Helicopter Cruisers

A prop can carry a radar much higher than a helicopter, and has excellent loiter ability, this makes it perfect for AWACS duties. It's why the hawkeye is not based on a Sikorsky. This is super important when the ship horizon is 20km and the enemy has 300km range hypersonic missiles…. spotting the missile early with a high flying AEW is the only way to have even a 1% chance of surviving it.

So it can:
1. Locate low flying cruise missiles in time to respond
2. Locate enemy aircraft carrying cruise missiles in time to intercept them
3. Spot enemy ships and submarines so you can hit them with your own long range missiles (if you have them)
4. Dropping torpedoes onto dumb submarines
5. Attacking ships in port, or airplanes in hangars…. which is where ships and airplanes spend most of their time
6. Wrecking small attack craft and pirates
7. Destroying retard helicopters that can't match your altitude or speed

Oh also it can deliver aircav and supplies a lot better, due to higher payload and speed….

The only advantage I think a helicopter has over a well built fixed wing turboprop is the VTOL thing, and being (at least in theory) perfectly happy without a prepared airfield to fly from. How did helos get to where they are today without being supplanted by short take off, cheaper, longer ranged, and potentially more effective lightweight turboprops?

Helicopters can hide in the terrain and pop out for ambushes as well as carry out recon without exposing themselves like the Kiowa's camera pod and the Apache longbow's radar pod. In a naval role they can do the rescue part of search and rescue along with anti-sub work with sonar dippers. Vietnam is also a pretty good example that its not just theory that they can land anywhere. The worst patches of jungle need only a daisy cutter to clear out the worst of the brush in order to get the skids down for quick insertion and exfiltration. Reminder that paradrops always have an inherent risk to them and landing a fixed wing craft in a field like an assault glider can be easily defended against by planting poles in the suspected landing site that will rip the wings off the craft and split it open, killing everyone on board. Helicopters can also lift things that cant fit inside their fuselage with winches meaning you can lift much heavier or bulkier equipment in a smaller and easier to land in a tight spot rotary wing vs a fixed wing.

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Yeah that's the thing it would be incredibly cheaper to operate compared to a supercarrier for bombing shit-tier fighters with no AA.

Thanks for the explanation mate. I still think that on balance you would gain a lot from using a collection of STOL turboprops for naval aircraft. They may not be able to use a dipping sonar the way a Merlin or Sea King would, but dropping a network of sonobuoys over an area can be done much quicker than searching the same stretch of water with anything less than an airforces worth of helicopters; they can be recovered by a launch or other small ship launched from the carrier (which can also cover the rescue part of search and rescue). As there isn't all that much terrain or cover for them to hide behind and pop out of in a naval setting that advantage doesn't mean much in this context.

Fixed wing maritime patrol is handled by big long loiter turbo props or converted jet airliners. The navy uses turbo props with aircraft like the E-2 hawkeye and P-3 orion. The helicopter has not replaced the carrier, but it has replaced the catapult launched seaplane used on every warship that isn't a CV. The smallest frigate can carry two helicopters which greatly extend its anti sub, search and rescue and ground strike capability. The main reason I can think of as to why we don't use catapult sea planes is recovery. You can't land a sea plane in rough waves and you need to dedicate more deck space for the crane that will hoist it back on board. Couple that with having to stop to make a recovery limits the fleets mobility. A helo simply needs to drop a line and reel itself in when landing in a storm. You can also store them inside the ship and not have to worry about the constant battle with rust you would have to deal with on leaving a float plane on a catapult 24/7.

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It's all about the power plant.

Turboprop engines are about 11x lighter for the same level of thrust than they were in WWII, I once hilariously did a napkin design of a PW Canada in a carbon composite P-38, with slightly larger blades it had enough thrust to literally hover nose up.
Turboshafts can no longer compete as soon as boomers died off so will the romance of the helicopter. Look at what Sikorsky and Kamov are doing, largest military helicopter companies in the world, and every future helicopter design is some kind of gyrodyne.

40x more money is a lot to pay for a one trick pony.

Now that is something I would like to see.

Tiltwing P-38s when?

Maybe a bigger version of this with weapon carrying cappacity

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I know that Germany has a long and storied history of taking retarded ideas and making them (almost, sort of) workable by throwing enough autism at them to get reality to sit down and shut up. But, still, I'm curious as to how you plan to get the wings on a P38 tilted at 90 degrees to the fuselage without just ramming them into the deck/tarmac.

