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US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
Jura The idiot
General
LOL “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.”
The US Marines won’t be using Google’s robot dogs because they fail a pretty basic test
The US Marines won’t be using Google’s robot dogs because they fail a pretty basic test
source:Before we see the robots coming for us, it seems we’ll be able to hear them coming.
Boston Dynamics, the robotics company owned by Google’s parent Alphabet, has been working with DARPA, the Pentagon’s research division, to build an autonomous robot that could carry supplies for troops. DARPA the robot—the Legged Squad Support System (LS3)—in 2012. It was designed to carry at least 400 pounds of supplies and be able to follow Marines through rugged terrain that regular vehicles wouldn’t be able to traverse, like a robotic pack mule.
But the military has admitted that it probably wouldn’t see the front lines any time soon. It’s too loud.
Kyle Olson, a spokesperson for the Marines, on Dec. 22 that the noise the LS3’s gas-powered engine gave off was tactically rather unhelpful. “As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself,” Olson said. “They took it as it was: a loud robot that’s going to give away their position.”
Boston Dynamics also used some of its DARPA funds to build a smaller, faster robot dog called Spot. While they’ve proven to be quite adept at , they weren’t much more useful to the military than their big brother. Spot was equipped with an electric engine, so it was a lot quieter than LS3, but its slight frame meant it could only carry about 40 pounds, which isn’t much of a help to Marines who about up to 100 pounds of gear themselves.
Both robots also would’ve been difficult for Marines to easily fix in the field if something went wrong. The robo-dogs are now in storage, and without another contract from the government, it’s likely that we won’t be seeing these robots aiding the military anytime soon. The Marines, however, are also experimenting with other autonomous robot technologies, such as drones, so it’s possible that some of the technologies developed for LS3 and Spot will make it into future devices.
“We tend to play with things that are fanciful and strange,” Olson said. “Learning from it was a big part, and we’re still learning.”
navyreco
Senior Member
U.S. Navy Continues Flight Testing APS-154 Advanced Airborne Sensor (AAS) on P-8A Poseidon
The U.S. Navy continues integration and testing of the first Advanced Airborne Sensor (AAS), designated the APS-154, aboard the P-8A Poseidon. Testing will confirm the ability of the P-8A and AAS to operate safely and efficiently. Successful testing of AAS on the P-8A is a significant milestone enabling production decisions and leading up to the initial deployment of AAS.
...
AAS is an externally mounted radar and a follow-on system to the currently deployed Littoral Surveillance Radar System (LSRS). LSRS currently provides a broad range of capabilities against moving and stationary targets at sea and on land. LSRS is currently operational on U.S. Navy P-3C Orions. According to Raytheon, the AAS is an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system with next-generation line-of-site capability.
Like LSRS, AAS is an integrated Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance and Targeting (ISR&T) asset, with the additional capability of Mast and Periscope Detection (MPD).
Lockheed ends 2015 with $5.3 billion C-130J deal
Lockheed Martin has capped off 2015 with contracts for 43 C-130J cargo aircraft of various shapes and breeds for the US government, including C-130J-30 stretch-models and KC-130J tactical refuellers destined for the Marine Corps.
Of the two contracts announced 30 December, one concludes negotiations for the $5.3 billion multiyear II contract that has been under discussion for almost two years, with money down now for the first 32 of 78 total aircraft.
That $1 billion order includes 13 C-130J-30 Super Hercules, and five HC-130J Combat King IIs used by the air force for personnel recovery and training. A further 11 multimission MC-130J Commando IIs are being procured for special operations and conversion into AC-130J “Ghostrider” gunships. Two more are KC-130J refuellers, and one HC-130J is being purchased for US Coast Guard operations.
...
Jura The idiot
General
hope this passes as
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
(dated November 12, 2015; sorry if it's a repost):
Navy, Industry Working Through DDG-51 Flight III Detail Design; Draft RFP For Ship Construction Released
source:
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
(dated November 12, 2015; sorry if it's a repost):
Navy, Industry Working Through DDG-51 Flight III Detail Design; Draft RFP For Ship Construction Released
The Navy and two shipbuilders are moving forward with the Flight III upgrade to the Arleigh Burke guided missile destroyers (DDG-51), which adds an air and missile defense radar to the ship class starting this fiscal year.
