Problem with conventional design is the hammer viewing everything in life as a nail, and two European programs struggling with reality at present are Future Combat Air System ~ that bizarrely proposes a piloted jet fighter at a modest cost of some 100 billion dollars to take us to 2040 and beyond ~ and the New Medium Helicopter in the UK, for which there is only a single bidder in the shape of Leonardo in Yeovil.
They've been going for eighty years, which may not be much of an advantage the way eighty years of whale-bone corsets may not be the ideal way of inventing the Wonderbra.
If you take their autonomous helicopter Proteus, for example, it looks like any other they might have built but with the windows blanked off. Whereas the defence giant Anduril in the US ~ who've been going less than ten ~ produce one called the Ghost that looks altogether more like one should look.
For instance it replaces the gearbox and drive-shaft connecting a tail-rotor with a (Chinese) electric motor from hobby stores that meets the same end... it's what I was told at the outset of inventing was the 'not invented here' barrier to progress.
Is suspect the government ~ on whom Proteus, the NMH and the whole company appears to be relying on ~ has looked at what's happening in Ukraine and begun to get cold feet.
Proteus is advertised as something to go looking for submarines, without needing the crew. But it can only cover so much ground albeit less expensively; something that can do this less expensively again however is any number of drones operating over a network covering a greater expanse altogether.
Which may be why Anduril is heading up, and Leonardo down.
Or at least in the UK: successive governments policy of flogging off UK manufacture to foreign buyers for a short-term fix to save jobs reveals who has the swim-trunks when the tide is out.