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It would be easier to tilt the little pilot pod instead of the wings.

Maybe put robot legs instead of the double tail, and a pair of manipulator arms on the belly.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_Seastar

May be a dumb question, but why can't just the engines rotate like the red section in pic related? I suppose the tail would drag during takeoff from the front lifting off first, but that could easily be mitigated by putting the rear landing gear more parallel to the ground/further back.

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Do I count?

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Aren't the twin-booms there only to house the superchargers? Do Turbo-props need that much room?

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I don't think a modern engine would need to be built that far back into the booms. You could probably use them for fuel storage, or possibly as hard points for mounting sonobuoys/torpedoes. You couldn't just cut them though, they're needed for aerodynamic reasons.

Tilt rotors are inherently less safe than traditional rotary wing aircraft due to their inability to land on auto rotation. Not to mention the increased maintenance and failure points involved in having your power plants and in some cases wings swivel. And if your design is less safe and more maintenance heavy than a helicopter then you have some pretty big problems to be honest. I don't understand how everyone here will collectively laugh at the Osprey for its high cost overruns and lackluster safety records but then turn around and say its the future and it replacing the cheaper and safer CH-46 was the right call to make.
Man, I guess after grug popped out of the berry bush to club berry pickers no one in the history of man ever fell for that trick ever again.

I fail to see how this plane eliminates the main issues catapult seaplanes had that got them deleted off of every warship in a heartbeat over helicopters.

If only you could solve landing, it would be viable. Something like pic related where some sort of supports would close in as the plane is vertically landing seems almost doable. You can then lower the plane and put it into hanger if need be, catapult can be on the same deck.

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You'd take the centre of thrust out of line with the centre of mass when the engines went vertical. That wouldn't result in a smooth, controlled, take off/hover, depending on how far away from the COM the COT(V) was the aircraft would either lurch forwards or backwards in a 180 pitch that would end in a crash. You could, potentially, rejig the weight distribution to fix this, but that would most likely result in a radically different air-frame.

Would a picrel outfitted with CY+4 tech make for a decent ship-launched turboprop recon aircraft?

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Would it be possible to have racks of them in a submarine to launch an attack of human missiles?

IMO the LANDING roto-rocket scheme tried with a C-130 for the Iranian Hostage Rescue is worth looking into.

IIRC it basically worked fine, just a minor other issue that busted off wings as it fell or something. The rig was put together in matter of weeks as a Hail Mary, and never revisited (at least officially). You wouldn't need to use it all the time, just when normal landing not possible, and I guess it'd be OK to blast rocket exhaust into the ocean.

What you really need is one of these.
430 mph AND unlike Osprey can take off and/or land normally, for massive overloading, Cat-launch, or just in case you get some battle damage and can't do helio-landing.

I'm waiting for the moment when a Ospery full of grunts takes some damage and they figure out they can't tilt the props, and only pilots got parachutes. How long they gonna keep re-fueling?

one of these
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LTV_XC-142

it was cancelled on brink of 'Nam escalation.

Only real issue was some vibration, but vibration can always be solved, just change something to break up the harmony.

Don't forget about these things.

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the retro rocket C-130 crashed because the pilot turned on the rockets too early and stalled the plane. I don't really like the idea of telling pilots that they need to fire the rockets at the exact right moment or risk falling short of the deck, smashing into the deck, skidding off the deck or into the superstructure for a 100% chance of death. Stopping planes quickly on ships has already been figured out. Its called arresting wires.

I have a bad feeling about those shopping cart wheels not being able to hold the thing upright while taking off or landing in rough seas.

They'd be too slow to avoid getting shot down by Russian CIWS.

Then again wonder how much sense one of these coleopter autism constructs would make in the context of arsenal ships.
Would a vertical hangar bay with an elevator make sense or would it just be bloat even if the coleopter planes are small drones?

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Seems far too complicated for the small advantages you'd get from that design (how very German of you), and best of luck to the poor bastard trying to land that thing vertically on a shipboard pad. It would probably be a pain in the arse to configure initially, and could get expensive over time, but what about vertically mounted solid rocket engines on a lightweight aircraft? Say it weighs around 3800kg or so at take off, it shouldn't take too many one-shot rockets to get it high enough off the deck that it has time for the turboprop to move it forwards fast enough to start flying.

