Iran copies spy drone....but will it work?

[vazar_da_priest]

Iran has claimed to reverse engineer a spy drone, after capturing one of the US's, but....will it actually work?

http://news.yahoo.com/iran-says-buil...083944692.html <----- full article

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an American spy drone that went down in Iran last year including that it was used to spy on Osama bin Laden's house weeks before he was killed by U.S. forces. Iran also said it was building a copy of the surveillance aircraft.
This type of drone has been used in Afghanistan for years and was used to keep watch on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan but U.S. officials have said little about the history of the particular drone now in Iran's possession. Iran has also been known to exaggerate its military or technological prowess.

[slipn]

I really hope not.

[Tierbook]

looks like its made out of styrophome.... so it will fly just nothing else

[Rennadrel]

Odds are it winds up with an elastic band and is made out of balsa wood

[Reg]

It will go hang out at the bottom of the ocean with N.Korea's missiles.

[Hif]

I certainly hope not. The US will just use that as an excuse to invade a third country in 12 years.

[smelltheglove]

i'm less concerned about them making a drones than i am about them making a missile. hopefully there was no tech in that drone that could help them with that

[Deleted]

I love the "retrieving data" part.

These things are designed with redundancy programs to entirely burn the "data" should it ever go down. The only way they'd get anything off it is if a) it malfunctioned and no wipe occurred(I know one wipe won't do it, but several will(depending on the type of drive blah blah)) and b) they somehow crack the security systems in put in place by the largest military on the planet....

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

If there was anything more sensitive than remote controlled navigation controls and the photographs it was taking of Iran, my opinion of the competence of the CIA and the US military has dropped even more. If it works, it will be able to fly, and take pictures or stuff.

[conscript]

Grats to them on "reverse engineering" one of our drones that doesn't work. I don't think anyone in the world buys the story that they managed to take control of it and landed the drone. Spotting it initially is near impossible. Hacking the GPS is possible, but the drones are made to return to base if they lose satellite signal so there is no way in hell they managed to hack the encrypted signal, override all of its programming and land it. The thing malfunctioned and crashed. I will believe they reverse engineered it if by that they mean they made a wax mold of it and made a copy of it out of plastic, but if they honestly expect anyone to believe that they managed to copy the entire things circuitry, programming, etc. just from examining the drone just lol. There is almost no way in hell they have even managed to reverse engineer the PAINT on the outside of the drone that makes it invisible to radar let alone the entire thing including the cameras which are baffling high tech. It would be more comical if North Korea had this and made the claim that they reverse engineered it, especially the cameras, since they still apparently use 35mm cameras to film their giant parades of penis showing.

Tin foil hat: I still think this drone is absolutely a plant and is completely fucking with Iran from the inside. Hope they have it in a lead lined room and have made sure it is completely stripped of the ability to transmit data, because it wouldn't surprise me at all if this thing is transmitting video, audio, and location information of Iranian strongholds.

[Beavis]

A friend of mine who is knowledgeable in these sorts of things suggested that the Iranians probably scrambled its control signal and then used bogus GPS signals from airborne platforms to make it think it was over Afghanistan instead of Iran. So, I can believe they managed to trick the thing into landing. (Though I imagine that'll be a 1 time trick...)

The notion that they've been able to reverse engineer this thing when they barely have a domestic aircraft industry is pretty laughable, but who knows.

[slackjawsix]

the thing is that america as many more than Iran and not to mention they needed the downed one to to make one of its power... we are still ahead of them in drone technology

[Slanderize]

It is what it is. They might manage to reverse engineer it and manage to build a few of their own, but at the same time right after Iran had first downed this drone, American propaganda started up almost immediately, with news unveiling our new fleet of copter drones. The ones that can hover, and take off straight up into the air.
We're constantly developing new tech, so even if they do steal the current shit, it's outdated garbage.

Personally I'm much more excited about their nationalized internet, lmao. THAT is gonna be some awesome shit.

[Xeones]

Honestly if they did manage it and used it against us or an ally I dare say it would be grounds for a more direct intervention.