General Dynamics Bath Iron Works and Ingalls Shipbuilding are collaborating on detail design of the Flight III upgrade, which should be complete by the summer of 2017, and both have responded to the Navy’s draft request for proposals (RFP) for Fiscal Year 2016 ship construction, DDG-51 program manager Capt. Mark Vandroff told USNI News in a Nov. 12 interview.
The two yards have taken the Navy’s preliminary design for Flight III, which was broken into 17 individual statements of work, and are working together to develop a 3D model of the ship that includes all equipment and distributed systems.
“We always planned to complete that some time in the late summer of 2017 because a ship that’s appropriated in FY ’16 generally spends about a year [procuring materials],” Vandroff said.
“A typical FY ‘16 ship wouldn’t start until the later part of 2017, and we would want the detail design to be done about the same time.”
The air and missile defense radar, Raytheon’s AN/SPY-6, is in the engineering and manufacturing development phase but is on track to be ready in time for ship construction, Vandroff said. The radar development is run out of the Program Executive Office for Integrated Warfare Systems, which has passed information to the shipyards through Vandroff’s office to support the Flight III detail design.
Virtually all the changes in Flight III support the addition of the SPY-6 radar. Vandroff said the primary requirements for the flight upgrade were to add additional power, cooling and weight margins for the ship’s service life.
“I could put a SPY-6 onto a DDG Flight IIA today with the power plant it has today, and it would work fine,” he said.
“There would be enough power. But there would be no growth margin for a 40-year service life. And if we’re building a new ship, we want to have similar growth margins on the Flight III that we’ve had historically on DDG-51s.”
To achieve sufficient power margins, Vandroff said the program office chose to replace the three Rolls Royce 3-megawatt generators on the Flight IIA ships with Rolls Royce’s 4-megawatt generator used on the Zumwalt-class destroyers (DDG-1000), which take up the same footprint on the ship and therefore give more power without forcing any ship design changes.
The new generators, however, make power at 4,160 volts instead of 450 volts – which Vandroff said is more efficient and safer, but necessitates more expensive switch gears. The America-class amphibious assault ship (LHA-6) uses the 4,160-volt power plant as well, so the DDG-51 program took the big deck’s electrical distribution system to support the new larger generators.
The SPY-6 radar is much bigger than the old SPY-1D(V), which means it makes more heat and requires more cooling capacity. The Flight IIA ships could handle the bigger radar, Vandroff said, but would again leave no margin. The Flight IIA ships use five air conditioning plants that produce 200 tons of cooling each – but the San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock (LPD-17) program was already in the middle of an effort to improve those AC units. By developing advances in the magnetic bearings, motor control of the compressor and more, the LPD program and Naval Sea System Command’s (NAVSEA) engineering directorate were able to get the AC plants to put out 300 tons of cooling each, rather than 200.
Vandroff said the improved plants cost a bit more, but “for us it came along at the right time so we could provide the additional cooling we needed without increasing foot space.”
“Frankly, if we didn’t have the radar, I would still be doing this just because, I would be doing it as a savings of lifecycle money because these AC plants produce cooling more efficiently than the current ones,” he said.
“They’re slightly more expensive, but over a 40-year service life of the ship, what you pay to get a more expensive AC plant you more than make up for in fuel savings over the life of the ship.”
The new SPY-6 radar is not any heavier than the old SPY-1D(V), but the weight is distributed on the ship differently. The old radar has a separate signal generator, which is a heavy piece of equipment and is located lower in the ship for its own protection and for shipkeeping purposes. The SPY-6 is an active array radar, which means the signal is generated on the array itself – meaning the array is heavier but must still be placed at the top of the ship, throwing off the ship’s overall balance.
To bring the ship’s center of gravity back down, Vandroff said he wanted to make the hull thicker in some places and to thicken the scantlings, which has the added advantage of creating a more survivable hull in the event of an underwater explosion. A ship can only be so heavy and still be safe to steam, and Vandroff said that adding steel to the hull and scantlings stayed within the weight margins but left little room for growth in the future.
“To get back that growth margin, we changed the hull form a little bit in the stern, and I mean a little bit,” he said.
“So the stern is slightly wider and slightly less flared. That gives you a little more volume that the ship will displace, and that volume change gives you another few hundred tons of service life in the weight.”
