The Dominator

``Generals,'' Stanford began with his eyes confidently scanning the row of aged military leaders in front of him, ``I present to you the latest in automated warfare: the Dominator.''

``The Dominator is unlike our previous Hawk-class UAV. The wingspan is much larger, forty feet from the Hawk's twenty feet but this is not a liability, because the Dominator has a top speed more than double than that of the Hawk, while having components weight less than seventy-five percent of what the Hawk carries, thanks to the micro fusion power plant and hybrid air-ion engine.

``Operationally, this means that the Dominator can carry a payload twice as much as the Hawk, and can fly as high as low earth orbital altitudes to evade capture, and can stay in orbit at that altitude for up to two hundred hours.''

There was faint murmuring among the generals. Flying at that altitude with double the payload meant that tactical nuclear strikes from ultra-high altitudes via drone technology was now a capability. The long flight time also meant that it was possible to keep a round-the-clock presence. It was a capability that they had long since dreamed of but had never seen it come to fruition.

``What about controls? How do you control the Dominator?'' A general asked.

``We provide four different ways of controlling the Dominator. There is the all-manual control, where both flight and weapon systems are controlled either by direct radio or by satellite link, flight mission control where the flight parameters are pre-specified and manual control over the weapon systems are provided (you can override the flight parameters), again by either direct radio or by satellite link. There is of course the fully automated control mechanism, where the Dominator is hooked up to the constellation of drone `swarms', and is controlled by a central computer that dispatches precise manoeuvring and firing sequences to each drone in the swarm to achieve user-specified tactical objectives.''

``What's the fourth way?''

``Oh that is still currently under development,'' Stanford said, with a glint in his eye.

(Based on an exercise generated by WriteThis - 13-Apr-2014 11:53:43)