[vazar_da_priest]

Oh god where to even begin with this.

The drone, The RQ-10 Sentinel is a flying wing. Flying wings are notoriously unstable. They require sophisticated fly-by-wire computer control to keep them from nose diving. Even minor changes to the shape and angle of the flying wing can dramatically change how it moves through air. The Sentinel's direct predecessor, the Lockheed Martin Polecat (an internal proof of concept drone) has a shape that is identical except in size to the B-2 Spirit, whose software and limits are well known. They did that because the point of the Polecat wasn't to recreate the flying wing, but to make a stealthy drone. The Sentinel, which is a production drone, not a proof of concept, used a different shape more attenuated to the Pentagon's needs. The point is, as far as getting a flying wing off the ground, the drone won't help Iran and they won't be able to do it because whatever software they pull off its flight computer will be in the form of compiled code that cannot be reverse engineered, and thus not modified for a different shaped drone. And that software will only work in a drone that precisely matches the weight, performance specifications, hardware components of the RQ-10. So basically if they want to "make a copy of the Sentinel", its going to be with all new software because they won't have access to the components the flight computer expects to be there nor the source code of its handling program.

Secondly, the secret of stealth is not in its shaping. 25 years ago this was true, which is why the Air Force only let the F-117 and B-2 Spirit be photographed at certain angles. But that was 25 years ago. Today that certain angles reflect radar certain ways is extremely well known, so the actual design of Stealth Aircraft isn't a secret. In fact, The F-22 and F-35 are both far more stealthier than the one-top secret F-117, the former being 21st century aircraft the latter being an early 1980s aircraft, but maintain a more traditional fighter design because the physical layout of how to make an aircraft stealthy is a non-secret.

The secret of stealth is in the radar absorbent materials and skin. And there's the rub. It is technology that is extremely difficult to replicate. In Star Trek, when they come across a material they don't know the identity of, they use their tricorder, scan it and the tricorder tells them. In the real world, that involves scraping off bits of it, dissolving it, seeing what chemicals result in a solution, passing light through the mixture to see what lines are absorbed and then making educated guesses. It's laborious, intensive work that barely works. And how do we know this? Because during Operation Allied Force in 1999, an F-117 crashed and although the crash was subsequently destroyed by another F-117, the bits and pieces that weren't destroyed were picked up by the Serbians. Some of it still sits in their military museum, but a lot of it made it into Chinese hands. China has spend the better part of a decade trying to reverse engineer the Early 1980s technology of the F-117. Their result is the J-20, which in aircraft circles (a hobby of mine) is something of a joke. It's the forward fuselage of an F-22 rammed and F-35 copied inlets on the body of a MiG 1.44. It's has "stealthy styling, but then goes and has canard foreplanes, a complicated aft fuselage, tailbooms, fins/strakes, none of which are stealth-compatible. And as for Radar Absorbent materials, there is no evidence China has been able to manufacture their own equivalent of what the US used in the F-117 in 1984, never mind what it uses on the B-2, F-22 and F-35 in 2012.

And lets keep in mind, the F-117 was retired in 2007 because advances in Radar resolution compromised its stealth advantage (basically it outlived its usefulness), and its limited carrying capacity made it pointless to pay for keeping around when the more stealthy, faster, more numerous, more advanced F-22 and F-35 were entering service.

So why is that relevant to Iran? Because if China, which had first hand access to F-117 components and a decade to work on the problem, isn't even close to replicating what the United States used from 1984 to 2007. And the J-20 isn't some minor program... it's China going all-in with their fighter of the future, and it's hardly sufficient. Instead they built this weirdly compromised wants-to-do-everything-but-is-nothing fighter that is the biggest thing in the sky. I mean it has canard foreplanes to be supremely maneuverable, but its also 20-30% bigger than an F-22. It makes no sense. It looks like it was designed by committee and people who in trying to reverse engineer our technology, attained no mastery of it themselves and are left to just replicate the work of others. If China can go this hard into ripping off our technology, and blow it so completely, what are the odds that bankrupt Iran with an even less developed aircraft industry and lacking the expertise to even keep their vintage F-14A's left over frm the time of the Shah flying, will have the expertise to produce anything meaningful from the drone? Near zero.

