US20170144756A1
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170144756A1/en
Could it be. Nay. Tiamat aka the 12th planet is returning and these recon drones are seeing if we fucked up the planet. New Jersey was not a good place to start.
We are doomed :fmicon:
I thought this was all a joke, but I'm really concerned now. Went for a walk last night and saw dozens of strange objects moving about. They all had lights, except some didn't, and sometimes the lights went out as I approached. I've been informed the lighting patterns all conform to government standards. Yet the government knows nothing of where these things are going and refuse to say why. I know the government and the military also operate these things, so why don't they know what's going on? They assure us, weakly, that there's likely nothing nefarious, even as I see reports that Russians and Chinese are known to operate these. This era of horseless carriages frightens me. All these cars move about to who knows where, flashing lights and rumbling around our critical infrastructure. I demand the FBI investigate and tell us what these cars are doing.
IMO, our government knows what they are and why they are here. If not, that is an egregious failure. They are currently claiming that a) they don't know who is behind them or what their purpose is, and b) there isn't a threat to the public. Those things cannot both be true!
IMO, they either:
1) Belong to and are operated by a US government agency, and are a defensive system that is either being tested or deployed in response to an actual threat
Or
2) They belong to a foreign adversary that is using them to toy with, blackmail, embarrass, terrorize, or otherwise provoke the US.
At the risk of sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theory type... I have been expecting something like this since we started seeing videos of coordinated drone flights coming out of China several years ago. I just assumed it would be at an American installation overseas or something like that, not on the home turf!
i'm gonna say somewhere in the neighborhood of ~25000 foreign spies operating in the USQuote:
Originally Posted by Meconium
One scenario I imagined was something like this: Drones show up. Biden gets a letter: "We are flying our drones over your country, and you will do nothing about it. If you shoot one down, the drones will begin dispensing their payload. If you disclose what they are, payload. If you retaliate against our country, payload..."
I think current technology makes that sort of threat a real possibility, and if these drones can launch from underwater and fly low to land, they'll be very hard to intercept, I think.
What would be the point of this? Some kind of ransom demand?Quote:
Originally Posted by waveshello
Also I think that kind of scenario would be extremely remote. If the president knows about it many other people know about it, too. I can't imagine someone wouldn't blab and certainly not everyone would be okay with just continuing to let them fly unimpeded.
That's fucking hilarious. What do you think is in those drones? You think there is some James Bond level submarine drone mothership that the drones can go to and fro without being seen and heard? You think we can't interdict drones by multiple modes? How impotent do you think the US really is when Ukraine has reduced Russia to using drones with thin long control wires to circumvent jamming?Quote:
Originally Posted by waveshello
"Counteroffer: we sortie ground jamming units and EA-18Gs to ECM your control of the drones, then shoot down what doesn't crash using multiple means, we hunt down and shoot your drone operators, and we nuke your country into glass."
If someone did develop a drone that can't be (currently) jammed, it probably wouldn't be a great idea to fly them every night for hours in plain view.
Hey we're all just wildly speculating in here, let me write a little scifi fan fiction will ya.Quote:
Originally Posted by summit
See my first post... I think it's more likely the first scenario or some variation of that. But to answer your question yes, I really do think there is some impotence, incompetence, ability to be blackmailed, or a combination of the three that exists within our government, and that's how a Chinese spy balloon drifted coast to coast over our country before there was intervention.
If they are not taking off from some sort of above or below surface craft, where are they going home to every night?
IMO, if it's a foreign entity, it's China or China backed.
I feel like we had a stronger national defense policy when Jer was around.Quote:
Originally Posted by summit
Our national offense is lacking.
(space force)
We are lulled geography, Pollyanna perspective. Generation Z is hosed.
The next four years of constant national panics over drones, balloons, brown skinned migrants, trans people, fluoride, vaccines, etc. are just going to be great.
All them problems were caused by D’s, Now that the R’s Got all four branches of the government in hand, shit should move a lot more smoothly now.
MAGA will show those drones who's boss! They're probably carrying airborne vaccines. Biden's last stand before RFK Jr. puts an end to science.Quote:
Originally Posted by m2711c
You're onto something there. Pace yourself because the exhaustion will be devastating.Quote:
Originally Posted by I Skied Bandini Mountain
This makes more sense than anything - keep the uneducated base in a constant state of panic and outrage, and cause the so-called educated "elites" to disengage in sheer exhaustion and revulsion.Quote:
Originally Posted by CarlMega
Can you jam drone electronics or cameras? With AI drones, in theory it could navigate old school by the Stars and then visually recognize t terrain and roads with no outside communication, gps or human control.Quote:
Originally Posted by summit
Short answer: Yes. (Passive) TERCOM and Astronav are not jammable, and are not new but these are typically quite expensive and used on very expensive weapons.Quote:
Originally Posted by Meconium
Long answer:
Terrain matching via DEM and image mapping could probably be made more affordable, but if you use radar for matching DEM then you may be trackable/jammable, although you probably have to be expecting it and have a sensor platform up that could hear the emission from a nap-of-the-earth missile/drone. Western nations use terrain matching on cruise missiles to augment INS/satnav and the class of missiles with terrain matching cost 7-8 figures, $2M+
Astrointertional navigation we use on ICBMs, strategic nuclear bombers (B-2, B-21), and spacecraft, again not new. Astronav on drones would be limited to nighttime with sky visible (or (nearly) in space, which is why it is great for an exoatmospheric warhead bus, or SR-71 or on a strategic bomber before it descends to low altitude). It is used to increase the accuracy of INS, like the laser ring gyro in a RV (which is really EXPENSIVE). Usually 8-10 figure weapons systems for astroinertial.
So, you could have drones with those very expensive solutions, but they are probably going to be strategic assets, not tactical toys. Think our RQ/MQ/EQ-4 airplane sized recon drones (130ft wingspan) that cost 1/4-1/2 a billion bucks. They did make a pod for those called agile that would use multiple-modes of passive navigation fixing for GPS-degraded situations. I think they used everything from image matching, signal matching (eg known radio station), you could even do magnetic anomaly matching if you have payload space and power for the antenna.
Or maybe someone has made a breakthrough on how to do it cheap.
Well celestrial nav is more advanced than I thought when writing off the top of my head above... maybe... probably... at least it will work clear skies daytime and is on the bone and rivet joint. But multiaspect cameras might have it on F-35... which means it could be on bleeding edge drones soon/now. This was a fascinating read and watch:
https://www.twz.com/17207/sr-71s-r2-...d-environments
Shorter answer: If the bad guy is domestic, we find them and give them justice. If the bad guy is foreign, we find them and give them freedom.
Same method prevents bad guys on the overpass shooting RPGs at you in your car. And a host of other ills.
Can someone help me out here?Quote:
Originally Posted by LongShortLong