The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Down Range Cafe => Topic started by: AE3007H1 on December 14, 2011, 07:38:14 PM
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What an epic FAIL on our part! I cannot fathom this blunder. At the very least it should have been shot down ASAP! The ramifications of this are mind boggling. First of all yet again we have been lied to by this administration and our government (we were told that it was lost and probably crashed) now we find out it is IN-TACKED in IRAN. To think that they (with the help of China and or Russia) were able to:
1. Track our drone mind you our most secret yet to date and stealthy.
2. Scramble/Jam our signal.
3. Take control of it and LAND it safely.
4. Reverse engineer it.
5. Share the technology.
6. Rub it in our faces.
7. Probably determine our targets to possibly be struck within IRAN. ( and make no mistake I am sure that this drone was operating above IRAN and not Afghanistan.)
This is a COUPE of the highest caliber. Please let me hear your thoughts on this and if any of you have any experience with this type of stuff please "without incriminating your self" share with us just how they could have pulled this off and would it would have taken.
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The old Mission impossible series had a self-destruct feature....This makes two....One in Iran, one over Seychelles....where is the "go home" default...
Modern yacht engines, even with a lost cylinder, lack of oil pressure, helm control,...there is a redundancy go home, safe mode or have a fail safe, and at least have our spook stealth drones self destruct....
Now we get laughed at and have Russians and Chinese techs crawl all over it....
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Remember this photoshopped pic of their missile launch:
(http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/07/01/science/0709-lede-IRAN.jpg)
given that they have photoshopped stuff before (to make for better propaganda, no doubt), here is a still pic from the video they released about our supposed drone:
(http://img.allvoices.com/thumbs/image/609/480/88927780-tehran-iran.jpg)
what's with all the banners hanging off the leading edges of the wings?
my gut instinct is telling me that is a fake, a mock up made out of wood, foam, and cardboard. they couldn't figure out the placement or the structure of the landing gear and its doors, so the whole thing is sitting upon wooden sawhorses.
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oh...yeah...I wouldn't believe everything you read or hear on the news either. A major component of psy ops is the acronym SCAME:
source
content
audience
medium
effect
I bet 90% of Americans who watched the video of our supposed drone on display took it as the gospel truth, hook, line and sinker. 100% of the ragheads watching Al Jazeera thought, "A-HA! That Great White Satan isn't as smart as they think they are. We took out one of their sophisticated toys!"
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I would tend to think that we would not have let a stealth drone out of our control.
I'm no longer privy to TS clearance stuff but, I suspect that if this is in fact, one of ours, it might just be a "bait and switch" ploy to make the rag heads think they have something tangible.
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a Trojan horse?
how small are GPS units nowadays? smaller than a cell phone?
one of those could be tucked in anywhere under the skin of the drone.
let one of our satellites pick up the GPS signal, satellite transmits that data back to the CIA or NSA, then that gets forwarded to a Navy ship that has onboard cruise missiles. Cruise missile gets programmed with the drone's coordinates, just waiting for the right time to launch....KABOOM! no more hangar or base where that drone was at.
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Who knows?
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a Trojan horse?
how small are GPS units nowadays? smaller than a cell phone?
one of those could be tucked in anywhere under the skin of the drone.
let one of our satellites pick up the GPS signal, satellite transmits that data back to the CIA or NSA, then that gets forwarded to a Navy ship that has onboard cruise missiles. Cruise missile gets programmed with the drone's coordinates, just waiting for the right time to launch....KABOOM! no more hangar or base where that drone was at.
Supposedly the military wanted to either send a team in and take it back or bomb the crap out of it, but Valerie Jarrett - er, bho said no. So, bad news, if it is real, then bho just gave it away.
But then, that is his job, destroying this country any way he can.
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Saying that this is really lost:
To address the "self destruct" The self destruct would have only worked if we were in complete control of the link to the drone. If they did in-fact interrupt this connection and take it over we would have been unable to get that "self destruct" signal to the craft.
