A “zero-sum game” is a game in which the gain or loss experienced by one participant is balanced by the gains or losses of the other participants. If all gains are added up and all losses are subtracted, the result is always zero. Typical examples are: chess, poker, bingo, lotteries, basketball, football and, in general, all confrontations where one player takes what the other players lose or where one party is required to lose in order for the other to win.
When a UAS is designed, it must be fully focused on a specific type of mission in order to ensure the viability of the missions it performs.
Similarly, we can consider zero-sum systems to be those environments in which the same principles of zero-sum games are present, i.e., those environments that require all gains that are entered in one part of the system to be automatically translated into losses in another part of the system..
By definition, UAS/RPAS/drones are perfect examples of zero-sum systems.. In other words, any improvement attempted in a closed aviation system means that it will generate a negative or undesirable counterpart in some other part of the system.
The reason why A UAS is automatically a zero-sum system because it is critically immersed in the influence of the permanent earth pull. This is critical because in order to operate immersed in gravity it must constantly overcome, or at least neutralise, gravity. The moment it ceases to do so, the system collapses and is inevitably dragged down by gravity, until its structure and the planet's surface more or less violently coincide at the same point.
To illustrate this, let us look at some examples:
To improve an airborne platform by making it more capable of carrying more payload, it is common to increase its wing area or increase the power of its engines. Both of these changes have adverse consequences in return. Increasing the wing area has several negative side effects such as increased weight (due to the increased structure) and increased drag (due to the increased area). On the other hand, the increase in engine power means an increase in fuel consumption and, therefore, more weight in fuel or batteries at take-off or, instead, accepting a reduction in flight time.
If you want to improve the aircraft by making it faster, you have to increase the power of its engines (with the same negative effects as above). In the case of fixed-wing aircraft, the thickness of the airfoil can also be reduced to reduce drag, but this increases the stall speed, and therefore also the landing and take-off speed. This makes the manoeuvre more complicated and its flight envelope more critical, etc.
This zero-sum situation in UAS, in which everything that is improved on the one hand is made worse on the other, has a direct consequence: When a UAS is designed, it must be fully focused on a specific type of mission.. If this is not done, we will end up with a system with so many negative effects that its viability to carry out the mission will be severely compromised. The more concrete and closed the design, the better the mission will be accomplished.
In the end, we can conclude that all UAS must be designed with a specific task in mind. (assuming the limitations imposed by the resources and technologies available at the time).
In general, there is no such thing as a UAS that is good at multi-tasking. Either it is very good at doing one specific task (because it was specifically designed for that task) or it is mediocre at multi-tasking.
In cases where people talk about a “multipurpose” aerial platform or where they mention that an aircraft is “versatile”, they are really making use of a commercial or communication resource. A “versatile” system is nothing more than a compromise between the technical and the economical part of a UAS, which means saving on the design of a single system for mediocre performance in several applications for which it is not designed. However, this “versatility” is acceptable in those cases where the trade-off of cost savings in procurement compensates for mediocre performance in several different types of missions. This acceptance is particularly true the higher the overall cost of the system. In other words, the more expensive the system, the more it pays to have a non-mission-specific design, in exchange for the possibility of being used in a wider variety of missions. This aspect is demonstrated concretely in designs, not only of UAS, but also of high-cost commercial and military manned aircraft in which there is a desperate attempt to ensure that all programmes have a wide range of users, even if this means that they perform mediocrely in some of the missions for which they are intended. Obviously, and by extrapolation, it also applies that The lower the relative cost of the UAS, the more important it is that it is designed specifically for a particular mission.. For example, a small UAS designed for agriculture is likely to perform poorly in other jobs such as surveillance, and it is worth the cost to have a dedicated aircraft for each type of mission.
As the cost of a UAS, as a general rule, is fairly directly related to the size or weight of its aerial platform, we can also conclude that The smaller a UAS is, the more specific and focused its design must be, because the economic cost of designing it for a specific type of mission is less important than its performance in that mission.
Notes:
UAS: Unmanned Aerial System
RPA: Remotely Piloted Aircraft
RPAS: Remotely Piloted Aerial System
