US Stealth UAV RQ-170 downed in IRAN

[500]

it was all bs because the americans didn't admit to it like they did this time? Do you know how retarded you sound?

Previously Iran made claims, US denied and Iran was unable to provide any prof for their claims. So I conclude it was a lie.

Now Iran made a claim and US admitted loss of UAV.

No they did not. Whenever they said they have the drones, US officials fell silent and never spoke about it. As per Iranians Russians have seen the drones too. As for denial, as I said go in the beginning of this thread. All these steps are as they happened:

US response timeline after Iranians announced they have RQ-170 in their possession:

1- We have not lost any drone
2- A drone is missing and we are looking for its status
3- Drone was flying in Afghanistan and we lost contact with it last week
4- Drone was not downed by Iranians
5- Drone is in Iran but it is useless since it is in small pieces
6- Drone is in Iran and is intact
7- Drone got lost and its smart autopilot landed it safely in Iran
8-

I asked to provide a source for ur claims, instead u just repost ur lies.

Israel should be wary now...Iran got nukes and now they got the best UAV.

You are very funny boy. Iran has 80 intact F-14s for over 30 years but still is unable to produce something even distantly similar to it.

 

[gambit]

You previously claimed that wing design are well understood by other countries and it's no biggie. News reports are claiming that RQ-170 is 90% made of composite materials to avoid deflection of radar waves.So that is another valuable piece of Knowledge falling into their lapse.

Composites are not for radar low observability but more for weight. Plywood is a composite. Concrete is a composite. So you need to get rid of this popular misconception that the existence of the word 'composite' equal to 'stealth'. If the RQ-170 is 'stealthy', it has more to do with its shape than with any ABSORBER material it may have. The more correct word is 'absorber' or the initials RAM -- Radar Absorbing Material.

Agreed there is always something to replace it but based on the knowledge of it's predecessor.

So what? Here are the benefits for Iran: Accelerated development of UAV technology.

 

[longbrained]

The question should be: 'How stupid can YOU be?' I do not like to call anyone stupid but in your case, it is quite appropriate.

What an utter lack of critical thinking skill...!!!

In robotics, like the FOUP handlers or wafer transfer arms that I work with, if there is something 'wrong' with the way they move, a 'safe' or 'default' position is always available for the controller to put the device into the 'stowed' position. Anyone who ever work with robotic devices know this.

So for a flying robot, or drone, what kind of 'safe' or 'default' position can we give the thing? An autopilot, may be?

Gee whizzz...Airliners have autopilot that can practically land the aircrafts themselves. But such a thing is impossible for a drone?

So if controllers lose contact and control of the drone, is it possible that the autopilot would kick in? After all, an autopilot is how it took off in the first place.

So is it 'stupid' to program it to land if it know it had contact with its handlers? No, it is a smart thing to do so. The autoland feature would be something that Iran could use, considering the best thing the Iranians have done so far in aviation is modify a bunch of F-5s and call it 'good'.

First of all it is you who is stupid. You know nothing about technology and are just concocting stories here. Drones do not go to a default stowed position. They have RTB commands in their programmed autopilot so that in case of loss of communication the drone will go back to its launching base or an alternate base and lands there. It would be stupid to say that a super secret drone flying into hostile territory is programmed to land safely in hostile territory if it loses communication. See now how stupid you are? I guess I have to start a thread here in order to teach you one or two things about technology and how engineering systems work. Do you even have a high school diploma?

 

[longbrained]

I asked to provide a source for ur claims, instead u just repost ur lies.

And I told you to go to the initial pages of this thread. And I am sure you do not have any argument about the rest of the timeline which I am going to post here to show that you are lying here:

Timeline of US responses to Iranian claim of having RQ-170:

1- We have not lost any drone
2- A drone is missing and we are looking for its status
3- Drone was flying in Afghanistan and we lost contact with it last week
4- Drone was not downed by Iranians
5- Drone is in Iran but it is useless since it is in small pieces
6- Drone is in Iran and is intact
7- Drone got lost and its smart autopilot landed it safely in Iran
8-

 

[Abii]

Previously Iran made claims, US denied and Iran was unable to provide any prof for their claims. So I conclude it was a lie.

evidence? you mean show pics?
Iran would be stupid to do smtg so idiotic. The Americans would know exactly how much we have.
Anyway, in the past they denied it, therefore Iranian claims were a lie. Nice logic bro.

You are very funny boy. Iran has 80 intact F-14s for over 30 years but still is unable to produce something even distantly similar to it.

let's see what we were up to in that 30 years
in that 30 years we spent a decade fighting the rest of the planet and keeping our borders secure under embargoes and sanctions.
we spent a decade rebuilding our country and bring it out of destruction.
Everything we've done, we've done in the past ten years, and still our military budget is smaller than our health and education budget. You want us to churn out F-14's in a decade, when we didn't have any aircraft industry before, when our military budget is tiny, and when all our resources are going to missiles and navy??