I suppose you could have a second set of weaker rockets to allow a vertical landing, you'd probably want those to be adjustable output liquid fuel engines though, as return weight isn't as fixed as max take-off weight, and you need a lot more control to land safely on a moving/rocking platform. Actually, if you're building liquid fuel rockets into the design it's probably cheaper and easier to use those for take-off as well, but that does risk the pilots using them during flight and not having enough fuel to land back on the ship. How buoyant do you think that plane would have to be to realistically have an emergency water landing option for a situation like that? It could put down close enough to its parent ship to be easily recovered in cases when it couldn't land on deck - and I think most pilots would prefer to fly a floating ship over water than one that'll sink like a brick. Any naval pilots ITT to confirm/deny?

I really don't see how that's better than a submarine that carries an arsenal of missiles. You could argue that the hull is cheaper, but its chances of survival are much lower. On that note, what kind of a drone would be good to be launched from the VLS of a submarine, and how would you go around recovering it?

Aren't chinks working on an arsenal sub that's just an arsenal ship with mild submersible capability to hide from ASMs?

Not really, if anything the trend is to build smaller subs.
The chinks are building cruisers with 2x64 VLS.

Actually, looking at OP pic is there a reason why it couldn't, with minor modifications, host a bunch of turboprops? Add arresting wires for landing, a catapult for take off and maybe widen the deck a little for a bit more maneuvering space. You could probably make the landing trajectory go sideways too, if safer landing abort is necessary.

I was addressing the problem of landing a seaplane in anything but calm seas.

But like you said, it was a "learning curve" not a fundy flaw, and IMO the concept should be retried for STOL or VTOL on small land based landing strips/pads. Rato on deck might be problematic because it gonna spray rocket blast everywhere, but that could be a "feature" of instant smoke screen for tactical use.

Firing rockets at right moment can be fixed.

The way the deck is spaced, you can only bring one plane between decks on the elevator at a time which was a major disadvantage for a lot of the smaller carriers in WW2. Flying into the superstructure to land is just a horrible idea in general as more landings than you would think are aborted at the last second and making a side landing would be incredibly risky due to how much easier it is for a ship to roll than to pitch without going into the problems with having smaller target to hit and the decreased stopping distance with the extra stresses applied to the landing gear and pilot accordingly.

The problem is that you still need to sacrifice a hell of a lot of deck space for even just a tiny strip to land a plane with wires or retrorockets and the inherent risk of coming on a bad approach and hitting the superstructure. Along with the problem that recovering sea planes even in calm conditions is much more energy and time consuming than landing a helicopter on the deck. A fucktarded solution I just thought up though would be catching them the same way we recover catapulted artillery observation drones. Hold out a huge net over the side that the aircraft feathers its props and crashes into. Of course such a solution will only work with small, light unmanned vehicles, but if you want to dedicate a lot of autism into it its probably your best bet to get a plane down as easily as a helicopter.

What if we put a vertical hangar bay hosting coelocopters on the back of a cruiser?

You guys don't think 50's enough.

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I don't know enough about modern tactics or military technology to know if this is a stupid idea or not but what about a network of solar powered blimp drones? They could basically stay up for months to years using cameras and sensors to keep a watch and AAM to dispatch any approaching threats.

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Some sort of aerial-based network? A sky-net, if you will. Would this be used to control and coordinate combat robots through some broadcast architecture?

Blimps seem like vulnerable targets, but it could work if the enemy didn't have decent anti-air capabilities and they were placed high enough.

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I don't see what a blimp can do that a space satellite can't already do when it comes to communication and observation. Both are sitting ducks in a real war ether way, and its impossible to hide an AAM blimp for area denial the same way you can hide and move SAM sites. It can't chase down or enforce air superiority so it would have to be used like an anti air network that again, cant hide.

Does miniaturizing satellites improve their survivability?

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In a WW3 situation, its likely that every man made object in space will be destroyed by debris. The thing is still on a fixed course so I wouldn't know how much it would help but it might count for something.

Due to their close proximity to the ground relatively speaking airships could perform various functions that wouldn't be possible for a Satellite, such as acting as a drone carrier, AWACS and mobile high altitude comm relay.
They'd also be more flexible than Satellites in terms of photo reconnaissance as they wouldn't be flying along a fixed orbital trajectory.

