DARPA's new X-76
74 points - today at 4:54 PM
SourcemrDmrTmrJ
today at 6:08 PM
To be clear, this is not a power-point program but a continuation of a long-standing design work with Bell.
Two articles that cover this in depth are:
1. Revised Fold-Away Rotor Aircraft Concepts Emerge From Special Operations X-Plane Program. December 2024:
https://www.twz.com/air/revised-fold-away-rotor-aircraft-con...
2. Bell’s Plan To Finally Realize A Rotorcraft That Flies Like A Jet But Hovers Like A Helicopter. September 2021:
https://www.twz.com/41997/bells-plan-to-finally-realize-a-ro...
The second article covers decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept.
moralestapia
today at 7:35 PM
>decades of prior wind tunnel testing on the folding rotor concept
Oof, I wish I had a job like that.
mikkupikku
today at 8:02 PM
Why won't they adopt one of Sikorsky's compound helicopters already? They're beautiful and elegant solutions to this problem.
Cool, I guess this should be able to hover in much more "austere" environments than the F-35B STOVL and the Harrier Jet. Tiltrotor with folding rotor blades sounds very mechanically complex and challenging though.
PowerElectronix
today at 5:34 PM
It looks like a maintenance nightmare with those clutches to decouple the blades and the mechanisms to have them folded during cruising. Does it even improve substantially in anh metric over the V280 to put money into it?
cucumber3732842
today at 5:43 PM
The V280 is designed to be cheap (a very relative term here).
Reading between the lines, I suspect "fast, but also expensive" was a design option that popped up and was not chosen earlier in the V280 program and now Darpa wants to pay to see where it goes.
Hard to be more expensive than F-35B.
it also has stealth. This is a complete disaster. The only purpose of this stealth ship is to steal leaders and or go inside cave lairs and blow them up.
ocdtrekkie
today at 7:41 PM
I'm confident with the stellar service and safety record of the V-22 that an even more complex tiltrotor will be a standout success for the military.
wartywhoa23
today at 7:51 PM
16 hull losses per ~400 units built is not exactly a stellar safety record.
Or I guess you mean /stellar?
radicalethics
today at 6:48 PM
I wonder what the motivation behind this is. Tactically, why ever show your latest weapon? What is the strategic purpose of this? It's like if I message my opponent in SC2 and tell them exactly what I'm going to tech to. That's ... insane right? Why would anyone do that?
benjcpalm
today at 6:55 PM
It's not a tactical choice- it's strategic deterrence, and it's not insane at all!
The US has always had a policy of messaging programs, with a lean toward classifying some percentage of the specific capabilities.
There's a reason that F-35 program was publicized by the US government as the program was under development. It makes the US air force even scarier, which discourages adversaries from thinking about conventional warfare with America.
That said- you won't see any detailed pics of the inside of an F35 cockpit, or a detailed look at the heads up display in the fancy helmet. That's top secret, because those making those details public don't offer enough additional deterrence to justify the risk to the program.
Yes, but even if the US didn't release the specifications of the F35, other countries around the world would rapidly figure out most of the capabilities anyway from photos, videos, and casual observation. (In other words, they'd know soon enough WHAT it can do but not necessarily HOW it does it.)
This isn't a new weapon, this is a test platform for various ideas, none of which are new or secret. Also, there are not many groundbreaking advancements left in military aviation. Most are just fairly incremental engineering or manufacturing improvements. (Military space technology might be a different story, though.)
The only other nation with the potential to develop a high-tech military plane that could rival US technology would be China. But if we ever got into a war with China, they wouldn't need superior technology to win. They could win via superior manufacturing capacity and the sheer number of people they can draft into service at a moment's notice.
foobarian
today at 7:24 PM
They could just cease all shipping. The consequences would be legendary.
Alan_Writer
today at 7:09 PM
I think they just show what it can be seen, like any country with advance military developments.
They won't show you everything.
Have you ever heard about those sound/sonic (or something similar) weapons the US used in Maduro's kidnap operation? Venezuelan soldiers said (pero some publications on the internet) that they never saw anything alike, leaving them completely disoriented and helpless?
Soldiers now can even see thermal figures through walls or solid materiales, and the same time, bacome invisibles.
It's more than sci-fi.
So it's an Osprey with a jet in the back?
Usually with these programs, they just commission an artist with some vague description, like they tell him to draw a futuristic VTOL aircraft, these pics have zero bearing on what gets delivered.
Sometimes they even take the piss with this, like in this video for a next-gen engine, where you can see their engine doesn't even fit in their fantasy aircraft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCHun6rxQm0
huflungdung
today at 6:05 PM
[dead]
From the image it doesn't look balanced for VTOL when the propellors are vertical. Also are the jets enabled during VTOL?
So it has jet engines that blades unfold and attach to during takeoff and landing? Why not always use the blades?
I’d go for simplicity and do a tail lander.
trelliumD
today at 6:43 PM
that already exists in the form of Saab Gripen :)
FrankBooth
today at 6:51 PM
Where do the 14 soldiers sit in the Gripen?
