I have to agree with this, but there's nothing saying that drone operators can't be situated closer to the action. They can operate from a ship off-shore or even a nearby ground facility or plane.

Realistically though, a thousand kilometers of distance incurs only about half a millisecond of delay. The real issue is probably getting the latency of everything else in the chain down to a low level. e.g. One problem commercial VR systems are currently engaging is getting latency down to a level that doesn't make people feel sick. The standards for a military jet are probably a lot higher.

On the bright side, a CAS fighter flying at a few hundred kilometers per hour is probably a much easier first-step for drone replacement than a supersonic fighter. I'm not saying the A-10 is obsolete yet, but it's likley going to be replaced by drones before any other manned fighters are.

I think your half millisecond is an order of magnitude out. c = 3x10^8metres/sec. c=d/t. So t=1000×10^3metres / 3x10^8metres sec = (approx) 0.3x10^-2 sec = 3x10^-3 sec = 3 millisecs. Phew, tough editing work on a phone. 6 millisecs for a round trip.

Yes, you're right. Average human reaction time is on the order of hundreds of milliseconds though. If you can keep latency under ten milliseconds you're probably doing pretty good, and that's reasonable over distances of a few hundred kilometers. Having the operator thousands of kilometers away is only really necessary for extrajudicial assassinations, which should be put to a stop anyways.

I can remember playing Quake on a server with a latency of 40 ms and being an untouchable god because of it.

But for VR you can just have a ultra wide fov camera and then allow your pilots to look around that field with zero latency. The only latency would be with actual commands to the drone which shouldn't cause any problems with VR anyways.

There is significant lattency in digital videos streams and also the render pipe. I don't know how they stream video but it can't be mpeg.

Even with compressed independent frames that never spend on future frames you get the transfer window lattency so you need a lot of unjammable bandwidth. Line of sight transmitters? Ir lasers? Kind of a hard problem though as you might possibly want to not light up the whole country with your communications.

And commodity hardware can't push frames without a lot of buffering. I guess they might afford custom display hardware but it's a complex problem too.

I guess it would be easier to just send the coordinates where you want everything dead and get the popcorns. Bonus extra is everything that actually is a threat but I doubt that it's a actually a big concern when doing CAS, although I guess a A10 pilot might be able to spot schoolyards and kids if they are not under pressure.

The ping from US West to Tokyo is around 150ms on AWS, last I remember.

I read once that musicians need to be within about 20ms to collaborate in real time, and that sound travels through air at about 1 foot per ms. Fighter pilots can recognize an image flashed for 1/220 second (4.54ms) [1]. Etc. I'd call these operating parameters for drones, split between computing and communication.

1. http://www.100fps.com/how_many_frames_can_humans_see.htm Test #3

You can put big guns on drones.

A-10 are anti tank, and anti dug in positions. If someone is running in the open ground forces can just shoot them. Further, a person running at 25 mph takes 27 ms to move one foot. So a little latency is not an issue. Remember, these things are spraying billets in a line on the ground. They don't need or really want pin point accuracy.

Yea, the GAU-8's precision is like 70% within some multiple meter radius at 1km anyways. I don't remember the specifics.

80% within 5 mils. 1 mil = 1 foot at 1000 feet. At 1nm (usual employment range), that's 30 feet.