Dave R "Something doesn't sound right on this. The magic of a cruise missile is its guidance system and its terrain-following ability. Without that, its just a radio controlled plane with a bomb on it.
OTOH, if he's got those things, he's a real tech stud. But there are no details about those things on his site."
rero360 "one would think all you need for guidence system is a gps system coupled with an altimeter and some sort of memory to store the flight path, also I think so long as you don't put an explosive payload in it then there shouldn't be any issue, I think it would be kind of fun to build a model aircraft capable of making a flight completely on its own from take off to landing."
A GPS is an altimeter. GPS is also, conveniently, good at storing paths. There you have it, instead of a radio-controlled bomb it's an autonomous craft flying at 200m +-20m, along a specified route or between waypoints. Might need a special command to lose altitude and crash, though.
As for the magic, aiui the expense you refer to is due to the very difficult problems they had to overcome to make cruise missiles. To make the Tomahawk autonomous it sees all the land in front of it, and compares it to a big database of what the land around looks like, and what it's route should look like. Then it has some logic about knowing where it is, or where it isn't, and getting where it wants to go from there. You could say it's over-engineered, once GPS was in place. Hell even the US military is switching to GPS guided bombs in a big way, because they can strap a very cheap kit onto any bomb and thus make it 'guided'.
