Quote:
Originally Posted by Olefin
There were more UAV's out there than you think - Israel had the IAI Scout and the Tadiran Mastiff. And the US was using drones for recon as early as the Vietnam War - and they werent target or artillery drones.
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Were there more than I mentioned? Yes. Were they in widespread use? No, certainly not. You named the two prominent IDF examples, which played a role from the early 80s onwards. Yes, the Tadiran Mastiff was first flown in 1973, but that's not the same as an operational UAV that was fulfilling a defined role within the IDF.
With respect to the US: Were there non-artillery UAV in service with US armed forces before the RQ-1B predator? Certainly. Were they part of a unified strategy or available to battlefield commanders? Not so much. Yes, there were things like the QH-50 DASH, which aimed at naval ASW, but it performed significantly worse than contemporary helicopters and offered little in terms what we today think of as strength of UAVs, e. g. data links to other weapon systems of the (literal) mother ship, high endurance or range.
The DASH, while later equipped with TV-cameras, initially was a simpe radio controlled helicopter with a range of 71 nm and a cruising speed of just over 40 nm, that was used to lob two anemic Mk. 44 torpedoes into the vicinity of a detected 1960s submarine. While later a single Mk. 46 torpedo could be carried, its endurance of just one hour and missing sensors meant that it was nothing more than an instrument to bring a weapon into an area. Helicopters and ASROC missiles did and do the same. Other US drones before the RQ-2 were usually artillery drones or other reconnaissance drones, e. g. the Ryan Firebee or the D-21, which was a strategic recon drone and did not offer its capabilities to battlefield commanders. Also, drones of this age were not really featuring hardened electronics, so their use in post-nuclear warfare is uncertain.
Nothing of this arsenal would offer capabilities for SAR (i. e. 'search and rescue') to commanders in a T2K universe. Additionally, what SAR roles do we see in T2K at all? There are hardly pilots downed in that setting since airplanes are almost extinct and coordinated military actions are pretty much non-existent. So, what "small reconnaissance drones" would exist and for what purpose and who would (be able to) use them.