
Strat
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Drones still have to be piloted, they're just piloted remotely.
Not strictly true anymore. Say "hello" to the Northrop-Grumman X-47B. Say it nicely, though.
http://www.as.northropgrumman.com/products/nucasx47b/index.html [northropgrumman.com]
http://www.gizmag.com/x-47b-first-flight-the-era-of-the-autonomous-unmanned-combat-plane-approaches/17817/ [gizmag.com]
Strat
Re:Is this a legitimate comparison? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given their loiter time, drones replace multiple jets and allow using fresh aircrew while keeping one machine on-station.
They also do NOT require expensive combat search and rescue resources because when they go down their crew aren't IN them.
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Fighter jets aren't really fighter jets anymore, and haven't been for over a decade. They are more aptly described as a "weapons platform". The days of yanking and banking with a bogie on your six are as long gone as the shoot-out with six-shooters at high noon. The modern fighter has a fire-and-forget, over-the-horizon. The Air Force already has friggin' acronyms for the terms, they are so common. The pilot picks a target from the radar screen, assigns a missile to it, launches, and picks the next tar
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From some random tech site giving a history of processors:
June 1991 Intel 486 introduced Clock speed: 50 MHz Number of transistors: 1,200,000
vs
Take your pick of quad or eigjt-core processors running at around 3.3 GHz.
What other useless comparisons can we use?
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That's surprising. Tires only come in a minority of LEGO kits and pretty much never wear out.
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They do, however, get lost. In profusion. Down air conditioning floor vents, outside in dirt, in the bellies of hungry stupid little doggies, down sink and tub drains, God only knows where.
I speak from experience, having raised three avid Lego fans to adulthood and in the process of raising three more.... and most of the axles or hubs from any Lego set older than 1 year old are missing the wheels or tires. If you were to build any wheeled vehicle from any of Legos in our house, you'd have to put it up on li
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I mean, Lego is reportedly [businessweek.com] the world's #1 tire manufacturer, just based on the number of tires it produces, but it's not exactly an automotive powerhouse.
Maybe, all I know is that they're the only ones making Ferraris I can afford! (or were)
It needs what??? (Score:4, Interesting)
500MB/s? I just... wow. How? How do you get 1/2 GB/s per drone from the other side of the world? Presumably they don't care about latency!
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Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Informative)
From THIS [irconnect.com] article:
To demonstrate the concept, Northrop Grumman's test team developed and installed on Global Hawk a new 1.4 terabyte (1500 gigabyte) computer server capable of storing all of the imagery and sensor data recorded during a complete Global Hawk mission.
With a 42 hour mission time that computes to just under 10MB/s or approximately 80Mb/s bandwidth. That sounds more reasonable.
Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Informative)
On page 17 of the actual report (page 22 of the PDF file), it says "a single Global Hawk...'requires 500Mbps bandwidth...'" So yes, somewhere between there and the Wired story, someone miscapitalized the B. That statistic is cited within the report as being from the Department of the Navy.
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Plus, you're forgetting that the military always get the cool toys first. 500MB/s to the user will come to us regular Joe's eventua
Why spread propaganda? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why spread propaganda? (Score:4, Informative)
Saying that, I didn't notice anyone saying that this wasn't the case either[dramatic ellipsis]
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Most of it is indeed downstream. If you figure one standard definition camera on board, and you want to minimize compression artifacts but use one of the required NATO-approved codecs, you're looking at 12kb to 60kb per frame. When you consider that you need to record full frame rate, again, let us assume 30fps per NTSC (or ATSC's 480p) then you're looking at (1s)(30f)(12kb)=360kbps to (1s)(30f)(60kb)(1800kbps). Now,
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Drones are controlled from reasonably close by, and I would suspect they're fairly autonomous during flight.
That's not correct. While there are some types of small autonomous aircraft used directly by troops, most of the drones are piloted from locations in the continental US, like Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.
These remotely controlled planes can hover in the air 24 hours at a time, collecting intelligence or carrying out a strike in Afghanistan.
