Military Aircraft Of 2163 - A Speculative Thought Experiment

[Orionblamblam]

Can a 'printed' aircraft be that far off:

http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-07/working-assault-rifle-made-3-d-printer

There's good and bad there.

Good: The *one* part that's been printed, the receiver, is the *one* part of a weapon that the government regulates. You can buy and sell every other part - trigger, magazine, firing pin, barrel, etc - over the counter or over the internet with no paperwork. So by taking the receiver out of the governments ability to regulate, you take the ability to regulate firearms away from the government. And that's a good thing.

Bad: Well, I don't really see anything bad here, apart from lazy journalism. Other than that, most of the gun could be made by a well-equipped home shop; making parts via 3D printing is obviously a new wrinkle, but you can't print up a chamber or a barrel yet. And even when laser-sintering steel and titanium-feedstock printers get good and cheap enough to put one in your man-cave, the barrel will still need to be machined. Unless the printer has *molecule*-level precision.

And printing up ammo is still a ways off.

EDIT: The relavance of all this is that *eventually* 3D printers will be ubiquitous and relatively cheap. Assuming they can build sizable items out of virtually any material - plastic, metals, ceramics, etc. - then probably the major driver of the cost of a printed item will be the *mass* of the item. Secondary cost will be any wacky, rare feedstock materials. The actual complexity of the printed item will be almost irrelevant. And thus a small turbojet engine massing 25 kilograms won't cost any more than a small piston engine or a steam engine massing 25 kilos. And thus horribly complex componants won't cost much if any more than simple components. Couple that with a governmental inability to control what people, corporations, religious organizations, militia groups, chess clubs or teams of LARPers may choose to print up, and the future skies may be filled with home-made aerial hunter-killers.

 

[Dreamfighter]

As through globalisation planet Earth has now become the equivalent of "a small 19th century town", Obb's Doomsday-scenario is an option to (seriously) consider, imho.
Imagining resource-wars taking place in a later stage, a repetition of something like the Spanish flew (with that one's contamination factor and mortality rate rather moderate compared to some virii today) could have apocalyptic properties. And it could happen as soon as next month, when a chickenfarmer sneezes or someone doesn't - "intentionally or not" - disinfect properly when leaving the lab.
But hopefully Earth's Leadership then gets things sorted out timely and Human (Aero)Space Flight in 2163 will be something as exotic as aerospace-enthusiasts and -professionals hope it will be (and as some people predict in their posts here) and not a paper aircraft in a mutant's deformed hand.




Regards,
NightmareDreamfighter

 

[Jemiba]

Maybe in 2163 technologies like plasma stealth or metamaterials will be standard, but I don't think,
that someone without a special interest in aviation will be able to tell a fighter aircraft then, from one
today. Looking at the development of fighters, a curve showing the changes in appearance and their
time of development is flattening out more and more, additionally the time in service becomes longer
and longer. Wouldn't be surprised, if the then current US fighter, would be just a direct successor to the
F-35 Block 90, if there will be a USA, Great Britain, France, Germany etc. at all and not just a local
subsidiary of the "Worldwide Ltd". There will be no "wars", just conflicts in the companies leadership,
solved by personnel turnovers. That doesn't mean, there will be no need for weapons, of course. Large
parts of what we know as "third world countries" (and maybe other parts, refusing to co-operate) will be
outside of this "Worldwide Ltd", because of there inability to offer resources. Human labour won't be a
resource in our sense anymore, but the "subsidiaries" will have to pay for their portion of the workshare
by delivering raw materials. And some regions, although principally belonging to the "have-nots" will be
lucky to be tasked as border guards against the inflow of emigrants. They, of course will need to be suitably
armed, but with regards to aviation, COIN aircraft will be enough. Fighter and bomber aircraft just will have
to be able to overcome quite primitive opposition, perhaps on missions to retaliate for boundary violations,
but not to fight in a large scale war.
In a certain way, this can be quite a peaceful world ! :-\

 

[Sbiper]

1st time post here, been lurking for a while, not 100% applicable to this but the Orions Arm website does 'Space Opera' on a grand scale, kinda what could happen across seversal thousand years of the future (global mass extinction, resource wars, peak oil etc. excepted) http://www.orionsarm.com/

 

[OM]

I can buy an AK on the black market why not a nano assembler it is 150 years from now ;D

...Why wait that long? The big stink going around about the dropping costs of a Makerbot is that there have been demo runs where a .45 with a 9mm adapter, as well as a dead-on German Luger have been created with a Makerbot using the highest quality ABS available, and not only are they not detectable by the gate *or* the wand detectors, the ABS will hold up long enough to the heat that the rapid fire a full-auto AK-47 would encounter during a rather lengthy assault. Taking this one step further, if one has access to the same equipment and materials that Shapeways is using for their metalcast prototyping, more durable weapons could be quickly mass-produced for deployment in defensive positions where arms embargoing winds up being effective.

...Some pundits/EFF-types have claimed that this may be why in the past couple of years all the praises-n-promises of everyone owning a cheap Makerbot using the Von Neumann method has died down, out of fear that before Al Queda or his brother Fred gets the idea of building a disposable, untraceable small-arms arsenal, one or more of the first and/or second-world governments will start cracking down on the production, sale and distribution of these small, affordable rapid prototype "3D Printers". The justification, naturally, won't be "let's keep plastic stealth guns out of the hands of the terrorists", but "let's help keep the toy companies, D&D figure casters, and Sony's price-gouging spare parts divisions in business by preventing illegal duplication of copyrighted/patented parts!"

