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.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

for the eighth night in a row ...entirely mundane air traffic management visuals...

Eight working nights in a row do not exist for mundane work. And you wonder why we tell you that you work too much? Go home, child!

[curiousangel.livejournal.com]

The artillery thing might also be for something like the Copperhead laser-guided round, or it might also work with submunition dispensers, too.

The only application that immediately springs to my mind for unguided shells is GPS confirmation of where rounds land or perhaps reporting on wind and temperature conditions that might influence trajectory. I'm not a redleg, though, so the details of what you'd want to know about munitions in transit are mostly unfamiliar to me.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

*sigh* The line between exploration and war gets too damn blurry for me. I'm glad I'm no longer working somewhere that's funded by DARPA.

Like another before me said: Go home. Rest. Be with your family. You need it.

[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.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Mundane tasks in an overall non-mundane context, perhaps... what occasionally annoys me is the right-wing supposition that anyone working for the government must be a clock-watching slacker (that probably couldn't find "real" employment elsewhere). I work longer hours than most people that I know in private industry, for typically less money. And we don't get stock options... but there are more important things in life than getting rich.

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

The submunition dispenser idea kind of makes sense, or targeting QA... otherwise, I'm vaguely amused that someone gets 802.11 to work at 5000 mph relative velocities... it should be a breeze to connect to commercial airliners, then ;-).

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I would have had fewer qualms about dual-use technology development under the previous Administration... with the Bushies, I'm reluctant to do anything that contributes (however indirectly) to their ability to bully and threaten other countries. Mars-analog drilling projects are an area with no likely military applications...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Good point... I'm not sure I'd bet on it, though :-(

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Quite so.

There are clock-watching slackers throughout society, just as there are selfish idiots travelling about by every means of transport :-)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

True... I've seen inconsiderate road behaviour from cyclists as well as drivers of monster SUVs. Granted, the former are much less likely...

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Pedestrians, drivers of semis...

There probably are some statistical trends in personality types, but inconsiderate behaviour is a universal human thang. However, the damage which results goes as the fourth power of the axle weight, approximately... So, the social obligation to be considerate, and the penalties for selfishness, ought to have the same functional form :-)

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what was studied at your former (DARPA-funded) workplace? I thought that you were at UCB... not a place that I'd typically associate with weapons research.

[dawnd.livejournal.com]

I was at UC (from 1988 through 2002). The DARPA funding was when I worked for Donald Glaser. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in the early 60's for inventing the bubble chamber. When I worked for him in the early 90's, he was doing research on Vision/Perception/The Brain, so you can see how that could possibly translate to something weapons-related. I don't recall at this point which specific project it was that was funded by DARPA. It wasn't a big one. The big one there was an NSF project, IIRC. Over the years, most of the projects I worked on were funded by NSF. But I also got paid in part by NIH, CTR (Council for Tobacco Research), DoE (Dept. of Education), NSIC (National Storage Industry Consortium), DoD, and several others. The funding will depend on exactly which dept. one works in. And even when I worked in Education (which one would think would be far from science and weapons), I was working for someone who did research on Science and Math instruction, so it was usually NSF. And the rest of the time I worked for science or computer science departments, so weapons research was never terribly far away.