Iran is starting to have an aircraft industry. We're now making civilian jets under license, and starting to copy early American designs. Our problem is in the engine department and we won't have a proper jet engine in the next 7 years at least. As our economy gets bigger and our focus shifts, we will start copying more advanced designs. Meanwhile you can't even deal with our stupid missiles.

 

[lt.fridz]

I dont really know much about the Iranian military and their computer hacking abilities. There has not been much note of that in the media but I guess it is possible that they have developed the capability to hack into the control mechanism. I would suspect that ground to air comms to the drones are encrypted with state of the art encryption and find it unlikely that there is a weakness in the control link to the drone. Surely the command link to the drone is designed to be extremely secure and tested again and again and again. Having the enemy able to take over your assets is surely something that the designers of the system want to avoid at all cost. If the encryption is done properly, this will simply be impossible to do (unless a major mathematical breakthrough has been made and P=NP ) It is almost inconcie

However the news of a computer virus at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where the US military pilots the drones from was very surprising (I can't post links, too few posts, but you can google "U.S. Drones Have a Computer Virus" for some info). According to published stories the command center had a lot of virus infection at that base. This is really incredible because one would think the US military had more information security. One quote from the wired website is chilling: "We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.” I just hope the nuclear missle stuff is more secure than this!

One poster here briefly described the drone functionality as having an instruction set downloaded to them. These instructions are used in some scenarios, possibly when data link is out or when some other scenarios arise.

Let me put forward one hypothesis that I find plausible. An organization managed to infect some computers on the base at Creech Air Force base. The computers are either on the same network or have access to computers on the control network responsible for downloading instruction set data to the drones. This organization put together a new instruction set for the most valuable drone. It might have been something like: "When near the Iranian border, stop listening to the control link, fly over to a specific location in Iran and land there".

I think that if the base computer system can be infected by rootkits from a capable organization, then anything is possible. This would not need breaking some "unbreakable" encryption, but just a lot of custom made malware code. And stranger things have happened in the computer hacking world.

The organization involved might be the Iranian military, as I say I have no knowledge of their capabilities. And the key ingredient in a successful hacking operation is essentially just smart people, we all have abundance of them. I am however inclined to believe that the Chinese are a more likely candidate. There have been reports that China has probably the most advanced, government runned, cyber-warfare units. And they have been suspected of infilterating any computer system that they so desire. If they had infilterated Creech Air Force Base computers and discovered that they could upload new instruction sets to the drones, what would their next step be? I wonder how the Iranian military might respond to a proposal by China to jointly capture the "crown jewels" of the US military. My guess is that the drone is probably somewhere in China now.

I am not at all belittleing the achivement of downing the drone, a malware operation as described above would be no little achievement. I just find it more plausible than the theory that control of the drone was wrestled from the operators using probably the worlds best encryption. The weak points are probably in the backend. And there have been numerous reports of suspected chinese malware in the most sensitive systems of the US military and private sector.

 

[longbrained]

You are very funny boy. Iran has 80 intact F-14s for over 30 years but still is unable to produce something even distantly similar to it.

It is because Iran's military budget goes somewhere else rather making F-14's. Listen to this Israeli scientist who has developed Israel's failed Arrow missile talking about the same issue here:

 

[unicorn]

Composites are not for radar low observability but more for weight. Plywood is a composite. Concrete is a composite. So you need to get rid of this popular misconception that the existence of the word 'composite' equal to 'stealth'. If the RQ-170 is 'stealthy', it has more to do with its shape than with any ABSORBER material it may have. The more correct word is 'absorber' or the initials RAM -- Radar Absorbing Material.

More to do with my vocabulary Sir.Thanks

So what? Here are the benefits for Iran: Accelerated development of UAV technology

I know it is a big thing for you to say .

 

[gambit]

First of all it is you who is stupid. You know nothing about technology and are just concocting stories here. Drones do not go to a default stowed position.

The word 'stupid' continues to apply to you, kid. For a robotic arm, the 'stowed' position is a 'safe' condition. For an aviation robot, or drone, the commands to maintain attitude, heading, and speed are the EQUIVALENT of the 'stowed' position. Freakin' amazing can be added to the word 'stupid' here.

They have RTB commands in their programmed autopilot so that in case of loss of communication the drone will go back to its launching base or an alternate base and lands there. It would be stupid to say that a super secret drone flying into hostile territory is programmed to land safely in hostile territory if it loses communication. See now how stupid you are? I guess I have to start a thread here in order to teach you one or two things about technology and how engineering systems work. Do you even have a high school diploma?