They're also incredibly slow, impossible to hide from radar/mk. 1 eyeball, and pretty much the definition of SAM bait. How long do you expect this lighter than air AWACS to stay in one piece in an age of hypersonic, theatre level, SAMs?

Would a missile even explode when hitting a blimp? You'd probably need a timer, or a return to flak.

military-today.com/artillery/draco.htm
Italians had the right idea, but they completely butchered the concept with their terribly bad execution. Instead of making a recoil-operated 76,2mm autocannon with a long externally driver belt they just put their naval gun on top of a vehicle. Now it's way too big for what it is and doesn't carry enough ammunition.

Its illegal to arm satellites with weapons and they are much more expensive too which means you can have less of them. Also as mentioned blimps have a variety of applications not available to satellites. I guess I should have clarified that I meant these specifically as attachments to carrier groups or for coastal defense to protect against low flying cruise missiles and other hard to detect threats.

Add to that, they're probably also more expensive to shoot down, if we assume that all the major powers have anti-satellite lasers.
Honestly, I don't get why anti-satellite missiles are even a thing. Is it that hard to overheat a satellite? It's not like it can easily dump the heat anywhere.

Depends on the fuse in the missile. Most proximity fuses should have no trouble dealing with a huge, reflective, effectively static target.

What if you just make a better longer range helicopter?

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If we're diving into the realm of autism, let's jump in with both feet.

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...

Now we're talking.

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Is there actually fundamental difference from jets that makes turboprops unsuitable for somewhat conventional (so not ) VTOL? Additional engines shouldn't be an issue if needed, as it competes with helicopters and not planes, you could probably remove the TO part and use a catapult too.

Can we include a spinal and ventral turret (both rear facing) too? I know they'd be pretty small but just assign a manlet and that shouldn't be an issue.

I don't get what's the point of this.
I mean the smaller and the closer you make satellites the sooner they're gonna come down and burn.

Do they really intend to send some every other day or something?

If that were economically viable they wouldn't need to send cubesats.

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Aren't Musk companies renowned for making a lot of buzz and not making money?

Besides with the US now screaming about the nuclear test ban you can fucking bet Russia and co are gonna push to add a 0 to the altitude of the definition of airspace (so from 100 miles to 1000 miles) and are just gonna laser/maser fry everything that comes near them and watch laugh their asses off as "muh internet for poor people (read: without government oversight or regulation)" people cry as their billions and their dreams go down in literal flames.

Zero-Launch (just blast the fuck-off, maybe short guide rail) full-blown fighter bombers of a Heli-cruiser's deck from the beam. That will avoid blasting the ship. The aircraft would then have to figure out where to land, refuel, etc, but you'd have the ability to launch real aircraft.

Probably a Rato-cradle that connects to aircraft's landing gear AND hardpoints, then drops off as soon as rockets expire. Sure it would be spendy to launch, but not used all the time.

Similar to how they used cats to launch fighters off freighters in Battle of Atlantic.

A "hide behind tree line and pop up to hit a tank" tactic is a one tree pony. You need a convenient forest and a tank.
Also germans solved it by putting a set of mossiles on a regular commercial crane. Boom $65000 vehicle that does the same thing as your $4000000 vehicle.

Good thing you can also use hills, mountains and buildings and if you have none of these nearby just what the fuck are you fighting for? inb4 da ocean

Pretty much all missiles save for the latest ABMs and anti satellite missiles work on proximity fuses. The only air to air missile that was contact detonated I can think of was the first one. The AIM-4 falcon.

Well, AWACS planes used by the navy are already turbo props, and as mentioned before, it would be much easier to just fly around the missile blimp or attack it directly vs hiding a SAM battery. And shooting a blimp down isn't considered an atrocity the same way satellites are.

Anti-satellite lasers are stupid. If fired from the ground they will have to shoot through miles of cold air and ice crystals which will sap the beam of all of its energy to heat the surrounding air instead of doing damage to the target. Direct energy weapons in atmosphere are only ever going to be short ranged because of this.

Probably the fact that the props provide the lift instead of the exhaust. You need to tilt the entire engine up and down to get a VTOL turbo prop whereas the harrier just needs to tilt its four nozzles down for the same effect.

I don't quite understand what you're getting at here. Do smaller satellites de-orbit faster? Because the latest fad that all the reddit tier start up companies and apefricans that want to prove they aren't impoverished shitholes that still haven't invented powered flight or the wheel are launching micro cube sats smaller than a loaf of bread because they are relatively inexpensive to piggy back off other space launches.