But the pilots are thousands of miles away, sitting in front of a bank of computer screens. And that distance, which is the strength of the program, has also created unique challenges.
http://www.npr.org/2011/11/29/142858358/drone-pilots-the-future-of-aerial-warfare [npr.org]
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Actually, he does mean "control the aircraft directly". UAVs are piloted in real time on a system that wouldn't look particularly alient to a flight sim nut.
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I've seen lots of video (here [youtube.com], for example) where it looks like the "pilots" have multiple control sticks and many-paneled displays showing video feed from a UAV. So these "pilots" may have more feedback from the aircraft than an in-plane pilot would.
Also, people were commenting about the bandwidth - Reaper [wikipedia.org] drones have Raytheon multispectral targeting systems [raytheon.com] that must require a good bit of bandwidth (multiple video feeds at different wavelengths). Also I would imagine that the drone is sending back tons
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I doubt that, more likely it simply malfunctioned, if they were that smart, why not just EMP the drone? Or do they did just that?
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Plus, you're forgetting that the military always get the cool toys first. 500MB/s to the user will come to us regular Joe's eventually.
From whom? Surely not one of the existing ISP's in my area. Oh wait. You probably mean a 500MB cap will come to us regular Joe's. /snark
Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to those posting corrections.
Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually only for take off and landings. It is the latency issue that causes them to have local pilots for take off and landings.
it is funny but I was talking to a friend of mine that worked on drones about two years ago and he told me the same thing.
Bandwidth is and will be an issue for a long time to come. You only have X amount of spectrum in which to transmit data. That is why AEW aircraft take controllers with them instead of beaming the data back to some command center.
Bandwidth gets tricky when you get past LOS range and satellites introduce real latency issues.
Also their is not proof that Iran brought down that drone by spoofing GPS. It is actually very unlikely that they did. Drones use encrypted GPS and it is not very likely that Iran broke the encryption keys. It is far more likely that the drone had a problem and came down.
Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Informative)
It's utter bullshit offcourse. Some journalist probably mistook frequency-used for data-transmitted or something along those lines.
Flight-data (speed, position, velocity, status) is a tiny trickle of data, the only data that are significant is when transmitting live-video, which not all drones do 100% of the time. And even when they do, it's not 500MB/s. Full-HD-video from a blueray-player is on the order of 35 megabit/second, thus 500 MB/s would be the equivalent of streaming around 100 HD-cameras in blueray-quality-video.
That's not what's happening. The number is bullshit.
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Wish I'd read that before posting my other comment.
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No that's still completely batshit crazy. People in this thread who have done the research are saying it's actually 50mbit which is sensible and believable.
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However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.
I couldn't tell you why OP didn't copy/paste, he's only a few words off from the original anyway.
Re:It needs what??? (Score:5, Funny)
However, he translated 500Mbps (megaBITS per second) to megabytes per second. 500Mbps is actually closer to 62.5MB/s -- still a lot compared to residential bandwidth in the US, but not half a terabyte every second.
So he doesn't know bits from bytes and you don't know giga from tera, but together you're dynamite ;)
2 out of 3 US Workers (Score:2, Funny)
are bandwidth-hogging drones. Eat your heart out US military.
History's Detectives: Drones used since 1940s (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_TDR [wikipedia.org]
Video streaming (Score:2, Insightful)
This accounts for most of the bandwidth.
The number in the article is indeed way high... not to say Global Hawk does not have some serious data output.
I work on NASA"s Global Hawk program, and used to work on many DOD ISR programs.
Bandwidth (Score:2)
How the hell can the manage 500MB/s? That is an insane amount. We can stream 720p with 5.1 audio over a 5mb/s connection. So what the hell are they using all that bandwidth for?
Clearly the military needs to invest some money in compression and/or greater automation in these things. 500MB/s should be enough for a wing of UAVs.
Re:Bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not sure where the submitter gets his 500MB/s from, but as others suggest it's probably 500Mb/s.
However, you might say 500Mb/s is still a tad much, however I have a good idea why it might be that high.
