zlacker

I wouldn't put all my eggs on a single billion dollar basket like that in 2025. A networked flock of million dollar drones with phased array radar could be cheaper, more effective, thanks to a larger virtual aperture, and far more survivable an overwatch resource. You could stagger refueling and have it available 24/7.

>>mikewa+(OP)
Sounds cool as a fantasy. How are you going to measure the distance between the drones with millimeter precision? How are you going to synchronize the pulse between the drones with nanosecond precision to achieve the phased array effect? How are you going to do all that with the enemy actively deploying EW measures?

Not that these problems are impossible to solve, but they are nontrivial in practice, I'm afraid. It would take quite some effort to turn the fantasy into a reliable theory, and then quite some more, into a practical swarm.

Will be cool though.

>>nine_k+Jj
Atomic clocks are now less than $5000 devices. The same type of circuits that allow GPS receivers to correlate timing to the picosecond could be used in this application. None of what I suggested is fantasy, but it would require good engineering.

What would be even more fun (i.e. stretching the limits) would be to include a 30-300 mhz radar in the mix, which would resolve just fine with dispersed nodes, and penetrate most stealth coatings and bounce off the airframes of the enemy.

>>mikewa+Lm
Yes, every separate component is doable. What looks hardest to me is the geometry: every node / drone would not only need to be perfectly synchronized with the rest of the swarm, but also understand its location within it with millimeter precision, in order to time its impulse to do beamforming, or allow locating any received signals. We should assume that near the battlefield GPS is already jammed, so it must be a sophisticated network of laser rangefinders between the drones, plus location data from land stations.

Then, there should be a super-node in a larger aircraft that would receive the data from the swarm and turn it into a coherent picture, run object detection and tracking, etc.