well thats new. israeli claims he aint care about iran nuke program xD
back to subject:
Gambit much i cant believe iran hacked it the way they claim, i dont see why just some malfunction would result to some soft landing in US's most hostile territory, i studied material for 7 years and am a composite expert.
drone body was made by absorbers and all absorbers i know which are elastomer-matrix ones, wont stand falling down from 50,000ft altitude. unless US has used ultrahigh tech ceramic based ones which is impossible now. at least till now no one claimed hes able to do that with Zn-Br ceramics composites and they cost a lot more than price of RQ170 (6 millions)
As you have studied materials, you know that a composite is merely a mixture of diverse elements, concrete and plywood are composites. So composites by definition are never absorbers. I doubt that the entire aircraft is constructed out of absorber. Composite? Yes, and this would be for weight reduction purposes. Radar absorbers are composites but they must be constructed to contain an electrical conductor such as ferrite particles in a structure that exploit that conductive property. The deeper and longer the conduction/electrical path inside this material, the less energy that can escape and/or reflected off the aircraft, contributing to its radar cross section (RCS).
Currently, if an aircraft is designed for low radar observability, it will be more because of shaping than of from absorber. The 'flying wing' design is already radar low observable. So RAM content will be minimal as in just enough to absorb the majority of the impinging signal, leaving a very small amount of initial specular reflection that will be absorbed by the atmosphere, the rest of the energy will be surface wave travel loss.
i got a theory,
iran jammed the UAV, made it lose contact with US base (perhaps the virus helped too? im no expert of electronics and avionics) and it landed at safest ground it could as a default programming. default program COULD be changed by virus, or some other way i am not aware of(?) considering the fact that it landed in kashmar, 400km inside iran territory
pity i cant post links :|
would appreciate
ALL answers
I do not discount the possibility of deliberate interference, but that does not mean I endorse its probability. I pointed this out already: That the drone's communication antennas are in the two 'bumps' topside of the aircraft. That mean the wings and fuselage will shield them from most -- if not all -- of any ground based transmissions design to interfere. The fact that it either landed or crashed so deep inside Iranian territory give us two possibilities:
- That this particular drone was compromised from the start of the day's mission by a human agent who gave it alternate mission data to take it so deep inside Iranian territory. In this case, there is less 'hacking' than it is of the more common espionage tradecraft involving some hardware.
- That this particular drone suffered a malfunction that confirm our speculation that in the event control is lost, the drone defaulted to a programmed flight behavior that would facilitate attempts at reconnection. We can wonder why would the US programmed in a preservation feature of landing instead of self destruct but that is for a different discussion.
When we talk about 'avionics' we are talking about systems that has
NOTHING to do with the mission of the day but of creating and maintaining flight such as how much to move the flight control surfaces to effect a turn or to compensate for turbulence to maintain straight heading or to avoid bad weather. But on
WHERE to fly, those instructions can be altered by a 'virus' if people want to hype it that way. Messing with the flight control codes make no logical sense and would probably prevent the aircraft from taking off, let alone change course to fit someone's needs. The instructions on where to fly, at what altitude and speed, and for how long is far easier to create and inserted into the day's mission data pack. On this, we return to the human agency.
