iyaayas01 posted:

Northrop got royally pissed and sued McD...eventually they reached a settlement where McD would pay $50 million to Northrop and gain sole rights to the design (and any subsequent foreign sales), with no admission of wrongdoing.

quote:

COWLEY COUNTY, KANSAS -

Residents in Cowley County, Kansas are still talking about a mystery craft, seen being towed down US 77 Monday.

Sitting inside Lindly's Appliance Store, Kammi Root is used to seeing large machinery towed down US 77. But what she saw Monday afternoon is something she won't soon forget.

"There was this funny sphere that went through on this big trailer and my first thought was, 'That looks like a UFO,'" said Root.

A huge 32 foot craft, wrapped in tarp, was as mysterious as the transport company who called Sheriff Don Read for help.

"They told us that it was an aircraft and that they had explored other ways to transport it but this was the best way for them to do it and they asked us not to say a whole lot about it," said Read.

After all, the massive load's shape would certainly draw enough attention on its own.

"People were calling in saying, 'Oh they think they found a flying saucer. It looks like a flying saucer to us and we don't know for sure what it is,'" said Donetta Godsey with the Winfield Daily Courier.

For nearly an hour, officers helped maneuver the craft through Cowley County.

"The biggest thing that we had to deal with was down at the roundabout we had to remove a bunch of signs and markers because the load was so long it couldn't make the corner," said Read.

Meanwhile, onlookers struggled to wipe the shock from their faces and the questions from their minds.

"What was that funny thing that was on that trailer that looked like something from somewhere else?" said Root.

So what in the world was it? Undersheriff Bill Mueller says it was an experimental aircraft from Northrop Grumman, possibly a new unmanned drone. It still has a ways to go. Its final destination is Maryland.

PREYING MANTITS posted:

Certainly an interesting way to transport an experimental aircraft.

http://www.abc-7.com/story/16323848/2011/12/14/its-a-bird-its-a-planeits-a-ufo

The Locator posted:

Needs better pictures. At 32' it wouldn't have had any problem going anywhere, given that a normal semi-trailer is 53' long.

The story says that they had to remove signs because the load was too long to make a turn, but 32' isn't nearly long enough to pose that sort of problem.

Edit: Better picture, still not great, doesn't really look that long, just wide.

Godholio posted:

With negotiating skills like this, it seems like common sense that nobody ever buys their airplanes.

Slo-Tek posted:

Maybe an X-47B? wiki thinks it is 38' long, but with the wings off 32' is probably about right.

Though Wiki claims that X-47B ship 2 had it's maiden flight in November 2011, and they will both eventually end up at Pax river, so maybe with a new one at Edwards, they are sending ship 1 to Patuxent.

Godholio posted:

How do they get the truck to the destination?

iyaayas01 posted:

Gorilla Salad posted:

Maybe there's a smaller plane inside

Advent Horizon posted:

Is that a 787 forward fuselage?

Nebakenezzer posted:

The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Iran did highjack the drone electronically, by messing with it's GPS. Supposedly Iranians managed to trick the drone into thinking it was landing in Afghanistan.

Ola posted:

edit: /\/\ Waldo is just below the port horizontal stabilizer.

Phanatic posted:

In an Airbus?

Boeing's got its own distorted-looking giant cargo aircraft to haul other aircraft parts around in:

iyaayas01 posted:

This has been discussed at length in the thread over in GiP...the general consensus is that it is typical Iranian propaganda bullshit. Jamming GPS signal != hacking the Gibson and spoofing the drone into thinking it is somewhere it is not...these things have INS for a reason.

Mr.Peabody posted:

The general consensus there sucks. If I owned 3 radio towers I could make a military drone fly off course, and I'm not an electronic warfare agency of a government. All you need is the known coordinates of 3 satellites, their broadcast frequency, and the ability to delay and rebroadcast their signal from multiple ground sources. A simple delay can trick the GPS into thinking it's 500 miles West of its actual location, and cause it to suddenly veer to the East. It would think it is correcting its position or returning to base, when in fact it is flying deeper into Iran. GiP think because the signal is encrypted it is impossible to crack, but they don't need to crack it, just slow it down. They think Iran is too stupid to hack it, but it's not complicated and it's not even innovative. All it took was a few minutes on google to find a research white-paper on the vulnerabilities of military GPS receivers. Now imagine if you are a government with an electronic warfare agency, access to a hundred radio towers, a serious interest in recovering a remote controlled spy plane, and daily opportunities to do so. So you have to acknowledge the vulnerability exists and there is continual access to exploit that vulnerability. Every day the probability that they will exploit it approaches 1.

So now you've caused a drone to veer off course and it's going to attempt to fly 500 miles in the wrong direction until it runs out of fuel. All the remains is the glide characteristics of an aircraft that's designed to maximize efficiency and maintain straight and level flight so it can hover over a target for hours on end. People in there seriously think this thing is going to brick, but it's not.. it's going to glide. Sure it's going to hit hard and fast, but plenty of people survive crashes like with only some structural damage to the aircraft. Like the taped back on wing we see in the Iranian press photo.

