>All weapon systems that consist of an expensive vehicle and an expensive-to-train crew are being re-evaluated against drones right now.
Worth mentioning that this already happened to an attack helicopter 20 years ago! The Comanche[0] was a revolutionary recon/attack helicopter with some mental stealth engineering behind it - everything from limiting sound profile via blade design & fenestron, a radar presence a fraction of an Apache, they even directed the exhaust down the tail boom so that the heat generated could easily be dissipated by the tail rotor!
Unfortunately for helicopter nerds, UAVs were a fraction of the price, suitable for recon and attack, and pilots could survive it being shot down.
My game of choice was Gunship on the Commodore 64, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter simulator from Microprose. Spent YEARS playing that.
Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
I loved that it had a dynamic campaign where the frontline moved according to how well you did.
Before that, I also enjoyed LHX.
> Best part was the instruction manual that came with it that was basically a guide of all the military equipment of the Soviet Union that you could target in the game.
Do you remember what the copy protection was for MicroProse's F-19 Stealth Fighter? It was the silhouettes of US and Soviet fighters and bombers from the Cold War era: "identify this aircraft". Somehow they thought my teenage self, obsessed as I was with Cold War military tech, wouldn't learn the shapes. It's how I learned the shapes of most fighter jets.
Yes, I had a pirated copy. We all did back then, legal games were unheard of.
That guy has been very active on twitter since the start of the development of the game. I don't have his account anymore since I stopped caring about twitter but ... he's probably still there journaling!
Comanche, LHX Attack Chopper, Gunboat and Wolfpack. A handful of military sims meant hundreds of pages of specs to sift through -- best copy protection I ever had to deal with. I probably spent more time reading the manuals than I did playing the games.
I don't recall having played Comanche in order to compare the two. The other game I spent innumerable hours in was F117A [1] - partially because -- again, my recollection -- one had to damn near real-time fly from the base to the target and then back, all the while in stealth mode, which usually meant going slow and terrain hugging
Around the time of F-117A I discovered Jetfighter II which felt a lot smoother handling wise, it was great to just fly around doing stunts to be honest. I spent a lot of time just doing carrier take-offs with an immediate 360 and back into landing.
Yes, I also played a ton of F117A. The terrible graphics were actually what let me run it and LHX, I had an anemic 386. I only got to play Comanche at my uncle's house. LHX actually looks exactly as I remember it. I remember those blocky polygons very fondly.
The voxel-based graphics and resulting frame rate were one of those distinct “wow” moments I had while gaming as a kid. Up there with playing Doom or Flight Simulator for the first time.
Today its graphics look so outdated, but back then it was amazing how you could fly through valleys to get to targets.
There were a few games like Comanche, X-Wing, Magic Carpet and Descent that felt like they really pushed the technology while trying to show how we could utilize 3d in a different way from the other titles of the time (which were usually all FPS games).
Yeah, that was an amazing helicopter, and it's really too bad it was cut, but as you say, it just didn't make economic sense any more when UAVs were invented. I guess it's something like the Japanese battleship Yamato, with the largest guns ever installed on a warship. It was amazing, but easily sunk by airplanes flown from aircraft carriers, so it was already obsolete when it was launched.
I worked with a former army officer / test pilot who was formerly involved with the Comanche project, when the news came out that it got cancelled. He was quite disappointed with that, and disagreed with what was said about it's survivability. He said if they can't see you, they can't shoot you.
> He said if they can't see you, they can't shoot you.
He should tell the F-117 pilot who got shot down with a few decades old anti-air system that, while keeping in mind that the F-117 flew higher and faster and quieter (relatively).
And still, it was supposed to not be vulnerable to enemy radar. And a multi decade old anti-air system, with the benefit of good intelligence and incredibly sloppy American operations, managed to shoot it down.
Why would anyone think a helicopter that would be flying much lower to the ground, would be invulnerable to e.g. man portable air defence systems?
Because low flying aircraft are harder to detect than high flying aircraft. More over when their rcs has been significantly reduced. It’s not “invulnerable” no more than any stealth aircraft, submarine, tank, or any other platform is. It’s significantly harder to defeat.
it wasn't vulnerable to enemy radar, serbian AA realized that it was the exact same pattern day in and day out, did some quick calculations, and fired at the spot it knew it would be at the next day.
aircraft carriers are even more vulnerable. battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes. When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
> battleships are obsolete not because they are easy to sink but because airplanes are more versitle for most purposes.
The main reason really is range. A battleship can obliterate a target within about 25 km (yes, I know the guns can shoot longer than that, but practical accuracy against a moving target such as another ship..) whereas an aircraft carrier can launch strikes from hundreds of km away. Further, the carrier can launch reconnaissance aircraft (nowadays with radar obviously, but thinking of the WWII era when battleships were obsoleted) so it's aware of what's happening around it. So it can, say, stay away out of range of enemy battleships, as well as detect enemy targets at long range to launch strikes against. Yes, mistakes can still happen, see the battle of Samar. And yes, the battleship likely has floatplanes, but compared to a carrier, few of them, shorter range, and needs relatively calm seas to recover them.
All this being said, yes it took a lot of planes launched from a lot of carriers to sink the Yamato. But due to the range issue explained in the previous paragraph, the carriers could safely do this well out of range of the massive guns of the Yamato, whereas the Yamato could do nothing more than sit there impotently taking hit after hit until it finally succumbed.
> When doing a shore assult a battleship is more useful than airplanes but that is not enough to be worth the cost of running them.
In principle, yes. But to do that the battleship needs to get awfully close to whatever it's going to shoot at, running the risk of hitting mines, or being targeted by shore-based anti-ship missiles etc. And if you already have the overwhelming superiority to get rid of all such enemy systems before bringing the battleship in, why not use those same assets to hit the same targets the battleship would hit in the first place?
You are mostly correct, except for one key point: the battleship was armored so that it could get close to the action and have somewhat reasonable chances of surviving. Most ships today could not take near the hits the Yamato did. (the Yamato shows why it is pointless to try)
Missile cruisers/destroyers are the battleship replacements.
But airplanes can also carry and launch missiles even better, with some warning and planning.
Battleships are useful for the naval equivalent of a bar brawl or a street gang fight. Aka up close, nasty, ‘punch them in the face until they can’t get up again’. They’re the equivalent of Mike Tyson in his prime for that.
Which even now would have some PR value, and no matter the time period will always be a spectacle.
But tactics have evolved more since then, and we just don’t have those type of fights that much anymore. And when we do, we just bring a ‘gun’ instead of relying on our ‘fists’.
Of course, anything is possible and maybe we’ll turn New Jersey into a spaceship to fight our space naval battles in a hundred years. Odds are low though.
Worth mentioning that this already happened to an attack helicopter 20 years ago! The Comanche[0] was a revolutionary recon/attack helicopter with some mental stealth engineering behind it - everything from limiting sound profile via blade design & fenestron, a radar presence a fraction of an Apache, they even directed the exhaust down the tail boom so that the heat generated could easily be dissipated by the tail rotor!
Unfortunately for helicopter nerds, UAVs were a fraction of the price, suitable for recon and attack, and pilots could survive it being shot down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing%E2%80%93Sikorsky_RAH-66...