By adding weight to the bottom of the ship and then adding back in some margin for growth, Vandroff said the Flight III configuration has a center of gravity “roughly where it was on a IIA.”
Overall, Vandroff said of the Flight III configuration, “the radar is new, the radar is a new thing, but everything else I described to you is not new – it’s the 1000’s generators, it’s the LPD-17’s AC plants, it’s LHA-6’s electrical distribution system. It’s all things we’ve used before, we just said, I’m going to go use what I’ve got on hand. And then steel and the shape of the ship.”
Aside from those must-haves to support the new radar, Vandroff said he’s working with the shipbuilders to add in a couple nice-to-haves as well.
First, he said, “if you’re going to have a ship with this much BMD (ballistic missile defense) capability, it would be really good perhaps to put your BMD commander on this ship as opposed to the carrier or somewhere else in the battle group. So do I need a few extra racks for a BMD commander and his flyaway team? So we’re moving around to get a little extra berthing. Would it be helpful if they had two or three extra consoles in [combat information center] in order to plan BMD missions from? Yes, that would be helpful. It doesn’t really change the ship, so we’ve redesigned the consoles.”
And second, the Navy learned when it upgraded USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53) that tearing out the Aegis Combat System to upgrade the hardware was a more challenging task than it ought to be.
“It should be easier to swap out equipment than it was with John Paul Jones. For John Paul Jones, we buried the vital combat system equipment on purpose in the Arleigh Burke design deep inside the hull, inside lots of steel and lots of structure because that makes it more survivable in damage condition,” he said.
“It also makes it harder to get out. 30 years ago when we first designed Aegis, there wasn’t the concept that, wow, information technology is going to change really fast and we’re going to want to swap out hardware on a more regular basis. You built a ship for a 30-year life. So we’re looking at … rapid removal routes. Things where we’re going to place combat system equipment so it’s still protected, but every one of them will have kind of an easy way off the ship, either by unbolting plates or by making sure there’s areas where distributed systems are not run so its’ an easier hull cut, so we can get things on and off the ship in the combat system faster.”
For all the changes going into the Flight III design, Vandroff said the Navy will get a ship with “tremendous capability” in the SPY-6 that is not only a “huge leap forward” in integrated air and missile defense but also is much better prepared to ward off jamming attacks; has the margins to support future weapons; and still feels the same to the average sailor walking through the ship.
Excluding the lead Flight III ship, Vandroff said the new ships won’t cost much more than the older ones. The average Flight IIA destroyer during the last three years of two-a-year construction across two shipyards cost $1.5 billion per destroyer. Vandroff said his office was in the midst of updating its cost estimate, but NAVSEA has estimated that the Flight III follow-on ships, under the same type of two-a-year multiyear buy, would cost $1.75 billion each and could drop in price as the radars become cheaper to build.
Vandroff could not, however, discuss the timing of the new Flight III ships. The draft RFP is out and the Navy has already responded to comments from industry, but Vandroff said he could not discuss any future actions in the competitive bidding process, including a release date for the final RFP.
source:
Thanks for posting this, Jura. This is EXCELLENT detailed information about the Flight III Bukres. Really interesting and good reading.hope this passes as
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
(dated November 12, 2015; sorry if it's a repost):
Navy, Industry Working Through DDG-51 Flight III Detail Design; Draft RFP For Ship Construction Released
source:
Oh...I am such a nerd!
Sheesh! What does it take to make the U.S. Navy happy?
, tiny Kratos Defense & Security (NASDAQ: ) strapped together six commercial welding lasers, added a bit of military-industrial complex magic, and built the Navy its first working laser cannon. Unimaginatively dubbed the Laser Weapon System, or "LaWS," the new gun proved itself capable of shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles, poking holes in small boats, and at classified -- but "tactically significant " distances.
But apparently that's not enough for the Navy. They want a laser that's bigger. And better. (And presumably badder.) And they want Northrop Grumman (NYSE: ) to build it.
Introducing LaWS's bigger, badder brother
The laser that the Navy has decided to build -- and has hired Northrop Grumman to build -- is called the Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD), and it's quite a monster.
