Shield AI X-BAT multirole UCAV

H_K said:
No radar in the nose due to air intake location... how will it detect air targets for its primary mission?
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While I agree with the criticism of what's being presented by yet another overhyped start-up, this kind of inlet has been studied by Boeing with their JSF proposal, which was meant to accomodate a radar. It depends a lot on the aircraft size, the volume of where you want to put the radar and the arrangement and dimensions of the intended radar as well.
 

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Scott Kenny said:
You absolutely can put fuel in the wings outboard of the folds.
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It’s rarely done. The A-6 Intruder is one of the few designs I know that has fuel outboard of the folds (143 gallons per side, 950lbs each).

On a supersonic wing it makes less sense as the wing will be thin and the volume available in the outer section will be limited, especially considering the added complexity and weight, which is not desirable on a VTOL aircraft.
 
H_K said:
The engines aren't vapourware but the rest of the X-Bat design still is.
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I don’t think those are even the biggest problem with the X-Bat. The biggest technical problem is the engine inlet distortion and engine performance on landing. I get where these guys are coming from and drawing inspiration from Falcon 9 landings. But landing with rockets is simple compared to trying to do it with a turbojet engine. With rockets you have virtually instant thrust and throttle responses that is only dependent on conditions within the rocket itself. With a turbojet engine, your throttle response will be much slower and your power output will be directly related to the flow quality in the inlet. Worst still poor flow quality induced engine performance lost is unstable and positively reinforce lost of power. Meaning if the flow quality starts to degrade, that degradation is likely to grow extremely large and extremely fast. Couple that problem with a slow throttle response and you’d have an intractable problem.

Traditional jet engine V-TOL doesn’t suffer from these problems as much because the engine inlets are horizontal so you can point the inlets into the wind. The X-Bat is trying to do the same thing with the engine essentially running backwards and (looks to me anyways) lack of ability to land in an arbitrary direction to match the wind. This configuration of VTOL is likely to have large risk of engine exhaust ingestion and poor inlet performance.

You might be able to demonstrate X-Bat’s VTOL capability on a good day out in the desert. But the problem becomes extremely difficult to solve if you have to do a landing in any kind of even light cross or tail (dorsal?) wind. I also wouldn’t read too much into a successful test campaign of their subscale model either. The lag in engine response to throttle commands becomes more difficult as an engine is scaled up due to increasing inertias and square-cube laws. Just because it works at 45% scale, it doesn’t mean it will work at full scale.

This is a very subtle but extremely difficult technical problem to solve. I’m not confident that the folks working on the X-Bat even recognize the gravity of this problem because this problem have no analog from any one with experiences working on the V-Bat nor someone they can poach from SpaceX that had worked on the Falcon 9.

I do hope they succeed because it is a compelling idea. But I wouldn’t bet on this working and I’d hate to be the guy that has to figure out how to get this to work.
 
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even if the vertical landing part doesnt work i hope they have a backup plan for short EMALS assisted/ support carriers with STOBAR. cause if its a 10 tonne class UAV with a F110 then it has more than enough dry thrust available.
 
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raptor82 said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/2046527762672861493
View: https://x.com/virtualbayonet/status/2046527762672861493
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Its an interesting marketing tactic. The signals coming from the USAF have generally been for lower cost lower capability CCA but Shield are deliberately leaning in to the bigger is better. Obviously being runway independent changes things and makes the X-Bat potentially more survivable than the current tier 1 CCAs through reduced runway reliance but would likely require a great sustainment tail.
 
Shield AI can bid for the next CCA increments with its X-BAT if it has flown and/or demonstrated capability by then. If they are priced out of the requirements they can continue to develop for future requirements hoping that the USAF will raise the CCA cost ceiling by a factor of 3 or 4 to make the X-bat work :)
 

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