The 'Return To Base' programming can be interpreted as to land at the nearest possible location. But this is a different issue. In order to know where is the 'base' the drone must have coordinated system knowledge as in 'from' and 'to' and assisted by external correlative devices, such as GPS satellites or even astronav. But again, this is a different issue than what SHOULD BE a 'safe' condition for a flying robot in the event it lost contact with its handlers. You can criticize US for being shortsighted to program it to land anywhere instead of 'base', but it is still a different issue than 'hacking' or shooting it down.

Damn funny...For a group that consistently delight in calling Americans 'stupid' and 'ignorant', while using an American invention at that, members of this group can be awfully dense.

 

[Pfpilot]

I don't know why this is considered such a big deal. I think what is more amazing is the lack of losses the Americans have suffered in their extensive use of Drones. The Iranians may be able to gain technical know how, but I find that unlikely...to gain something from an aircraft so advanced, the local industry must also be on a similar plain.
The Iranians had access to f-14s and accomplished very little in the form of moving it's development forward...the reason was the aircraft being far too advanced for the Iranian industry. They may have been able to manufacture spares locally, but the electronics, the engine, and the weaponry were still foreign. The same must apply to this drone. The Iranians haven't been too successful in manufacturing capable drones in the past; this may provide a better direction to go into, but won't exactly pull Iranian UAV development to the forefront of technological development.

 

[Obambam]

And much more technically plausible, too.

Great feature and very generous I must say

 

[gambit]

I dont really know much about the Iranian military and their computer hacking abilities. There has not been much note of that in the media but I guess it is possible that they have developed the capability to hack into the control mechanism. I would suspect that ground to air comms to the drones are encrypted with state of the art encryption and find it unlikely that there is a weakness in the control link to the drone. Surely the command link to the drone is designed to be extremely secure and tested again and again and again. Having the enemy able to take over your assets is surely something that the designers of the system want to avoid at all cost. If the encryption is done properly, this will simply be impossible to do (unless a major mathematical breakthrough has been made and P=NP ) It is almost inconcie

However the news of a computer virus at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, where the US military pilots the drones from was very surprising (I can't post links, too few posts, but you can google "U.S. Drones Have a Computer Virus" for some info). According to published stories the command center had a lot of virus infection at that base. This is really incredible because one would think the US military had more information security. One quote from the wired website is chilling: "We keep wiping it off, and it keeps coming back,” says a source familiar with the network infection, one of three that told Danger Room about the virus. “We think it’s benign. But we just don’t know.” I just hope the nuclear missle stuff is more secure than this!

That subject has been discussed and equally speculative until more details came out. What most likely happened was the 'virus' was a common Windows based 'script kiddie' crap that infested the Internet designed to contact a certain location IF an Internet network access is available. Some unthinking USAF or civilian contractor infected his box with it and because the 'virus' was designed to replicate itself to other PCs if they are connected, the result was that many PCs in this network became infected. The problem was bad enough that the local techs could not eliminate them all en masse so they had to call in the 'big guns', so to speak. We know about these types of replicating malware and the drones themselves were never at risk.

 

[500]

evidence? you mean show pics?
Iran would be stupid to do smtg so idiotic. The Americans would know exactly how much we have.
Anyway, in the past they denied it, therefore Iranian claims were a lie. Nice logic bro.

Then why US admitted the loss of UAV this time?

let's see what we were up to in that 30 years
in that 30 years we spent a decade fighting the rest of the planet and keeping our borders secure under embargoes and sanctions.

Spare me of that nonsense. You were fighting just another retarded country which is 3 times smaller than you. Sanctions Iran got only couple years ago. Still they are very mild.

It is because Iran's military budget goes somewhere else rather making F-14's. Listen to this Israeli scientist who has developed Israel's failed Arrow missile talking about the same issue here:

After 30 years and tens of billions of petrodollars invested, Iran managed to copy old North Korean missiles. Good for them.

 

[gambit]

Great feature and very generous I must say

Sure much more than what China has done. Another thing China can thank US for. And 'yer welcome' ahead of time.

 

[lt.fridz]

That subject has been discussed and equally speculative until more details came out. What most likely happened was the 'virus' was a common Windows based 'script kiddie' crap that infested the Internet designed to contact a certain location IF an Internet network access is available. Some unthinking USAF or civilian contractor infected his box with it and because the 'virus' was designed to replicate itself to other PCs if they are connected, the result was that many PCs in this network became infected. The problem was bad enough that the local techs could not eliminate them all en masse so they had to call in the 'big guns', so to speak. We know about these types of replicating malware and the drones themselves were never at risk.

Well, all I am saying is that if the information security is such that it would allow what you call "common Windows based 'script kiddie' crap" then I suspect it would be wide open to a detirmined, well funded, capable adversary.