Throughput

[jay]

I'm sitting here late at night, for the eighth night in a row... the paper went off to Japan last night, tonight I'm catching up on entirely mundane air traffic management visuals.

One stark moment at this afternoon's air traffic technology planning meeting... a colleague from NASA-Dryden was discussing their incipient shift from classical pulse-code modulated telemetry to a network structure, and added that they'd used 802.11b. Out to an aircraft 20 miles distant. I was impressed, as we're lucky to get a quarter of that on the ground on Devon Island.

Then the Dryden guy said, "that's nothing... the Army has their training ground at Yuma completely saturated. They can fire tanks remotely from their desktops." Okay.... I imagine something like a real-life video game... wondering vaguely what defines "work-safe" in that context.

Then he added," and they've been putting it on ordnance, too, like shells. 802.11b packets can handle the Doppler shifting up to Mach 10." That gives new meaning to throughput... I'm sure that the details are classified, but I can't help wondering what they're doing with 2-way digital communication with unguided shells...

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Are you sure those shells are unguided? I remember plans from years back in the UK to put solid state phased array radars on morter bombs, and then using something like magnetorestrictive elements to wiggle the shell a bit and produce guidability. Even if there isn't guiding, something might be done for damage assessment or improved targetting if you can tell where the shell's gone. And if there's a camera, think of the press photos. Remember, the US sells wars the way hollywood does action movies. The visuals are all important.

As to remote controlled tanks, this is entirely in tune with the 'no-US-casualties' policy that's existed since Vietnam. There are also plans for robot infantry that were covered recently. Of course the corollory to a 'no-US-casualties' policy is that there is little concern about allied casualties, and less about enemy civilians. I can quite easily see the 'teletrooper' attrocities in some of Ken MacLeod's fiction coming along real soon now.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Maybe real soon now... but I'd be slow to trust combat assets to an 802.11 link. It also seems to me that they'd be easy for opponents to jam and/or hijack.