Addressing the banners and etc from the bottom: Maybe it did a gear down landing and they wanted to make it look as if there were no damage. "thus showing they had more control than they actually did"
I am liking the whole "trojan horse" idea. It seems very plausible.
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I think the "Trojan Horse" idea is wishful thinking.
I also don't think the Iranians accomplished any thing besides maybe staying out of it's way.
Ever had your computer crash ?
Ever had your cell phone drop an important call ?
That's newer technology than what's in this drone, and we expect it to never fail ?
My understanding is that it's "Failsafe" default is to make a normal landing.
Something some of you have overlooked, if we can't tell it to stay the hell out of Iran, we are not going to have any better success telling it to blow itself up.
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Indeed. All this hand wringing and dismay is arrogance. Nothing can happen to OUR technology! Really? Ever own a micro-soft product? ::)
Sh!t happens, stuff breaks, and things fall where they are. Its not a sign of a screw up or Iranian brilliance. Its a mechanical device failing. How many thousands of hours did that thing have on it? If you send something over hostile territory odds are good it will fail over hostile territory. Ask my good friend Mr. Murphy. My only suggestion, and its potentially a very expensive one, is to have an auto destruct that requires a "phone home" every x hours, and if it doesn't get it then "boom". That way even if our signals were being jamed it would still be destroyed. BUT, that phone home feature could be the only thing that was wrong with an otherwise good bird. You're screwed either way.
FQ13
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I've been using a Mac since May.
Before that, I had the same IBM PC Windows XP machine for like 7 years. It ran like a champ except for when it came time to edit movies in Windows Movie Maker. It would lock up every time.
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Who says that we didn't tell it TO be over IRAN? My thinking is that this drone was purposly flying over Iran to designate targets for a possible upcomming attack. It has been rumored that this particular drone was equipped with equipment/sensors for detecting trace amounts of radiation and chemicals. I have worked on the Global Hawk program and I assure you Your cell phone has nothing on "some" of the technology. I will say that some of the newer cell phones are pretty snappy now though! ;)
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The news is reporting that Obama asked them to give our drone back. As if they really would.
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The news is reporting that Obama asked them to give our drone back. As if they really would.
What else is he going to do? Besides, if they say no, at least whe can say "Well, we did ask nicely". ;)
FQ13
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So, bad news, if it is real, then bho just gave it away. But then, that is his job, destroying this country any way he can.
I think this is the most plausible explanation. Although in order for it to happen, it had to have military support from people very high up. That is scary.
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Sh!t happens, stuff breaks, and things fall where they are. Its not a sign of a screw up or Iranian brilliance. Its a mechanical device failing. How many thousands of hours did that thing have on it? FQ13
The thing is for that scenario to have happened, the thing would have simply crashed. Then yes, you can go with the whole "$h!t happens", reasoning. But for this you have to buy into that the Iranians have the technology to not only intercept this thing, but then to take over control with enough sophistication to actually navigate it and land it. That's hard to buy considering the long list of recent failures they've experienced with all of these explosions they've been blessed with.
If there was a failure on our part, why on Earth would we put coordinates to an Iranian airfield for it to make an unassisted emergency landing on it's own? That makes even less sense than the Iranians intercepting it.
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The thing is for that scenario to have happened, the thing would have simply crashed. Then yes, you can go with the whole "$h!t happens", reasoning. But for this you have to buy into that the Iranians have the technology to not only intercept this thing, but then to take over control with enough sophistication to actually navigate it and land it. That's hard to buy considering the long list of recent failures they've experienced with all of these explosions they've been blessed with.
If there was a failure on our part, why on Earth would we put coordinates to an Iranian airfield for it to make an unassisted emergency landing on it's own? That makes even less sense than the Iranians intercepting it.
As I posted before, my understanding is that the programmed "failsafe" default is a controlled landing, nearest airfield in its memory would be the obvious place to do that.