First, a drone typically doesn't have just a single camera. It'd be a bit of a waste to get cheap there really, when you can put three or four cameras per drone.
Second, I can imagine military regulations dictate that judging kill orders based on compressed live images from a shaky drone isn't good enough. Has to be a raw data stream to ensure the best possible information is available.
These are of course just my thoughts and I don't have any experience or insider knowledge to back them up with.
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and your still not there -- unless they are morons and everything is completely uncompressed/raw frame - but even then i don't think you would hit 500MB/s
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"He, uh, downloads songs from the web"
"Yeah, how many?"
"All of them."
"Well you're in a pack of trouble with the record companies there, son!"
500% of the bandwith? (Score:2, Insightful)
Breaking News! Modern technology uses more bandwidth than available 20 years ago! Film at 11.
They're comparing it to the time when 14.4 kbps modems were considered blazingly fast.
5 Steps to Internet Bliss (Score:3, Funny)
Only one problem with that plan (Score:3)
I see only one problem with that plan. By the end of it, you'll have had
- your country used for everything from getting rid of old bombs by dropping them on you to testing new weapons by dropping them on you
- some hospital hit by cruise missiles which the USA still claims they hit their intended super-secret bunkers that nobody else ever heard of
- a few dozen children born with flippers because of all the uranium oxide dust from the depleted uranium ammunitions used. (While DU is actually pretty inert and s
Re:5 Steps to Internet Bliss (Score:4, Insightful)
500MB/sec? (Score:3)
500MB/sec isn't right in a million years.
Blu-ray uses about 40megaBITS/second, and that includes audio as well as video. So if we were to say a couple of megabits/second for control (which is probably generous); that means each drone sends out the equivalent of over a hundred totally separate high-def video feeds each with 5.1 channel DTS surround sound.
Misleading Title (Score:2, Interesting)
aircraft != warplane
Asinine comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
As a Gulf War vet who worked with the communication network at the time, that "500 percent" metric is pointless. In 1991, we were still playing games on Commodore 64's. Hardly anything in our military inventory was networked, and what little was, was largely special-purpose point-to-point equipment. Is 5x the bandwidth of a pre-internet era war supposed to be impressive? Quick, tell us how much more bandwidth it was than we used in World War 2!
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looks like the record for ww2 for Morse code was 35 words per min.. split the difference (10 min to operate and 35 max) lets use average of ~23wm. 5 letters per word and average 3 bits per letter so 3*5*23= 345 bits per min per operator = 5.75 bps per operator
for 500MBs = 4,194,304,00 bps
so 500MBs is equivalent to ~729,444,174 radio operators from WW2.. which happens to be ~66x the number of people drafted for WW2.
sorry i couldn't find any stat on the number of radio operators active during WW2.. so i
AT&T/Verizon (Score:2)
That's a good thing (Score:2)
Besides 500MB/s being slightly dubious... so what? They're reconnaissance planes, their primary purpose is gathering intelligence. So they're gathering it, at 500MB/s. So their downside is that they're good at what they're doing?
This would be an issue if we were told "They use 20% of the total available bandwidth for military applications per plane just to stay in air", but I do not believe this to be the case or we would be told that. So what exactly is the downside?
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Skimming the actual report, the number in there is predictably "500Mbits", it seems to be Wired who got that mixed with megabytes. Still as some earlier posters point out one needs to go no further than Wikipedia to find out that number is still likely off by a magnitude as the real figure seems to be 50Mbps. I assume the 500Mbits figure came from people trying to get funding for more bandwidth, and may be based on theoretical maximum, such as the capability of the link installed on them.
The report in quest
The problem with drones (Score:3)
500MB/s ~ 4k resolution, 30 frames, uncompressed (Score:3)
Global hawk is a high altitude, high resolution surveillance bird. It's like a drone version of the U2. I'm not surprised that it would generate HUGE amounts of data. They aren't spending tens of millions of those things to mount a web cam. Bandwidth for more pedestrian drones like the Reaper should be far lower.