On the wings, obviously, for quick deployment. Maybe I mean early deployment.
sandworm101
today at 7:05 PM
Different engines for different phases of flight? It has been tried many times and never really works. Such craft can be made to fly, but never well. The answer has to come from using one set to power all phases.
Id be interested in seeing a turboprop that can transition to a turbofan/jet once the prop is folded away. The f-35 was a step in this direction.
“ With SPRINT, we're not just building an X-plane; we're building options”. Found the guy who couldn’t be bothered to write his own press release…
newer_vienna
today at 6:25 PM
I'm quite fond of the caption, which describes a "a proof-of-concept technology demonstrator that aims to demonstrate technologies and concepts"
NitpickLawyer
today at 6:57 PM
Brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
irl_zebra
today at 5:58 PM
I think I'd rather have them working on airplane tech rather than writing airplane tech press releases. With this approach, it's not just a tactical thing; it's relieving the burden of wordsmithing from technical people.
bigfishrunning
today at 6:16 PM
The technical people were never wordsmithing, they just didn't hire a technical writer. Instead of freeing up someone to do more design work, it freed someone to interview for a new job. I hope they get it.
notahacker
today at 5:31 PM
Good to hear that the DoD's new contract with OpenAI is solving all the most important problems...
It's a quote from someone...?
... who probably wrote their prepared PR statement with an LLM.
I have always talked/written like this. now that LLMs do it in a similar enough way, my own writing gets called AI slop. I just wish my rotator cuffs knew I was a robot.
irl_zebra
today at 7:15 PM
It's probably good signal at least, if not a bit of a harsh thing to say that I don't mean in a bad way, that your writing was bland or mediocre since LLMs are basically regression to the mean.
Skimping on the service again, are we?
It feels like DARPA has fallen so far. In a post-Salt Typhoon era it's really hard to imagine them as dynamic, best-in-class innovators anymore.
ambicapter
today at 6:36 PM
This administration doesn't really prioritize anything that has to do with intelligence, so advanced research was obviously going to fall by the wayside.
idontwantthis
today at 5:53 PM
Isn't this need already met by the Bell V280 that the army already selected for it's Blackhawk replacement? What is the big innovation they are going for here?
Tuna-Fish
today at 6:17 PM
+50% top speed over the V280. Bell offered it as an alternative to the V280 in the early stage of the contract, but it was judged too experimental (and probably too expensive). Apparently DARPA is funding further development of the concept.
crimsoneer
today at 6:31 PM
Someone has played the new Deus Ex games
phplovesong
today at 6:14 PM
The swedish gripen can do mach2 (2300km/h) and does not need a traditional runway (500 meters of something "flat enough" will do). I assume its way cheaper than something like this.
I suppose the argument is that X-76 could work in environments without roads. But that also implies without fuel or any other support on the ground.
RandallBrown
today at 6:17 PM
Can it hover?
I can't access darpa.mil. Was it slashdotted because of the article being posted here, or now it is unavailable outside of US?
rcMgD2BwE72F
today at 8:06 PM
Inaccessible from France. With family.dns.mullvad.net private DNS.
I can access it from the UK
newer_vienna
today at 6:26 PM
Still up here in the US
HumblyTossed
today at 6:26 PM
Hmmm... that just looks like problems. It's a lot of mechanical parts that always have to work correctly.
The Osprey killed a lot of Marines over the past decades. It took a while to work out the issues. Hopefully we will remember what the Osprey taught us.
[flagged]
hopefully we never will - the last thing I want the government MORE involved in is healthcare
It is a fascinating take. I am curious to understand what model you think would work.
The U.S. effectively has a dysfunctional system with wild mix of "no regulation" and heavy state participation. I am not sure there is any country with a deregulated system where people can enjoy good healthcare. You could theoretically say that Switzerland does this, but the government there requires everyone to have insurance, even though hospitals are 100% private.
There's no magic wand fix to healthcare, it and the related insurance industry are incredibly busted.
What I am dead certain of though is that involving the government in it will be worse, not better.
I wonder is Iran would have gone different if we had captured the Ayatollah instead of killing him. A stealth drop ship like this would have allowed that to happen. The reason why regimes are more likely to negotiate when you capture their leaders is because you might release them. (not a good day for the usurper.)
otabdeveloper4
today at 8:09 PM
> A stealth drop ship like this would have allowed that to happen.
Yeah, I saw that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode too.
Sadly, we might need some more intensive vibranium research before it becomes reality.
I don't think whatever is negotiated with Iran's current regime would actually be honored by them. They may commit something to get their leader back, but won't be keeping the promises.
Their self stated goal is destruction of Israel and US. They could have chosen peace and not have funded proxies across the middle east. Their choice of aggression by whatever means they have at their disposal just shows what their long term strategy would be.
They have shown the intend. They just didn't have the capacity to follow through. Once they gain the capacity, they could go extreme lengths. Just see how they attacked their neighbors who were not party to the war.