I suspect the input of lawyers over ruled the common sense of operators.
The people who actually work with it probably said "Lets rig it to blow itself to bits" and the lawyers screamed "But you can't do that ! A piece might hit a civilian !"
Completely overlooking the fact that if we gave a rats ass about those civilians we would not be considering bombing their sh!thole country.
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As I posted before, my understanding is that the programmed "failsafe" default is a controlled landing, nearest airfield in its memory would be the obvious place to do that.
I suspect the input of lawyers over ruled the common sense of operators.
The people who actually work with it probably said "Lets rig it to blow itself to bits" and the lawyers screamed "But you can't do that ! A piece might hit a civilian !"
Completely overlooking the fact that if we gave a rats ass about those civilians we would not be considering bombing their sh!thole country.
Basically correct.
Yes, RPAs typically go into an orbit for a pre-determined amount of time before determining a landing site if they can't get a control message. A self destruct would be a great idea but like Tom noted it could be over a populated area, not just an unfriendly one. Fire Scout was headed for DC last year. Sure a well placed impact would be nice, but there was a lot of population between here and there. They don't just fly over unfriendly territory. RPAs spend a great deal of time over the top of our own troops too, doing convoy route clearance and personnel recovery observation. Would really suck to find a lost aircrewman only to have him or her die when the drone watching his back crashes into them.
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Basically correct.
Yes, RPAs typically go into an orbit for a pre-determined amount of time before determining a landing site if they can't get a control message. A self destruct would be a great idea but like Tom noted it could be over a populated area, not just an unfriendly one. Fire Scout was headed for DC last year. Sure a well placed impact would be nice, but there was a lot of population between here and there. They don't just fly over unfriendly territory. RPAs spend a great deal of time over the top of our own troops too, doing convoy route clearance and personnel recovery observation. Would really suck to find a lost aircrewman only to have him or her die when the drone watching his back crashes into them.
I could be wrong, but my gut feeling is that if your luck is that bad you are pretty much SOL anyways.
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A "Self Destruct" is really unnecessary. All they have to do is nose it over into the ground. If it can accept a self destruct command, it can do that. NASA had a self destruct on all of the boosters because it would allow the bulk of the fuel to burn up before it ever made it to the ground. These things carry nothing compared to that.
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You have to remember Bill, NASA launched out over the relatively empty ocean, where as an RPV will probably be over some place much more populated, like the one JNevis mentioned over the Washington Metro area.
I say "add an on board nuke and blow it up real good" , but I'm not the one who would deal with the diplomatic incident or law suits.
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They don't need to send a command to self-destruct. They could employ a dead man's switch, basically a signal to NOT self destruct, absent the signal it destructs. In this case it goes into orbit until its out of fuel, finds the closest runway in its memory, lands verifys friendly/Foe locaiton and then sizzle-sizzle and POW anything any opposing force could use could be rendered useless with an incindiary device followed by a small explosive charge.
No airborne detonation and the resulting cascade of parts and pieces. Just a shell that can be displayed without any useable materials.
Not bad for a lowly machinist ;D
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I have my doubts about the Iranians being able to take control and landing the drone.
No doubt we don't use the RC transceivers you can buy at a local hobby shop in these drones.
Likely the signal is encrypted or contains embedded code structures that would change very often during the flight and the drone would be able to detect a counterfeit signal.
If Iran has the capability of cracking the encryption/code, we might have bigger problems than the loss of the drone.
Don't know if our boys do it this way, but I would and I hope the pros are thinking ahead of me at least.
And I don't know what the default action is should a phony signal be received. Tom's take might be correct in screwed up ROE world.
Instead of a Nuke hiding in there, it might roll out a wet bar for it's capctors.
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Yes, I agree. To think of the massive undertaking this had to have been to "capture" this drone. If so they would have had to been planning this which would indicate we have been flying these missions for some time now. Also, another biggie is they would have had to be able to TRACK our stealth technology. As you stated, there are many larger underlying problems that the capture of this drone indicates above and beyond the actual loss of the drone. If this is all true they had to have had help from either a defector, spy, or some inside type information of the communications/technical type.
