UAVs?

[MikeyD]

A post on another thread about modern 'force multipliers' got me to thinking, will UAVs like Predator or the smaller equivalents be in the game?

In CM1 a plane passes overhead and a bomb drops on the far side of a hill. Of limited recon value to the troops on the ground. It'd be nice in CM:SF if we could 'purchase' an overflight by a Predator, Prowler, or Pioneer drone and 'download' any spotted enemy positions to the commander. These positions then get disseminated (slowly or quickly via 'relative spotting' processes) to the boots on the ground. If the commander's physically away from his command vehicle or if the vehicle's destroyed that could further delay receipt of data (an incentive for the opponent to hunt command vehicles!).

If in CMx2 we 'purchase' units for a QB like in CMx1, a Predator overflight could cost the player a chunk of points with no guarantee that it won't get shot down. It sounds like it could be a workable idea, and add a valuable 'vertical' Intel component to the game. People with actual experience with dissemination of Predator intel to the troops might have suggestions on how to make the process more realistic.

[ October 31, 2005, 03:26 PM: Message edited by: MikeyD ]

[M1A1TC]

Ive already posted a thread about this, and didnt get an official anwser. Besides modeling the UAVs, it would be nice to see UGV like the PackBot. They been used since 2003

There are smaller UAVs now, that can be carried by a platoon (In a rucksack), and there are also 40mm grenades that have wireless camera in the nose, can be launched by M203 over a hill by a grenadier.

Desert Hawk

Aladin

Mosquito Micro UAV

OAV

[ October 31, 2005, 05:17 PM: Message edited by: M1A1TankCommander ]

[Battlefront.com]

We have not decided quite what to do about UAVs. They will be simulated in some way, for sure.

PackBot is an interesting tool, but I'm not sure where it fits into a high tempo combat environment. It certainly is a highly valuable tool for "hunts" in more controlled environments. Also not sure what the likely assignment of these vehicles will be in the near future. I mean, I doubt a vanilla Rifle Company would have access to as standard TO&E.

Steve

[M1A1TC]

Actually by 2015, by the Army estimates, a 1/3 of the ground and air forces will be robotic

Raven

[hellfish]

Well you gotta admit - they are developing the UCAVs and whatnot a lot faster than they develop manned systems.

[Colin]

I can't wait until a PBEM where I just pick a 5000 pt UAV and arty force force and run them over and over until I route everyone. There should be a nice bonus for routing when the troops realize a drone is calling in arty. Morale crushing narc drones.

I remember seeing footage of Iraqi regulars surrendering to the Predators from a battleship.

[LGMB]

I'd love to see Special Forces guys calling in Hellfire strikes from local Predator drones (or Pegasus drones if they'll be in by 2007).

[Bigduke6]

Too bad the Syrians won't have the traditional Arab counter to zippy high tech stuff like UAVs: Combat troops in civilian clothes, and little boys and goat herders hanging around U.S. units.

[Kurtz]

"Never send a human to do a machine's job"

- Agent Smith.

[James Sterrett]

Keep in mind that the US is far from the only force to field UAVs - the could quite reasonably be a toy available to both sides.

[juan_gigante]

Well, probably not available to Syria - but Blue on Blue...

M1A1, those pictures you posted take me back to the days of my youth when my dad and I would construct these large styrofoam gliders which would (if the advertisment is to be believed), fly hundreds of feet. They invariably took an immediate nose dive into the ground, and broke in some way. While I am sure that those in your pictures are of higher quality, when I first saw them I was a little afraid for the future of the U.S. Army.

[Guest Mike]

Why not to Syria?

Any half-competant model a/c builder teamed with a wireless geek could make a functional recce drone!

[Peter Cairns]

Iran has already supplied UAV's to groups in the Lebanon, who flow one in to Israel earlier this year.

Peter.

[Bigduke6]

Yes, but a UAV can't ask Joe for chewing gum. If you see a UAV, you know you're in trouble. If you see a friendly goat herd or a cute kid, who knows?

[Cogust]

Originally posted by Bigduke6:

If you see a UAV, you know you're in trouble. If you see a friendly goat herd or a cute kid, who knows?