Mr.Peabody posted:

The general consensus there sucks. If I owned 3 radio towers I could make a military drone fly off course, and I'm not an electronic warfare agency of a government. All you need is the known coordinates of 3 satellites, their broadcast frequency, and the ability to delay and rebroadcast their signal from multiple ground sources. A simple delay can trick the GPS into thinking it's 500 miles West of its actual location, and cause it to suddenly veer to the East. It would think it is correcting its position or returning to base, when in fact it is flying deeper into Iran. GiP think because the signal is encrypted it is impossible to crack, but they don't need to crack it, just slow it down. They think Iran is too stupid to hack it, but it's not complicated and it's not even innovative. All it took was a few minutes on google to find a research white-paper on the vulnerabilities of military GPS receivers. Now imagine if you are a government with an electronic warfare agency, access to a hundred radio towers, a serious interest in recovering a remote controlled spy plane, and daily opportunities to do so. So you have to acknowledge the vulnerability exists and there is continual access to exploit that vulnerability. Every day the probability that they will exploit it approaches 1.

So now you've caused a drone to veer off course and it's going to attempt to fly 500 miles in the wrong direction until it runs out of fuel. All the remains is the glide characteristics of an aircraft that's designed to maximize efficiency and maintain straight and level flight so it can hover over a target for hours on end. People in there seriously think this thing is going to brick, but it's not.. it's going to glide. Sure it's going to hit hard and fast, but plenty of people survive crashes like with only some structural damage to the aircraft. Like the taped back on wing we see in the Iranian press photo.

DJ Commie posted:

Are you writing your own GPS code, or using a premade chip? What is your output? NMEA 0183 over serial is all I've used so far, and on a somewhat old USB GPS WAAS module.


I have an old Trimble SLGR unit floating around somewhere, I don't remember it working very well, the old SA being set makes a lot of sense.

Ola posted:

edit: /\/\ Waldo is just below the port horizontal stabilizer.


Looks like an A321 to me.

Colonial Air Force posted:

Pfft, the Navy?

movax posted:

Hah, that picture owns, know anything about the circumstances it was taken in?

Mr.Peabody posted:

The general consensus there sucks. If I owned 3 radio towers I could make a military drone fly off course, and I'm not an electronic warfare agency of a government. All you need is the known coordinates of 3 satellites, their broadcast frequency, and the ability to delay and rebroadcast their signal from multiple ground sources. A simple delay can trick the GPS into thinking it's 500 miles West of its actual location, and cause it to suddenly veer to the East. It would think it is correcting its position or returning to base, when in fact it is flying deeper into Iran. GiP think because the signal is encrypted it is impossible to crack, but they don't need to crack it, just slow it down. They think Iran is too stupid to hack it, but it's not complicated and it's not even innovative. All it took was a few minutes on google to find a research white-paper on the vulnerabilities of military GPS receivers. Now imagine if you are a government with an electronic warfare agency, access to a hundred radio towers, a serious interest in recovering a remote controlled spy plane, and daily opportunities to do so. So you have to acknowledge the vulnerability exists and there is continual access to exploit that vulnerability. Every day the probability that they will exploit it approaches 1.

So now you've caused a drone to veer off course and it's going to attempt to fly 500 miles in the wrong direction until it runs out of fuel. All the remains is the glide characteristics of an aircraft that's designed to maximize efficiency and maintain straight and level flight so it can hover over a target for hours on end. People in there seriously think this thing is going to brick, but it's not.. it's going to glide. Sure it's going to hit hard and fast, but plenty of people survive crashes like with only some structural damage to the aircraft. Like the taped back on wing we see in the Iranian press photo.

Colonial Air Force posted:

Pfft, the Navy?

Understeer posted:

ANZ took delivery of an A320 this fall in the same livery. This fall was also the Rugby World Cup. To say the French made a couple comments while the aircraft was on the flight line would be putting it mildly.

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Air-New-Zealand/Airbus-A320-232/2017930/&sid=2e3dc5b707ce290618869aa83522c154

Godholio posted:

F-4s could get off a ramp deck?

movax posted:

It's definitely possible to do, and I've seen it done...on civilian GPS receivers. Remember that military receivers can decrypt P(Y) (accuracy improvement) starting with PPS-SM in the mid 1990s, and currently on SAASM (the uDAGR I've linked below implements SAASM). It doesn't improve jam-resistance any though (same signal coming from space), though the new code they are rolling out on Block IIR/IIF promises to improve that aspect as well. What the P-code does prevent is an enemy transmitter mimicking a real GPS satellite and the P(Y) code. The GPS ASICs that Uncle Sam uses are rolled in-house; I think you're in for a world of hurt if you're caught with a Rockwell GPS ASIC in your pocket.