Spendy to launch was going to be the main reason why I would say it would never be adopted, but I just heard the sound of lockheeb securing a new workforce of soon to be retired top brass as you said that…

Ship-launched ekranoplans when?

You're right, popping up behind things is the one reason helicopters have an advantage over fixed wing airplanes. However, helicopters are outperformed by pic related in that same task, which is cheaper, can "hover" longer, and is an infinitely more stable weapons platform.

Helicopters have literally no reason to exist, deal with it.

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A truck with elevated ATGM launchers cant do the run part of hit and run and is restricted to terrain that has a viable land route in and out. No poking out of some really kraggy and impassable mountains for them. Good luck deploying one on rough terrain without tipping too.

Not only that, the latest SpaceX bunch are so low they are still well within earth atmosphere meaning they still have "air" drag affecting them in plus of the normal "space" drag (due do the constant gravitational pull).
I seriously doubt they last the year and they want five thousands of them! That mean two launches per week to maintain the network.

I mean it's technically doable but… does ISPs make that much money? One of the big advantage of that business is that once the cables are there all you do is sit on your ass counting the dosh. You don't rebuild your entire network every year. And the main fee is copper and fuel for the bulldozers not fucking spaceships…

You can defeat that with a simple mortar.

what the fuck is a clgg?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combustion_light-gas_gun
How fucking new are you? Magyar-user is obsessed with them.

I hope the Skylon makes space launches cheap enough for some African space program to accidentally the entire LEO.

How do you know where it is if it stays behind the tree line? By that logic an Apache can be taken out by a beehive round from any artillery piece, because we can apparently psychically predict where enemies are.

He used to be obsessed with railguns until I drilled into his head the downsides of the railgun compared to a clgg with a scramjet warhead. Same as everyone else in this website. I'm just glad I'm able to bring my knowledge down from the sissyvilized north to the uncivilized unwashed masses that exist outside the borders of leafland.

Not just him, almost all publication on that subject those last 10 year are Russian.
Amusingly enough one the top researcher on the subject is one Mark Kalashnikov (I don't think they're related though, it's not a rare name).

Threadly reminder that the shuttle programs were based on the exact same gimmick and were found that… nope it doesn't work. The cost compression, does exist but it is in fact quickly ridiculous and it is what allowed Russia that was building 100% disposable cheap aluminum alloys booster to become the giant of the civilian launch (as the US maintenance grew and grew, and the shuttle flew less and less).

It's an old false economical paradigm "the longer you have stuff the less it costs" that is in fact only true economically… because of how taxes are calculated (and therefore completely virtual and unnatural).

The truth is the older and more used shit get… the more it costs to maintain it as "brand new". And since space flight will always be space flight shit must be maintained to "brand new" level or it just won't work.
A cargo ship might be a "buy once, work for half a century" before it falls apart completely from rust because you do not keep it in a brand new state, you allow it to decay.
But that's NOT the case of, well, literal rocket science…

It's the reason why everyone stopped trying to make Mach 2.0+ planes and why Mach 3 planes almost never flew at that speed… if you have to rebuild half the plane every-time it's flying, even if it's cheaper than a brand new plane it's never gonna be cost effective, because you're gonna two entire chains, one to make and one to refurbish and the refurbishing being specialized work it's gonna be immune to cost compression via volume that you have on a "normal" production (as each refurbishing is gonna be different, not everything will have the same wear and tear).

It's the reason why disposable items exists. It's cheaper to mass produce an infinity of disposable lighters than it is to make a sturdy refillable lighter.
To actually be cost effective the refurbishing needs to be either a fraction of the cost of something new or to happen only after extensive use.

To give you an idea, the "small" refurbishing of a plane reactor engine is 1,000 hours of flight… (which is just inspection and changing anything that look tired) which is about an entire year of exploitation of a plane and the "big" (where you basically put a new one) is 10,000.
And airplanes companies struggle to keep maintenance cost effective.
Doing that after every flight is never gonna be cheap.