But if you see a herd of friendly goats, then you're in deep trouble. My father always told me: "Don't you ever turn your back to a friendly goat (or angry goats for that matter), because they are know to be very 'physical' by nature."

[MikeyD]

A UAV overflying the battlefield is one thing, A PFC with an M16 in his hand finding out there's a company of enemy infantry over the ridge is another. Would dissemination of UAV recon data 'cascade' from Battalion commander slowly down the chain of command? Will BFC's new 'relative spotting' (which nobody here has seen yet) be able to 'cascade' 3rd party recon info through the ranks, as opposed to immediate "Borg' spotting? At the very least I'd say there should be a bit of a time lag (5 minutes?) between the drone of a Pioneer UAV engine overhead and the map lighting-up with newly discovered units.

[M1A1TC]

Some current news about Raven being used to hunt for insurgents

http://www.military.com/soldiertech/0,14632,Soldiertech_RavenHunt,,00.html?ESRC=soldiertech.nl

"Soldiers in Iraq began widespread use of the Raven last year. It requires line-of-sight contact, making hilltop launch sites and navigation ideal. The images captured by the small aircraft can be relayed to commanders at the tactical operations center if needed."

Please include Raven in the game

[mazex]

Originally posted by juan_gigante:

M1A1, those pictures you posted take me back to the days of my youth when my dad and I would construct these large styrofoam gliders which would (if the advertisment is to be believed), fly hundreds of feet. They invariably took an immediate nose dive into the ground, and broke in some way. While I am sure that those in your pictures are of higher quality, when I first saw them I was a little afraid for the future of the U.S. Army.

He he, brings me back there too... The days when boys where boys and nice scale models could suddenly be a pile of balsa wood I did a bit of pioneering for those UAV's too at the age of 14, and I've been searching for half an hour now for a picture taken from my RC-plane down at myself as a spot in the corner of a small airfield - taken in 1983. It's kind of fun - you see the wing in the upper part of the picture like in a regular Cessna amature photo but something looks really wrong as it is so crude

Anyone tried the WSPMBT Stryker scenario someone hinted about here a week ago? In the beginning of that scenario a UAV gives you the positions of some of the insurgents...

/Mazex

[M1A1TC]

I think including UAVs in this game is critical

[Midnight Warrior]

It would seem that UAV's in many ways coud be handled as any other unit (paricular small UAV's like a Raven). They could be given waypoints which would traverse much ike a ground unit. They could spot units much like a ground unit. They could be shot at much like a ground unit.

Of coarse there also are differencies between UAV's and ground units that would have to be accounted for.

The UAV waypoints would also have to have a specified altitude of either AGL (altitude above ground level) or ASL (altitude above sea level.

They would also have climb and dive limits (these could be specified as a maximum climb angle (say 10-20 degrees) and a maximum dive angle (say 30-40 degrees). However, in general UAV are not dogfighting or flying fancy 3D maneuvers but typically would be flying wings level flight bewtten waypoints with a small amount of climb and dive and a medium banked turn at each waypoint.

The command altitudues for each waypoint could be limited by these maximum climb/dive angles. The pitch and roll rates would be sufficiently high that the vehicles could be assumed to intstantaneously pitch and roll attitude.

The UAV's would have a mimimum turn radius (just as a ground vehicle does)but it would be governed by R=V^2/A where R is the turn radius, V is the speed and A the hoizontal acceleration in making the turn.

Say for a coordinated turn (i.e. a turn where the vehicle does not loose any altitude because t maintains a 1 G vertical component)where the bank angle is 45 degrees A (acceletation) would be 1 G (or 32.2 ft/secs. For a slow moving UAV's like a Raven this would be a pretty tight turn radius (for an aircraft that is). For a speed say of 50 knots this would be a turn radius of about 214ft. If waypoints are limited to be greater than this turn radius then the UAV should be able to follow the routes OK.

The rules for spotting enemy units could be similar to a ground vehicle except that it would be limited to the FOV (field of view) of the imaging sensor on the UAV. The imaging sensor could be pointed at a spot on the ground (i.e ground stabalized) or it could be in a push broom/snow plow mode where is stares at a fixed angle in respect to the vehicle.

The new command structure looks like it could easily accomodate these new command options such as command altitude.

The vehilce can be drawn graphically just like a regular ground vehicle.