"Browns are dumb hurrr"/"GiP is dumb hurrrrr" aside though, it'd be dumb for an UAV like that to depend solely on GPS as a navigation system as iyaayas said, and it likely has a INS/IMU or similar system as well. Coupled with a large amount of sensor fusion fed into a control system, it'd be almost impossible for a UAV to not realize that it's GPS data if supposedly jammed/compromised is no longer valid. Every civilian UAV I've seen, even the most basic of homemade drone has some type of IMU in play feeding into a Kalman filter or similar. Some of us moronic civilians even go further and implement Schuler tuning in our INS.

I think that article makes a good (and almost reasonable) story, and hopefully my faith in the competence of our fine engineers at Lockheed and friends is not mis-placed.

Here is a public/non-classified description of RC's modern military GPS portable unit.

e: SAASM - Selective Availability Anti-Spoofing Module
DAGR - Defense Advanced GPS Receiver
Selective Availability - a now defunct ability to introduce artificial navigation error in public navigation signals
P(Y) - the "precision" code. Each satellite broadcasts several signals, originally just the public/open to all C/A coarse code and precision P code, but now expanded to new secure code (M code) and transmitting civilian signals on a new frequency as well. Currently there are:
L1 - C/A, L1C Civilian Code, Military (M) Code, P(Y)
L2 - L2C Civilian Code, Military (M) Code
L3 - NUCLEAR LAUNCH DETECTED
L4 - Nothing
L5 - Safety of Life

e2: "well what the gently caress do you know about GPS movax?" I researched under one of the engineers on the original NAVSTAR project, read several of the standard GPS texts from cover-to-cover and am currently home-building a GPS receiver, so I think I know a fair amount about it. Still all conjecture though.

e3: jamming != spoofing, jamming should not have made the UAV "land safely in Iran", and if they successfully spoofed our military GPS signals, we are kinda boned. Jamming is me screaming "DICKS DICKS DICKS DICKS" so you can't hear what your friend is saying, spoofing is me intercepting your friend's words and replacing them with my own "LAND YOUR DICK IN MY BUTT"

grover posted:

This wouldn't work; the rebroadcast encrypted signal would be rejected for being out-of-tolerance. Spoofing of this sort only works when the signal starts out completely synchronized with the GPS unit's position- something that can only happen if the repeater is initially positioned within a few feet of the target. It's something that's easily done in a laboratory, but just not possible in practice.

Mr.Peabody posted:

I think there's been some confusion, in that the theory is that it was a two-fold attack. UAVs are primarily piloted by a human. The theory goes that there was a jamming signal that disconnected the "unhackable" encrypted command and control signal from the UAV forcing it to fall back into a GPS guided "return home" failover. The second part of the attack was then manipulating the timing of the GPS streams to manipulate the UAV to consider itself off course and attempt to correct itself.

quote:

In the lighter moments of World War II, the Spitfire was used in an unorthodox role: bringing beer kegs to the men in Normandy.

During the war, the Heneger and Constable brewery donated free beer to the troops. After D-Day, supplying the invasion troops in Normandy with vital supplies was already a challenge. Obviously, there was no room in the logistics chain for such luxuries as beer or other types of refreshments. Some men, often called “sourcers”, were able to get wine or other niceties “from the land” or rather from the locals. RAF Spitfire pilots came up with an even better idea.

The Spitfire Mk IX was an evolved version of the Spitfire, with pylons under the wings for bombs or tanks. It was discovered that the bomb pylons could also be modified to carry beer kegs. According to pictures that can be found, various sizes of kegs were used. Whether the kegs could be jettisoned in case of emergency is unknown. If the Spitfire flew high enough, the cold air at altitude would even refresh the beer, making it ready for consumption upon arrival.

A variation of this was a long range fuel tank modified to carry beer instead of fuel. The modification even received the official designation Mod. XXX. Propaganda services were quick to pick up on this, which probably explains the “official” designation

Mr.Peabody posted:

I'm not putting myself out as an expert on GPS, but it's more interesting to find websites like
this one I just stumbled across than the GiP discussion on the matter.
E: What's the potential to using GBAS augmentation to assist in the spoofing?

Mr.Peabody posted:

I'm not putting myself out as an expert on GPS, but it's more interesting to find websites like
this one I just stumbled across than the GiP discussion on the matter.
E: What's the potential to using GBAS augmentation to assist in the spoofing?

Mr.Peabody posted:

I think there's been some confusion, in that the theory is that it was a two-fold attack. UAVs are primarily piloted by a human. The theory goes that there was a jamming signal that disconnected the "unhackable" encrypted command and control signal from the UAV forcing it to fall back into a GPS guided "return home" failover.

quote:

The second part of the attack was then manipulating the timing of the GPS streams to manipulate the UAV to consider itself off course and attempt to correct itself. I know the military is working on a new generation of GPS signal that will be far more robust and secure than what is currently implemented, but I'm not aware of the minuta of detail.