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Posted on 03/02/2014 5:35:11 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Not really, satellite point to point isn’t vulnerable to DOS and remember they’ve already got autopilot remote control will just be for when the plan needs to be changed.
I was thinking about this the other day. No crew would have serious benefit cost and liability wise but all modern ships have mechanics and engineers aboard to fix things as they break. And on all boats, big and small, things break pretty regularly. Maintenance intensive. If these unmanned ships are to use common modern engines, drives, electronics, miles of piping and wiring, and such.....who’s going to fix them when they break?
Nothing’s perfect of course and it might be possible to get it very good by means of spread spectrum. But it’s going to be a people problem. Do people want pilotless craft among piloted ones? If you are piloting another craft, how do you signal a sudden problem to the controllers of the pilotless craft?
One can’t jam satellite?
Not quite the same.
My PC is not a black market treasure trove like an unmanned freighter.
Fine, the trend isn’t going away. Enjoy you new masters filled with new power.
You’d use the existing method. Pretty much the only thing people are useful for on vessels now is respond to emergencies on their vessel or others. Send the SOS the radio will pick it up, which gets transmitted to the remote operator who then responds.
People will complain about it until the next big pilot error accident. That’s always what gets buy in on decreased pilot control.
Crews on both ends would perform repairs and maintenance. It’s just a pizza drone on steroids, but instead of a spindly little hover-copter carrying a cardboard box it’s a steel tube the size of a sperm whale packed with all manner of goodies.
Why not go to remotely piloted ships using satellite data links.
That’s how we operate long range drones now.
It would be lots cheaper than a physical crew aboard and it places an actual captain in command.
It’s not easy, the frequencies are all over the place, and which satellite are you going to jam? There’s tons up there and at most you’re using two (the one your RC is talking to and the one the boat is talking to), and there’s probably another dozen you have access to (it’s LOS for the entire sky).
I think that’s what they’re talking about.
I understand that, but claiming that this ends piracy is just as silly as the folks who claimed the Titanic was unsinkable by design.
To say that this ends piracy is a bit amusing. There has always been the lure of profit in piracy and pirates have had a knack for continuing to thrive over the centuries.
So, I guess they’ll be designed to limp home on back-up systems? If it’s a serious enough issue I guess a repair crew will boat or airlift out to them at sea?
It WILL end piracy of cargo ships, mind you it will take decades for the entire fleet to be automated, but when more than 3/4 of the fleet is automated the pirates will go find their new criminal enterprise.
The lure of profit means nothing when it simply cannot be done. When they can’t take control of the vessel through computers (which of course let’s face it the current round of pirates don’t have technical skills) or violence then there CAN’T be pirates. Of course there will still be criminals, they’ll just have to find something else.
Sufficient technology exists that without radio or satellite guidance such a ship could reach its destination using only local instrumentation and dead reckoning. If we made it to Io and transmitted back hi-res photos of the cloud canopy, we can make it to Tokyo harbor unscathed.
A caretaker, maybe, or maybe someone with the skills to go manual at need. Weapons are a separate problem - many ports forbid them aboard. Hence some of the problems off Somalia. I could see a human skeleton crew as a backup, and anyway the Seafarers' and Maritime Officer unions would definitely be putting the pressure on the ship owners. That's just another hoop, IMHO, but it's there.
I wasn’t certain. It sounded a bit like a pitch for a fully autonomous vessel. That’s as silly as an autonomous jumbo jet...at least given the current state of the art.
I can envision adversaries utilizing submarines to sink the drone vessels without any compunction or fear of getting caught.
If legal and monetary constraints were removed, a contributer to hack-a-day or instructibles would have it working in no time.
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