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But you can't just land a SpaceX booster on some Nigerian airport you racist.
A single Skylon itself is projected to be capable of 15 launches at most before having to be retired so it's all a meme anyway.
What I find intredasting about the Skylon however is less its economic efficiency or raw performance but the infrastructure surrounding it.
Having the things operate out of mildly converted airports with 5km reinforced runways, stored in airplane hangars and generally behaving like some esoteric experimental brand of autistic airplane when not going to space certainly seems less of a pain than dealing with fuckhueg rockets on specialized launch platforms, this should also make maintaining the things somewhat easier albeit not necessarily cheaper.
Sure they might not beat the Falcon rockets in pure numbers game when it comes to efficiency, but the relative lack of autism compared to conventional rocketry might make Skylons an attractive choice for those who want to launch satellites at their own discretion out of already existing airports instead of renting out the Kennedy Space centre or some shit.
Skylons could also be ferried around by simply flying in atmosphere instead of requiring dissassembly and expensive land/naval transportation via german subcontractors.

That doesn't sound like american accounting at all.
It's true that there has been less Russian commercial launches but it's hardly due to SpaceX (it's due to Ukraine… which were both a part provider AND the subsequent US sanctions that prevent a shitload of companies to have activities in Russia. Then you have the whole Proton thing AKA literal sabotage) but you still need some sort of special kind of accounting to reach those numbers.

(And Kourou shot 6 Ariane 5 and 2 Vega with only 1 for the ESA).

...

I'm a spaceX supporter and you managed to piss me off with that retarded graph.

God fucking damn you to hell.

If it stays behind the tree line it can't shoot me.

What? Are you serious?

More realistic

And that's the worst case scenario. Best case scenario has the lift getting towed and reused multiple times.

Why doesn't your 'more realistic' situation include a shoulder fired/vehicle mounted SAM splashing the aircraft en route to the target? Even if it was something shitty like a Blowpipe you can trade a few misses + lost cranes for each hit and still come out ahead strategically.

If that's too much interdependence for you then give it a single (decent) vertical launch, F&F, IR SAM that the crew can fire with a single button press as they bail out. Granted, revenge weapons are tricky to sell to the poor bastard who has to use them, but it does help tip the scales in your favour - and if it's ever actually fired it's only because your air-force and air defence outfits have shit the bed rather than being an expected thing.

You kinda lack vision. Space shuttles were not better because they were more viable logistically but because they increased technical knowledge towards future casual spaceflight, something that would be much harder with constant use of consumables.

Also this.

Because it's more realistic not 100% realistic. The idea that a ZERO INFRARED EMISSION target with the radar cross section of a telephone pole will be detected popping up from the tree line 5km away is…. well exactly zero.

The actual realistic thing would be that it spooges its load, folds down, and the carrier truck hooks to it and drives it to its next firing location. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times.

The only defense against this is something like APS, which maybe means its eight missiles kill two tanks instead of eight, but it's still worth it. And they'd be hell on any kind of unarmored column… ffs something like a Kornet thermobaric carries six times the explosive filler of a 155mm shell! One eight-pack crane can wreck an area the size of two football fields easily, imagine the damage that would do to fifty or so resupply trucks, and the brigade down the line who don't get food or ammo for a week because of it.

Vs

If you're fucking poor and have the time to set up static defenses then maybe the lift is a viable idea. But in real wars where the front line can collapse unexpectedly you need tank destroyers to be able to plug the gap as quickly as possible.

Wouldn't that inconvenience your assault force and help the defenders? I didn't read the rest of the post honestly, if the first line is any judge it is all garbage.

The leaf strikes again.

Not if the enemy force is stationed on one side of a river that your force has no need to capture IE your forces are making a deep push into enemy territory towards a strategically important city and you want to cut off enemy reinforcements stationed at what could have been another avenue for your attack you chose to bypass. Or perhaps the river is behind the important target and once its taken there is no need to advance as it was your campaign goal or you wish to delay an enemy counter attack while you regroup and rest after such a push. But you clearly aren't arguing in good faith anyway because you're a fucking leaf so I don't even know why I'm bothering explaining some basic sun tzu shit about keeping enemies separated from each other to dissolve their combat effectiveness.

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Now that is just beautiful. It would be something of a one trick pony though, only useful for engaging large enemy formations/armoured convoys from a prepared position. As sexy as the idea is it is an entirely defensive vehicle, which would have made it perfect for NATO forces in West Germany waiting for hordes of T-72's to come streaming over the border but isn't much of an argument for introducing it today.

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Has anyone ever tried nigger rigging an expendable quadcopter array carrying a single ATGM for a pop-up suicide attack?