And Now… DARPA’s Flying Car Program
January 5th, 2010*chortle*
Via: Network World:
Military scientists are looking to ramp up research and development of a flying military vehicle that will hold up to 4 people and have the ability to launch vertically and soar when necessary.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will this month hold its first Proposers’ Day Workshop in support of a flying car program it will begin this year known as the Transformer (TX). The goal of the TX will be to build a flying vehicle that will let military personnel avoid water, difficult terrain, and road obstructions as well as IED and ambush threats by driving and flying when necessary.
DARPA said the vehicle will need to be able to drive on prepared surface and light off-road conditions, as well as support Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) features.
The TX will also support range and speed efficiencies that will allow for missions to be performed on a single tank of fuel. DARPA said the TX will “provide the flexibility to adapt to traditional and asymmetric threats by providing the operator unimpeded movement over difficult terrain. In addition, transportation is no longer restricted to trafficable terrain that tends to makes movement predictable.”
DARPA said current transport systems present operational limitations where the warfighter is either anchored to the ground with a Humvee and thus vulnerable to ambush, or reliant on helicopters, which are limited in flight speed and availability. The TX will let soldiers approach targets from directions opportune to them and not the enemy, DARPA stated.
Perhaps the lead conditioning is finally getting underway for the first officially acknowledged round of Foo Fighters in the next several years?
Will the real Cyberdyne Systems please stand up?
Coming soon to a global battlefield near you: autonomous airborne H-K units. After all those years of raining human-guided ordnance, now they have the video game variety, torching the untermensch from the comfort of a leather chair with a coffee machine just down the hall.
The rise of the Armchair Warrior. Hooh-rah.
Automated sentry weapons on the ground. Airborne VTOL capability with “four-man” transport capability? Perhaps, but I see the two merging into an R-C angel of death sportin’ air-to-ground armament LONG before the first trained monkey takes a ride IN the new rocket sled.
As for calling them Transformers, well that’s just another one of those little tells revealing how and where and in which directions the social programming is progressing. And how big is the leap from “Transformer” to “Terminator”?
Not large.
It’s kinda funny, I’ve been discussing the possibility of building something to almost the exact specs of what DARPA is looking for. What we were talking about was geared more towards civil uses, like search and rescue but on a lower budget than helicopters.
Now if only we had a budget to work with to build the scale prototype.