And furthermore, lets say they make a drone, just for arguments sake... without a constellation of satellites to use to control the thing in real time, the range on your control is tens of miles, making it worthless. Nearly all US drones on the other hand, are flown from either US Central Command in Tampa, or an Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, on the other side of the planet from the wars they fight in.

---------- Post added 2012-04-23 at 03:40 AM ----------



Nationalized Internet = CIA just needs one spy to gain access to one computer connected to their internet to unleash the kind of worm that would be too dangerous to unleash in the global internet. Stuxnet on steroids. If it's a closed loop network with no bridge to the wider internet, incredibly destructive viruses could be released with little risk they spread outside of the Iranian domain.

It's so foolish on their part. It's like they want to make the CIA's job easier.

lol thank you.

that was actually incredibly insightful, and humorous at time

[Reg]

I hope it was a secret ploy by the US to send a drone into Iran and crash it on purpose, and when it gets reversed engineered, it goes all Transformer on Iran and blows them up!

[mistuhbull]

What you said:

Oh god where to even begin with this.

The drone, The RQ-170 Sentinel is a flying wing. Flying wings are notoriously unstable. They require sophisticated fly-by-wire computer control to keep them from nose diving. Even minor changes to the shape and angle of the flying wing can dramatically change how it moves through air. The Sentinel's direct predecessor, the Lockheed Martin Polecat (an internal proof of concept drone) has a shape that is identical except in size to the B-2 Spirit, whose software and limits are well known. They did that because the point of the Polecat wasn't to recreate the flying wing, but to make a stealthy drone. The Sentinel, which is a production drone, not a proof of concept, used a different shape more attenuated to the Pentagon's needs. The point is, as far as getting a flying wing off the ground, the drone won't help Iran and they won't be able to do it because whatever software they pull off its flight computer will be in the form of compiled code that cannot be reverse engineered, and thus not modified for a different shaped drone. And that software will only work in a drone that precisely matches the weight, performance specifications, hardware components of the RQ-170. So basically if they want to "make a copy of the Sentinel", its going to be with all new software because they won't have access to the components the flight computer expects to be there nor the source code of its handling program.

Secondly, the secret of stealth is not in its shaping. 25 years ago this was true, which is why the Air Force only let the F-117 and B-2 Spirit be photographed at certain angles. But that was 25 years ago. Today that certain angles reflect radar certain ways is extremely well known, so the actual design of Stealth Aircraft isn't a secret. In fact, The F-22 and F-35 are both far more stealthier than the one-top secret F-117, the former being 21st century aircraft the latter being an early 1980s aircraft, but maintain a more traditional fighter design because the physical layout of how to make an aircraft stealthy is a non-secret.

The secret of stealth is in the radar absorbent materials and skin. And there's the rub. It is technology that is extremely difficult to replicate. In Star Trek, when they come across a material they don't know the identity of, they use their tricorder, scan it and the tricorder tells them. In the real world, that involves scraping off bits of it, dissolving it, seeing what chemicals result in a solution, passing light through the mixture to see what lines are absorbed and then making educated guesses. It's laborious, intensive work that barely works. And how do we know this? Because during Operation Allied Force in 1999, an F-117 crashed and although the crash was subsequently destroyed by another F-117, the bits and pieces that weren't destroyed were picked up by the Serbians. Some of it still sits in their military museum, but a lot of it made it into Chinese hands. China has spend the better part of a decade trying to reverse engineer the Early 1980s technology of the F-117. Their result is the J-20, which in aircraft circles (a hobby of mine) is something of a joke. It's the forward fuselage of an F-22 rammed and F-35 copied inlets on the body of a MiG 1.44. It's has "stealthy styling, but then goes and has canard foreplanes, a complicated aft fuselage, tailbooms, fins/strakes, none of which are stealth-compatible. And as for Radar Absorbent materials, there is no evidence China has been able to manufacture their own equivalent of what the US used in the F-117 in 1984, never mind what it uses on the B-2, F-22 and F-35 in 2012.