One more thing. If this drone was on emergency auto pilot mode and had simply searched out its database for the closest runway to land on, don't you think that the Iranians would have fired on it once it landed? They might not have even known it was there "due to stealth" until it was on the ground. If this had happened like this you can bet your ass that they would have fired upon a US marked aircraft that just "landed" there.
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A "Self Destruct" is really unnecessary. All they have to do is nose it over into the ground. If it can accept a self destruct command, it can do that. NASA had a self destruct on all of the boosters because it would allow the bulk of the fuel to burn up before it ever made it to the ground. These things carry nothing compared to that.
NASA's self destruct commands are just that, active commands to the booster. Doesn't work if there isn't any contact with the control device, which is typically when RPAs do something stupid, like crash.
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a while back there was big stink about the video data from the Predators being sent down from the satellite to Nellis in an un-encrypted state.
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so I gotta wonder if the commands are sent from Nellis to the satellite are encrypted, and hopefully, again from the satellite to the drone encrypted, how does the drone get so buggy or lose a signal from a satellite that it starts accepting commands from Tehran?
:-\ :-\
Occam's razor and all that....
If you look at videos of the captured drone, it appears to be in some gymansium, not an aircraft hangar....not at some base.
so I think that goes to my theory that some engineering students at UT made the mockup.
UT = University of Tehran
I looked a little bit closer at the videos and I could swear it looks like there is a pile of dust on the floor that just so happens to be the same color as the drone's body....which leads me to believe it is made out of foam....that was rasp'ed, cut, and shaped to resemble the real thing.
way back when, I tried to spray paint foam once....the spray paint ate the foam....which again might explain why the captured drone is some color that does not match any of the real pictures of the real drone.
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AE3007hi wrote:
If this drone was on emergency auto pilot mode and had simply searched out its database for the closest runway to land on, don't you think that the Iranians would have fired on it once it landed?
If it had landed on its own, then the landing gear would still be intact, right?
And if they were, then why hide them behind banners taped to the leading edges of the wings?
my theory on that....triangles make geometry/trig easy, even from video or still pics captured from the video.
whichever contractor makes the drone knows exactly the placement of the wheels when they are on the ground, the size of the tires, the shape of the doors etc....even the tread pattern on the tires.
there haven't been enough pictures of the real drone published to the web that show some sort of scale or relationship of each landing gear to each other. hence the banners...it is sitting on top of some sawhorses.
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To further Tyler's comments: Remember that all of this is for domestic consumption. The average Iranian is more than a little nervous about getting the crap bombed out of them by us or Israel. The regime knows this. Showing that the suposedly invincible US technology isn't is good for morale. It doesn't matter if we buy it or not, its for the locals.
FQ13
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So...what am I missing here.
Obama asked for the drone back.
Cheney & Liberman both say Obama should have bombed/otherwise destroyed it.
News reports indicate a programming "flaw" involving GPS signals reception (as jammed) and programming to "protect the craft" by autolanding.
Seems possible that Iran may have gotten something we didn't want them (or the Chinese & Russians) to have.
Of course, the real story line here is that because Liberals & Obama say the world is safe we have nothing to worry about. You know, peace, love, joy and kumbaya all rolled into one....
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Worst case scenario Rastus, is that that the BGs (pick the culprit) DID figure out how to jam/spoof/override our controls. If that's the case they are idiots for demonstrating that capability while we stil have time to fix it. Given that conflict is looking more likely by the day, it seems to me that the smart play would have been to conceal that ability until the shooting started and then turn the lights out on our targeting capability. But then again, I'm not an Iranian.
FQ13
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Interesting combination of "facts" here.
Some support Tyler's theory that it is a mock up, some support Tom's that it landed after a malfunction and some seem to support that it maybe be a Trojan Horse as suggested.