...Such overkill may keep prototype houses like Shapeways or the upcoming "prototype on demand" services from Staples and Office Depot in business, as they'll be prohibited by law from either using high-grade ABS or anything other than this new "laminated ream of paper" method to produce anything, but as with any copy protection...aw, you older guys remember OM's Law #0 - For every method of copy protection, there'll be at least five ways to break it, and you'll only know of three of them. Either way, it's the old "guns don't kill people, people kill guns" debate, just given a plastic coated twist.

Granted, there'll still be issues remaining with regards to propellants, but if any of the "Gun Nuts" out there remember a particular triangular "no-jam" cartridge design that was demonstrated to JFK around 1962 where the cartridge itself was part of the propellant and was consumed when the weapon was fired, then it won't be that hard to come up with a variant of the ABS used in a Makerbot that would serve the same purpose. Either that, or the US government will have to declare the Vasquez Rocks off-limits, or at least prohibit large bamboo tubes from the premises...


[I just *know* one of the mods is *not* going to get that last joke... :-\ ]

 

[Lauge]

Quite another option: Cyberweapons become sufficiently effective and ubiquitous that no one in their right mind would dare put computers more sophisticated than a 1960's calculator in a weapon system.

Result: Military aircraft of 2163 will be piloted, will use technology on the level of the F-100 Super Sabre and the Mig-21 (albeit with more advanced materials), and weapons will be unguided or, at best, with some form of analogue guidance/homing system. And the cockpits will, of course, be full of good, old-fashioned steam gauges.

Regards & all,

Thomas L. Nielsen
Luxembourg

 

[Bill Walker]

Quite another option: Cyberweapons become sufficiently effective and ubiquitous that no one in their right mind would dare put computers more sophisticated than a 1960's calculator in a weapon system.

Result: Military aircraft of 2163 will be piloted, will use technology on the level of the F-100 Super Sabre and the Mig-21 (albeit with more advanced materials), and weapons will be unguided or, at best, with some form of analogue guidance/homing system. And the cockpits will, of course, be full of good, old-fashioned steam gauges.

That will never, ever happen. Yes, they may limit (or try to limit) self aware computers, but the temptation to use even 21st century automation, all weather capability, guided weapons, etc. will be too tempting. Once one side starts using it, the other side can use it or die.

As an interesting but related aside, a Canadian think tank is calling for cyber arms limitation treaties as the solution to the current situation with apparently government sponsored hacking from China. The alternative, they claim, would be a new and costly "arms" race in government funded hacking. Just imagine the pork barrel possibilities.

 

[Simon666]

Using Augustine's law and extrapollating the following graph all the way to 2163, the US will be a military dictatorship spending 100% of its GDP on defense, entirely spent on purchasing one single aircraft with it, most likely an intelligent self aware, self refueling and self healing unmanned drone assassinating each and every human objecting to the way the GDP is spent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Augustine%27s_law.svg

 

[Vahe Demirjian]

Using Augustine's law and extrapollating the following graph all the way to 2163, the US will be a military dictatorship spending 100% of its GDP on defense, entirely spent on purchasing one single aircraft with it, most likely an intelligent self aware, self refueling and self healing unmanned drone assassinating each and every human objecting to the way the GDP is spent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Augustine%27s_law.svg

Even if the cost of a new US military airplane rises exponentially decade by decade, it's absolutely ridiculous to imagine the US becoming a military dictatorship spending 100% of its GDP on defense by 2163 because spending all this money on military affairs would cause the American people to go starving and leave the blind, deaf, and poor neglected. Most left-wing organizations will surely deride the US as a right-wing fascist regime if the Americans spend 95% of its GDP on waging conflicts and expanding weapons arsenal in the name of delivering sustainable economic prosperity.

 

[Avimimus]

The Über-drone doesn't care

 

[sublight_]

What if this is really a psychological experiment to peer into the heads of members?

2163 will be so different that no scientist in the world will be even remotely able to imagine what it will be like. Just the other day scientists observed quantum magnetism with super chilled atoms and lasers. What will that lead to? Right now nobody has any real idea, but it is definitely an indicator of the kind of unforeseen surprises that we face. The rate of discovery and invention is accelerating every day so much so that the possibilities are unfathomable, and truly frightening.

The real question is not what weapons there will be in 2163, there is no doubt they will be robotic, exotic, and extremely intelligent, the question will be what conflict resolution protocols will we evolve to deal with them. In a world with 200th generation weapons, there will be no such thing as a localized conflict and any bad decision could be a global catastrophe.

The quantum magnetism experiment: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/26/quantum-magnetism-first-time-physicists_n_3339243.html?utm_hp_ref=science

 

[Scott Kenny]

The F-35 will have the bugs worked out and be in service ;D

B-52s will still be flying.

==========
In general, this is a really tough question. You're basically asking a person from the Civil War what it'd be like in 2000. So much stuff that they just cannot even imagine.



I expect that most combat vehicles will be unmanned. Humans cybernetically linked into groups of them to slow down the killing machines, because we haven't figured out how to program ethics into a machine yet, able to question and clarify orders. Killing the "quarterback" results in the robots executing their last set of orders to extremes, so life expectancy of soldiers has improved greatly. Nobody wants to kill them, because they're the ones keeping the robots from killing everything in the area.