I think the bandwidth and security solution will be high altitude relay planes/blimps over friendly territory so that signals can be line of sight in the air and then sent down to ground stations in friendly territory. That type of bandwidth is only problematic until it hits a terrestrial wire. At 40-50k feet line of sight is 200 miles to sea level and 400 miles for another high altitude airplane. By contrast geosynchronous orbits are 22,000 miles away and its a round trip. I guess it is possible to use LEO satellites but those are vulnerable in a way that GEO is not.
Line of sight signals from aircraft could be stronger and therefore harder to jam. Also the angle of the signal would be harder to duplicate and overwhelm from the ground. Also with multiple relay stations you'd have an alternate way to calcuate position like GPS but without the low power satellite constraints. Bonus points for one time pad encrypting the really sensitive stuff like controls. A 120GB SSD is a lot of unbreakable communication.
They need an aerial tonnage measurement... (Score:3)
The Navy uses displacement as a way to assess the "size" of their fleet....
Just numerically counting 2lb "drones" and comparing them to F-16s is not a terribly interesting statistic.
The Downside (Score:5, Insightful)
The downside — they're bandwidth hogs: a single Global Hawk drone requires 500 megabytes per second worth of bandwidth, the report finds, which is 500 percent of the total bandwidth of the entire U.S. military used during the 1991 Gulf War.
I think the downside is that the drones are used in "secret" CIA wars, routinely kill civilians, have been used by the President for extra-judicial assassination of at least one American citizen, and are increasingly eyed for use in domestic airspace. I'd put their bandwidth usage pretty far down on the list of reasons to be concerned about drones.
Propaganda (Score:2)
Dumb (Score:4, Interesting)
That's like saying 3 out of 4 military assault vehicles is a jeep.
Or 3 out of 4 warships are tugboats.
Of course there are a lot of drones. They're cheap and practically disposable. They're unmanned because they go places where it's too dangerous to send a man.
God, I would have hoped we'd have more than just 1 in 3 military aircraft being drones. Aren't they the most effective weapon we have? Assuming by "effective" you mean "killing certain people with the least muss and fuss to your own".
How about this: "The majority of military aircraft are missiles."
Tiny kamikaze drones (Score:3)
Tiny kamikaze drones!
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/tiny-kamikaze-drone/ [wired.com]
Is the F35 still needed? (Score:2)
At $150M/plane can we afford a plane designed for yesterday's conflicts? UAVs are getting better and will soon surpass the capabilities of manned vehicles.
If the US had the F35 for the past 10 years would it have made a difference in the Iraq or Afghan wars? In the next 10 years where do we see it making a difference over the F18, F16, A10 or F15E?
The lifetime cost of the F35 is estimated at $1T.
Re:Is the F35 still needed? (Score:5, Interesting)
1 in 3 (Score:2)
Does the statistic also represent kind of how slashdot is? Only 1 in 3 "first post" comments are actually funny? I'd expect even less...
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Which makes the second post to first post. Complete induction...
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defeating first responders.
FTFY
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Somebody is smoking crack.
Relax. It's probably megaBITS. Most people get that confused.
Distinction without... (Score:3)
Relax. It's probably megaBITS. Most people get that confused.
Which is still a metric shitload.
It must be streaming all that uncompressed video back to its pilot that costs so much bandwidth.
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I'll assume they mean megabits too, that makes more sense. The cameras on something like a predator drone are quite probably very high re
Re:Distinction without... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:500 megabytes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps bandwidth should never have been rated in bits per second in the first place? I blame my CompSci/IT predecessors (and marketing people, no doubt). I think they wanted a bigger number, and 300 bits per second sounded more impressive for that modem they designed than 37.5 bytes per second.
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
Also, most people think of data in terms of bytes - they buy hard drives in bytes (well, gigabytes and terrabytes), RAM, USB flash drives, sd cards for their phones, cameras, and other consumer electronics. In fact, bandwidth is the only place we still talk about bits instead of bytes, and that's ridiculous. It needs to change and the bits per second standard needs to die.
