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Comment by jewel | Hacker News Reader

I'm writing a sci-fi novel about a future war between Canada and the United States which mostly takes place between their fighter planes. For plot reasons all planes are required to have a human pilot (as per international treaty), but it seems preposterous that you'd have anything other than remote-controlled or AI controlled airborne machines in the future.

Having to carry a human creates a huge number of constraints. You can't maneuver as quickly due to G-forces, you can't make the fighters small, you can't have them hide-in-wait on the ground for days or weeks at a time. Human reaction time isn't as good, and humans can't coordinate with as many other pilots as a computer can. Pilots are also expensive to maintain.

Anyway, just some thoughts. I'm not an expert on the topic, which is why the novel is going to be a romance which just happens to be set in the future.

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If computer-controlled aircraft have the advantages of high maneuverability, small size, fast reactions, and disposability, what do you get if you turn the knobs on all of those up to 11, and then fit the simplest possible kill mechanism? A very effective AI controlled airborne machine that already exists - called a missile!

The only question is how you get the missiles to the battle (because being small makes it hard to make them long-ranged), and how you get slow-but-powerful human brains and large-aperture sensors near enough to them to make effective use of them.

So far, we've got two ways of doing this. Firstly, by slinging missiles beneath manned fighter aircraft which carry the brains, and sending those out along with airborne early warning aircraft which carry the sensors (and more brains). Secondly, by fitting them to warships big enough to carry plenty of brains and radars themselves. The aircraft have the advantage of speed (and altitude, if that matters), whereas the ships have the advantage of range (and a few other things).

This battleplane idea can be seen as either converging the fighters and AEW aircraft, or as transferring some of the attributes of the warships to the fighters.

Alternatively, the idea could be seen as converging reality with a 1987 techno-thriller:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_of_the_Old_Dog

Planes are just airborne aircraft carriers for the kamakaze drones that we call missiles?

So one unintended consequence of SpaceX is that we might end up with missiles that can land, wait, and relaunch themselves when needed.

Yeah, but they'll be constantly posting pictures of themselves on Instagram, so they won't be hard to avoid.

Neat! What if the treaty didn't stipulate that the "pilot" must pilot the craft - the purpose of the human was to ensure that the "human cost" of war remained at a reasonable level as to thwart senseless violence. Seems like an interesting exploration - who would the "pilots" be, and what (if anything) would they be expected to do while in the craft?

Star Trek had an episode where two planets were fighting. All the attacks were carried out on a computer, then the computed casualties were rounded up and killed in real life. It saved actually damaging infrastructure and wasting resources to build real weapons. There was a human cost, but because war was no longer violent, the people preferred to keep fighting instead of looking for peace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Taste_of_Armageddon

Hi! Yes, I should have clarified, that's exactly what the treaty was about. In the novel the "pilots" aren't given any command of the plane at all, it is computer controlled with the objectives transmitted from central command.

The pilot can play games or watch TV on the fighter's computer but can't send communications since the radio transmissions might help pinpoint its location. So it's a very boring job most of the time with occasional roller-coaster moments of terror.

My story tells what happens to one pilot whose plane is damaged during a sortie over Canada and the computer runs out of commands, causing her to suddenly have to control the aircraft.

Cool! Good luck with your book - would be happy to read an advance copy when you have it. :-)

Sounds like actual warfare.

I'd definitely be interested in reading this. Do you have a mailing list or anything so I can find out when it's available?

It seems to me that the entire concept of air war is designed around a presumption of human pilots. That you can only have a limited number of aircraft that have to be very capable. This rules still seems to apply to drones, even though they could be made cheap enough to be expendable. At that point a drone is just a very cheap missile and the more you have the better.

Is 1 fighter/bomber aircraft more useful than 10,000 single use drones? Only if you are flying from a secure base; and any serious adversary will try and prevent that. Lets hope we only ever have to fight people in pick up trucks with those billion dollar fighters.

For a lot of things, there's no substitute for getting a decent quantity of high explosives to the target. A tiny, expendable drone won't be able to carry a 500lb bomb.

Range is another consideration. As you shrink aircraft, their range generally shrinks too. Your 10,000 single-use drones probably won't be able to fly across the Pacific.

Smaller, cheaper, and more numerous may well be better, but it's all relative.

Incidentally, this basic scenario already played out for strategic nuclear bombing. The "drones" there are ballistic missiles, and they gradually supplanted manned bombers in large part because they were cheaper. (Being able to launch on short notice and extremely difficult to intercept were factors too, of course.) Manned nuclear bombers still exist, but are very much secondary to ICBMs now. But note that ICBMs, while quite a bit smaller and cheaper than a B-52 or B-2, are still gigantic and expensive compared to just about anything civilian scale.

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