Would be nice to give them a piece of gear that they would believe was leading edge....and have all their R&R affected by and directed toward technology we could detect and defeat. Even BHO asking for it back fits that pattern.
The only thing going against it is BHO's tendency to support the wrong side. Of course, maybe Iran will be getting word it is a Trojan Horse while we thing they swallowed the bait.
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Worst case scenario Rastus, is that that the BGs (pick the culprit) DID figure out how to jam/spoof/override our controls. If that's the case they are idiots for demonstrating that capability while we stil have time to fix it. Given that conflict is looking more likely by the day, it seems to me that the smart play would have been to conceal that ability until the shooting started and then turn the lights out on our targeting capability. But then again, I'm not an Iranian.
FQ13
Yeah :D :D :D It does seem to fit the "stereotype" that they would shout from the roof tops that they have stolen one of our Secret Decoder Rings and can not intercept all our secret messages.
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Would be nice to give them a piece of gear that they would believe was leading edge....and have all their R&R affected by and directed toward technology we could detect and defeat. Even BHO asking for it back fits that pattern.
There are some info out there that the RQ-170, although stealthy, isn't the upper end of the spectrum so to speak so the loss, although troubling, isn't exactly a "windfall of intelligence and technology" being played out in the press. Figure it this way, Jane's is probably the worlds greatest intelligence agency, but if they have it in "All the World's Aircraft" and Combat Aircraft magazine has pictures, it's old technology and probably already obsolete.
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The one thing that argues against Tyler's theory, that it is a fake, is that the Govt. admitted they lost one.
The rest of what he posted is to oriented toward the technical aspects of Photo interpretation for me to comment on .
There are some info out there that the RQ-170, although stealthy, isn't the upper end of the spectrum so to speak so the loss, although troubling, isn't exactly a "windfall of intelligence and technology" being played out in the press. Figure it this way, Jane's is probably the worlds greatest intelligence agency, but if they have it in "All the World's Aircraft" and Combat Aircraft magazine has pictures, it's old technology and probably already obsolete.
J has a point here, you do not see photo's of the pulse jet "Aurora" that replaced the SR 71 published in Popular Science, or Jane's do you ?
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I spent many a mid-watch browsing through the Janes books we had in our intel library! :)
I think this thing has CIA spunk all over it personally!
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I spent many a mid-watch browsing through the Janes books we had in our intel library! :)
I think this thing has CIA spunk all over it personally!
Who do you think originally pushed the drone program.
Comes to that, the CIA already had designs and prototypes for the U-2 before the Air Force got on board.
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The one thing that argues against Tyler's theory, that it is a fake, is that the Govt. admitted they lost one.
The rest of what he posted is to oriented toward the technical aspects of Photo interpretation for me to comment on .
Admitting you lost one, and losing one in good condition are two different things though. I'm still not 100% sold on it not being a fake. We admit to loosing a drone, but but that doesn't say what condition it was in when we lost it. It doesn't take more than a few days for a fairly smart guy to get rough dimensions and build a close mock-up, especially if you have some peices to size it off of. For all of their problems, Iran is full of "fairly smart guys." It says a lot that they have kept their F-4s and F-14s airborne AND re-equiped them with locally built, reverse engineered, US and Russian weapons systems.
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as far as Obama asking for the drone back, that could be done for a variety of reasons, but one that I can think of is to see how and if whatever available HUMINT resources available in Tehran jive up with whatever ELINT information we gather. basically a quality control measure of intell gathering.
Obviously, if it is a fake, they won't be loading it up on a trailer, and driving it to the border so it can be handed over.
and if we never really did lose one in the first place, we could get to see what assets the Iranians would use to go search for a drone that isn't there.
Say like a month from now, we could release pictures of a new drone entirely, call it the RQ-180 Stingray or whatever, and then in March say that we lost one just to see what or how Iran interacts with Russia, China, and North Korea.