V. S. Verba, V. I. Merkulov

One of the most promising ways of creating defence from aerial assault is deploying fighter drones which have the advantages of seamlessly combining the conflicting objectives of enhancing both combat capabilities, combat effectiveness and cost effectiveness. A number of tactical, economic, technological, and theoretic reasons dictating the importance of development and adaptation of fighter drones are studied in this article. The most preferential areas of interest for deploying fighter drones are: - situations with heightened danger (air defence suppression, countering enemy aircrafts with superior aircraft perform-ance and ammunition); - deploying as assault echelons for interception of heavily protected airborne targets (AWACS, relay, and C3 aircrafts, etc.). Another way of deploying fighter drones is to use them as a "kamikaze" round instead of re-usable weapon delivery agent. Absence of the pilot on board a fighter drone strongly affects its deployment specifics as well as architecture of its information computation system. Proceeding from purpose, conditions and specifics of deploying a fighter drone, its information computation systems must provide: - information support for guidance on all types of targets, including hypersonic aircrafts; - stable and precise operation of all sensors in a wide area of allowable velocity, acceleration and range; - high resolution tracking allowing for individual tracking of targets inside of a dense group; - high jamming resistance allowing for effective deploying in a complex signal-noise situation which requires for using of several frequency bands as well as passive modes of tracking systems operation; - ability for functioning in information ambiguity situation including suppressed onboard radar; - capability for prompt aim relay; - rapid response time; - capability of intervention in the guidance by pilot-in-command at any time. Fighter drones deploying policy defines four base operating modes for information computation system: unaided guidance, command (long-range) guidance, homing (short-range guidance), and combined guidance (allowing for intervention of pilot-in-command in the guidance at any time). The former mode requires co-ordination of long and short range guidance. Aside from deploying the fighter drone as a weapon for destruction enemy aircrafts, it can be used as an additional information source for manned aircrafts and command centres of air forces - automated control systems. Thereby the information computation system of a fighter drone must possess the "information back feed" mode that relays estimations of relative and absolute movement of the target and the drone-s status via command link transmitter. The article studies all the suggested operation modes of information computation system. Developing highly effective fighter drones is one of the top priority tasks requiring for combined efforts of various experts.