A UAV crash lands near Toronto in the 1980s, they'd think it was a damned UFO until they saw "Made in the USA" stamped on the side and smack their heads going, "Well, THERE'S your problem!"

The plot thickens.

Any coincidence that the Chinese just announced plans to station navel forces in Seychelles? You can draw your own conclusions, but to me this seems like SR playing out in real life.

Somewhat, just more on the governmental side of things. Instead of the the lowest people on the totem pole getting away with shady tactics, it's the higher-ups who do. Either way, it is hilarious that our MQ-9 crashed at an airport.

China is also testing it's first carrier. Though in reality, it is just an old Russian carrier that they are upgrading. In response Taiwan has been developing(buying?) cruise missiles capable of sinking carriers. I wonder how that will play out?

Carriers: Mobile Bomb Magnets, right?

CSM has a story about how Iran did it that makes some sense, if you assume that the zoomies are as arrogant as they often are. The whole "Those arabs are too stupid to figure out that our video is not encrypted and intercept it" issue from some time ago supports that PoV.

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East...ranian-engineer

*Headdesk* Please, please tell me that's just a joke between the branches...

heh, the first thing a enemy does is figure out how to handle your superior weapons.

I can guarantee they had the capability to subvert the GPS. I've seen it done on a test range at least once, though it was with a ground vehicle. Also fun to make things look like they aren't where they should be.

They are gonna have to get faster at it if they plan on catching the ArcLight.


If that proves inadequate, we are still looking at developing our own Thor satellites, which kind of makes the whole thing moot. We just have to make sure we can put some sort of anti-missile counter measures.

What this suggests, is that the drone only uses the civilian part of the GPS signal. If it was using the military part, the very existence of the encryption should be enough for it to separate the real from the fake.

You are assuming that the military GPS is encrypted. The information and technology to access it is not public domain, but that is a great deal different from actual encryption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals

There is some talk about how the P-code (Pseudo Random Noise or PRN) is modulated by a W-code that acts as some kind of encryption to generate the Y-code that is actually transmitted these days. This is apparently done exactly to avoid spoofing attacks like what is speculated as used.

Isn't the military on M-Code now, rather than P-Code? I'm not saying the M-code isn't similarly modulated, but evidence of one wouldn't be evidence of the other. Personally, I would have thought the M-Code would get encrypted, too, into, whatever, M(Y), but M-Code has some significant differences from P-Code, so I wouldn't want to assume. This should get harder in a couple of years, when they're using the spot beams, as spoofing would then require a massively more powerful antenna, and presumably one we'd notice elsewhere.

I'm personally not sold on the idea that the Iranians stole the drone with GPS spoofing; it's certainly not impossible, but I wouldn't have anticipated they could do it, and the only evidence we have at this point, as far as I'm aware, is the report of a single Iranian engineer.

There is mention of the M-code in relation to the modernization efforts, but i see no indication that there has been a switchover. Then again, the P(Y) is still present on the modernized system. I guess it depends on the age of the system in use.

It's also mentioned that the W-code is slower than the P-code, and that some groups/companies/etc. have been able to partially access it. It still seems plausible to me that someone could have spoofed the GPS signal. They did say that they had to land it at a location of approximately the same altitude as it's planned landing location. Also, I wouldn't want to assume that they are lying and end up losing even more equipment when proven wrong.

That, and I am pretty sure that drone would have been mangled much worse if it actually crashed. I don't think that fuselage/airfoil design is meant for non-powered glides.

Yeah, kind of hard to "Feel" the craft through a dead stick landing when you're not even near the damned thing.

With recent FBW controls, even being in the damn thing may not be of much use...

That French airline that crashed in the atlantic, seems to have done so because the inexperienced pilot jammed the control into a climb until the last moment.

Yeah, essentially nobody paid attention the warning system speaker shouting "Stall!". Seventy five times. They wandered off into some sort of mental fantasyland where the plane wasn't moving at an air speed of 30 knots with a sink rate of 7000 feet per minute, rudely interrupted by their impacting the Atlantic Ocean.

Probably turned the speaker off in order to not disturb their coffee break.

...

Damn is my cynicism showing. Sorry folks, it's the season.

Right, that would be the last thing to assume in an international espionage case...


You know how the Horten brothers started out with their flying wings? They built gliders

Also, we have no idea if the thing shown on TV is legit...if I was the Iranian head honcho, I'd show a bad mock-up no matter what was actually recovered to leave the Yankees in the dark about what we have.

Aviation Leak is saying that the Iranian story smells. Mostly because apparently the drone was on the ground for days before anyone found it, which doesn't exactly fit with the idea that it was lured to a planned landing.

Tale of RQ-170 Hijack In Doubt as Told in Tehran