And lets keep in mind, the F-117 was retired in 2007 because advances in Radar resolution compromised its stealth advantage (basically it outlived its usefulness), and its limited carrying capacity made it pointless to pay for keeping around when the more stealthy, faster, more numerous, more advanced F-22 and F-35 were entering service.

So why is that relevant to Iran? Because if China, which had first hand access to F-117 components and a decade to work on the problem, isn't even close to replicating what the United States used from 1984 to 2007. And the J-20 isn't some minor program... it's China going all-in with their fighter of the future, and it's hardly sufficient. Instead they built this weirdly compromised wants-to-do-everything-but-is-nothing fighter that is the biggest thing in the sky. I mean it has canard foreplanes to be supremely maneuverable, but its also 20-30% bigger than an F-22. It makes no sense. It looks like it was designed by committee and people who in trying to reverse engineer our technology, attained no mastery of it themselves and are left to just replicate the work of others. If China can go this hard into ripping off our technology, and blow it so completely, what are the odds that bankrupt Iran with an even less developed aircraft industry and lacking the expertise to even keep their vintage F-14A's left over frm the time of the Shah flying, will have the expertise to produce anything meaningful from the drone? Near zero.

And furthermore, lets say they make a drone, just for arguments sake... without a constellation of satellites to use to control the thing in real time, the range on your control is tens of miles, making it worthless. Nearly all US drones on the other hand, are flown from either US Central Command in Tampa, or an Air Force Base outside of Las Vegas, on the other side of the planet from the wars they fight in.

---------- Post added 2012-04-23 at 03:40 AM ----------



Nationalized Internet = CIA just needs one spy to gain access to one computer connected to their internet to unleash the kind of worm that would be too dangerous to unleash in the global internet. Stuxnet on steroids. If it's a closed loop network with no bridge to the wider internet, incredibly destructive viruses could be released with little risk they spread outside of the Iranian domain.

It's so foolish on their part. It's like they want to make the CIA's job easier.

What my brain registered: God DAMN the US is badass with its military. Come at us bros

[Easo]

Reverse engineered so fast? Nope...
Also photos showed it had landed on its belly.
Planes can crash almost without damage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornfield_Bomber
My IMHO is that they disrupted command signal ("thanks" Russia), and drone crash-landed. They definetely didnt take over it.

[Deleo]

1- The drone is programmed to fly back to a certain destination if the controlling signal is cut off. So they not only disrupted the signal they also faked it.
2- The drone was at over 50000 feet when US lost control. Crash landing from that height will result in a completely destroyed plane.
3- US did try to send a group into Iran's borders (it was on yahoo few months ago) but Iranians got the drone before they even started the operation which suggests they knew where it was going to *crash*


All that said, I don't think Iran was alone in this. Russia and/or China must have a hand and I don't think they can clone the drone this early. Maybe without the stealth system but the material used is quite hard to figure out. Also when it comes to computers and hacking Iranians are surprisingly good (google knows this).

[Annu]

The point is, as far as getting a flying wing off the ground, the drone won't help Iran and they won't be able to do it because whatever software they pull off its flight computer will be in the form of compiled code that cannot be reverse engineered, and thus not modified for a different shaped drone.

Actually it is possible to read out the flash and disassembly the code, might sound hard but a lot of chip tuning for modern motors is based on that. However, modern control algorithms are very sensitive to changes of the controlled systems, so just having their coefficients won't help you. Furthermore, these algorithms are well known, but still hard to master. That's why they are used rarely even in motor management systems, just your ESP is usually using them (typically in an adaptive implementation).

Also the techniques for fly by wire are all published, but it takes ages to build up a reliable system based on that knowledge.

If something is really sensitive in the electronics, I'm sure it's implemented in an ASIC. Well, reverse engineering an ASIC is really tough and if they were able to do that they would already have enough technology to build their own drones.

I'm sure in the end they will present some modified/painted styrofoam drone ordered from amazon that is able to fly in circles above some politicians, to claim they have "All the technology reverse engineered from the US Military".