Thus there would be some special coding for modeling small UAV's but not perhaps as much as one might think.

Finally, targets seen by the UAV (or by any unit for that matter) could be data linked to other units given that they are on the same comm net and given suiable delays.

Finally, the ground control station could also be modeled but it typically would likely be off the map for most situations.

edit: corrected a few typos.

[ November 05, 2005, 07:09 PM: Message edited by: Midnight Warrior ]

[Midnight Warrior]

Oh, I forgot to mention the punch line which is ... one doesn't need to have a high fidelity 6 DOF flight model (like in a flight simulator) to model UAV's in CM:SF.

[ozi_digger]

There are a couple of issues with UAVs that point to them being good on paper but operational realities are often different. I think a big problem is that we see the footage of a Predator strike and think as a commander, we can get coverage of anything at any time. Let me just play devil's advocate here.

1. Abstract Recon. BFC (IIRC Steve in particular) mentioned that an abstract method of revealing opposing troops on set-up will be modelled. This will represent recon elements spotting troops. Probably includes aerial recon too. Although abstract, I think this may be the best system of simulating UAV spotting.

2. Bandwidth Issues. Already identified as a number one problem of a networked force of the future. BFC (Steve) also mentioned the problems that vehicles have in staying networked while they're on the move. To me this presents a problem for all tha high-bandwidth UAV data streaming to your mobile forces.

3. Connectivity and Timeliness. Timeliness is another major factor of a highly mobile networked force. If you are playing tip of the spear in CMSF, how old is that info by the time it gets to you? What format is it in? My guess is that the info will be anywhere from 1 minute to hours, depending on the tactical level of the resource. If its tactical and under the control of a COY commander then it would be minutes. Can still be old news in a highly mobile engagement. Tactical UAVs tend to have low res sensors compared to their strategic counterparts. So will that analyst at the end of the UAV have spotted the enemy at all? If he does, will that picture blob be correctly identified? Which brings me back to format. What end result do you (the COY commander) get the report in? An annotated graphic? A word picture? A radio message?

4. Recon and Surveillance. This is the bottom line of my devils advocate rant. UAVs at the tactical level are intended for recon and surveillance. Recon before an engagement and surveillance of deployments. This to me is not the tip of the spear and a UAV would only feed me information that was not instantaneous. This is not to distract from their utility on the battlefield, but I think we need to be realistic as to what we're actucally getting. Abstracted snippets during sutup suits me fine. Maybe I get a message when my opponent's reinforcements arrive, where they arrived, their basic nature and when. Super-accurate, real-time information? Its possible in limited circumstances, but a healthy dose of operational realities needs to be injected IMHO.

[Midnight Warrior]

Given a UAV has streaming video whateverit sees on its sensor would be intsantly viewable by the operator at the ground control station. This begs the question of how this knowledge gets back to both the ground units and the human player. In CMX1 even though a CAS "pilot" saw something neither the human player nor the on map ground units saw what the pilot saw. In CMX2 will the UAV ground operator be more like the CAS pilot in CMX1 or like another ground unit where the player can see what the round operator can see but the other ground units are subject to the anti borg spotting rules. It wil be interesting to se how this is handled as to whether a UAV is modeled like any other on map unit or will it be abstracted.

[MikeyD]

The worst case scenario for UAV in the game would be you hear a drone's engine overhead and half the freakin' map immediately lights up for one side. At the moment CM uses a national icon (German cross, red star, etc.) to show a 'last seen' troop position. Perhaps, as news filters down to the troops about the recon flight a 'spooted by UAV' icon could appear. Sure, someone in a shelter is watching a live video stream of moving tanks but the bulk of the troops would be getting the info by word-of-mouth. So I imagine a 'spotted' icon would be more appropriate than actually showing those moving tanks on the map.

[M1A1TC]

The information is shared by a network.Most current vehicles such as Abrams and Bradleys have integrated network, where all friendlies appear as symbols, with their location updated by each vehicle's commander. Enemy symbols can be shared as well.

For example, on a Avenger system, I can see all aircraft around me for quite few miles. I can also put it locations of buildings,trees, whatever I want to use as TRP's. This info is shared among my battery, for example. So I know where each of my guys is positioned