Re:500 megabytes? (Score:4, Interesting)
But, since the byte is really the smallest meaningful unit of data is a byte (yes, a single bit can represent a boolean value, but you can't transmit a single bit; in the simple case of a modem, you would generally transmit a byte; with modern networks, you transmit a packet, and I believe the smallest amount of data you can encapsulate in a packet is also one byte, isn't it?), data speeds should really be measured in *bytes* per second.
I disagree. There are several reasons why data transfer capacities of network equipment is measured in raw bits per second. First, different encoding schemes use different numbers of bits to transmit one byte. Second, at what layer do you want to measure the byte transport capacity? Do you wish to use the frame payload, the IP packet payload, the TCP stream payload, or something else? Third, even with a set encoding scheme and a defined layer, different packet sizes will give different amounts of overhead and thus differing data transport capacities for the same raw bitrate. Transmitting a stream of packets with a one-byte payload results in much more overhead and much lower payload transfer rate than if you use packets carrying 1 kb of payload. Fourth, features of various protocols significantly affect transfer rate. For an example compare the transfer rate of TFTP and FTP on the same network.
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Obviously military h
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Yeah , then Verizon or AT&T will sell it as 5g and lower the caps even more producing an even more overly inflated bill, all while a senator tells us that this is needed because a truck has crashed in the internets tubes causing a backup of bits which are not being processed fast enough to fight the war on terror.
And it will only cost 45 Trillion to get the technology into the right peoples hands.
All joking now done, the cameras on those planes must be feeding extremely high def video back to the mother
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The number claimed is simply unrealistic, and must be a mistake.
full-HD as coming from a blueray-disc requires on the order of 35 megabits second. 500Mbytes/second is the same as 4000 megabit/second, or more than 100 times what a full-hd-movie coming rom a blueray-disc uses.
Yes there may be more than one camera. Yes it may be more than full-hd. But no, not more than *100* full-HD-cameras.
Re:Nerds for t3h win! (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, one needs to be a commissioned officer, Captain last time I checked to be flying a drone (for the Air Force at least).
Private for the win! (Score:2)
Actually, most drones are flow by non-coms, because most drones (by numbers) are back-pack squad level drones. Basically, fancy model RC controlled planes allowing soldiers to see over the hill.
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Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
Re:Nerds for t3h win! (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably pilots of regular aircraft resenting having the drones piloted by lowly "non-comms". After all the regular pilots are seemingly on the way out and thus its likely that many are being converted over to drone piloting. RHIP
Also when they started arming the drones. Originally they were scout-only.
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:4, Insightful)
You could run Netflix quite comfortably on 1/100th of that!
That's 500 megabytes per second, or roughly 4x the bandwidth of a GigE connection! Sounds to me like they're doing something seriously wrong, even if you assume they're receiving multiple hi-res live video streams simultaneously from the drones. Maybe the video isn't compressed at all?
a'la Jonathan Swift: (Score:2)
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
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What sensors could they have that could require more bandwidth than a video camera? Most would require much less - for one thing radar and IR aren't in color, and that's assuming the most asinine possible way of transferring the data.
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)
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True, but I was thinking more of the Reaper, which does have real time control and weapons systems. Which (according to wiki [wikipedia.org], it does have both autonomous and real time control, and of course can carry the Hellfire, Paveway, and JDAM missile systems. As far as data inputs for the systems, we've all seen the footage of the laser pointer guiding the LGMs to the target.
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Actually, the more that I think about it, I wish that the number was not released. It says a lot about what level of resolution is possible.
Re:That's a ton of bandwidth (Score:5, Interesting)
It's neither 500 megabytes/s nor even 500 megabits/s. There is no link capability in the U.S. space communications systems, or even anywhere, that could handle that reliably from just one drone, never mind multiple drones at the same time. That drone would need a big effing antenna to push that much data over a couple dozen thousand kilometers to the space segment. Let's get real: do the /. editors have no sense of magnitude at all?!