Weighing in at 150 kilowatts in energy output, LWSD will be about four and a half times as powerful as . According to website BreakingDefense.com, that should be enough power to "take out cruise missiles, drones, and manned aircraft at ranges of a few miles." And according to Northrop Grumman energy weapons program manager Guy Renard, all this will cost "about the price of a gallon of diesel fuel per shot" -- $2 per shot.
Getting the program up and running, though, will cost a bit more.
Building LWSD
Earlier this week, we learned that the U.S. Office of Naval Research has awarded Northrop Grumman the . Over the course of the next three years, LWSD will progress through three phases from design to demonstration.
In phase 1, Northrop will develop a detailed design for the weapon. Northrop will receive about 58% of the $91 million in funds budgeted for LWSD's development -- $53 million -- over the first 12 months of this work. Phase 2 would greenlight Northrop to assemble LWSD and conduct land-based test of the laser. Finally, in phase 3, Northrop would conduct at-sea tests aboard the U.S. Navy's "Self Defense Test Ship," the former Navy destroyer USS Paul F. Foster (DD 964), which serves as a floating testbed for new technologies.
Start to finish, these three Phases should take 34 months to complete.
What it means to investors
It's hard to overestimate just how important this news is for the U.S. Navy -- and not just because it would catapult the U.S. into a new generation of weapons systems, unmatched by any foe on the globe. Northrop's $2-per-shot boast -- validated by earlier testing of Kratos's LaWS, which proved capable of firing multiple 33-kilowatt shots -- promises to make shipborne defense against enemy missiles, drones, and aircraft extremely cost-effective.
Moreover, a warship equipped with powerful lasers, instead of powerful -- but expensive and bulky missiles and cannon shells -- would have essentially "" to power its weapons. It won't to keep it supplied with "bullets." So long as there's fuel in the tanks, the warship could remain in the fight. For that matter, freed of the need to lug around large munitions lockers stuffed to the gills with explosive ammunition, warships themselves could be smaller -- and cheaper.
These, as I say, are all benefits that laser weapons would confer upon the Navy -- but they're also strong arguments in favor of buying Northrop Grumman stock as well, because all these factors that make laser weapons so attractive to the Navy also make it a motivated buyer. The potential cost savings from a laser-armed fleet have already convinced the Navy to pay Northrop Grumman to develop LWSD -- and they will surely convince the Navy to buy these laser weapons once they've been perfected.
How many laser cannon might the Navy buy? According to Northrop, it's designing LWSD for easy integration onto the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer -- of which the Navy eventually. So that's at least 77 potential sales of this $91 million weapons system for Northrop. Or perhaps 154? 231? It all depends on how many lasers the Navy ultimately decides to arms its destroyers with.
Given the advantages, my guess is it's going to be a lot.
A stock for greedy investors
The world's biggest tech company forgot to show you something, but a few Wall Street analysts and the Fool didn't miss a beat: There's a small company that's powering their brand-new gadgets and the coming revolution in technology. And we think its stock price has nearly unlimited room to run for early-in-the-know investors! To be one of them, .
Jura The idiot
General
LOL it's actually one of USNI Top 2015 Navy Stories I overlooked during 2015; the collection is available at:Thanks for posting this, Jura. ...
Of course it is not good enough....proved itself capable of shooting down unmanned aerial vehicles, poking holes in small boats, and at classified -- but "tactically significant " distances.
But apparently that's not enough for the Navy. They want a laser that's bigger. And better. (And presumably badder.) And they want Northrop Grumman (NYSE: ) to build it.
Shooting down drones and destroying speed boats is nice...but the real threats are missiles and high performance attack aircraft.
That has always been the goal...and the US Navy will achieve it...you folks watch and see.
They want to...heck I want to see them...
"take out cruise missiles, drones, and manned aircraft at ranges of a few miles."
I imagine, once completed, you will see them on the Burkes, the Ticos, the Zumwalts, the Carriers (particularly the ford Class) and the LHDs and LHAs.
...most of those will also ultimately get some form of the Rail Gun too.
Imagine a Burke armed with two Laser CIWS, a Rail Gun (for surface attack and CIWS), and its compliment of missiles. Same for the Ticos. Same for the Zumwalts.
Imagine a Ford class with 4 x Laser CIWS, 2 x Rail Gun CIWS, 2 x RAM Missiles, and 2 x ESSM launchers.
That is the type of thing the US NAvy is ultimately looking forward to.