Bharat Rakshak

simpler it is better for single use and mass production. and it will likely be lighter and have less moving parts. perhaps could even be used for a MLRS type of 214mm rocket to extend the range out to 100km off small rockets....heh heh.

Can a pulse jet be put in the Nirbhay?

Check this photo on the link posted by Garooda about the US drone.

I see the right wing taped to the body.. what do you see?

That and the absence of the landing gear is pretty suspicious

Lets build the V1 then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bombThe cyber-commandos are not pilots, they broke the wing while landing

WHAT PULSEJETS????

Pulsejets are so stone age that even my college rejected it for my 7th sem project.


pulse jet has no future other than being used in toyshops.

You wouldn't consider it for a bomb with wings and propulsion?

if NAL is doing it has to be a serious purpose.. they are not into making hobby shop models as a stream of new revenue.
and if this pic was released without stating the purpose, has to be a 'message' being sent to someone...

VKS has been talking for a while.. he mentioned a few time "loitering disposable missile".. May be this is one of the tech they are considering for that..

Needs to be silent, long loitering/endurance needs low speed, low thrust, low fuel consumption performance.. pulsejet is a suitable candidate technology.. may be they have a few choices - needs evaluation to make a decision.. just wait & watch, they may even have a big surprise for all..

here is the video off the defense daily link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vorWHmk3 ... r_embedded

it is surprising they are not stripping the puppy open yet. I am sure, chippanda is sending a special team to package and export, by replacing the original with a tin copy replica.

Uh, guys, bad news on the Pulse Jet UAV.

Link

Scroll a little down and second video and second photo.

Wonder what happened to this Indian micro turbine? This report was from 2003.
Don't see it in the company's present site. I am pleasantly surprised at the awesome products these people are making.

pray what is the bad news.

Aditya, very nice article on livefist, well written, thorough and conclusive IMHO.

http://livefist.blogspot.com/2011/12/gu ... -lost.html

^
It is not necessary to have externally visible serrated edges to get stealth features.
The meshed intake is only to structurally support the blended body. The actual engines are much away from the center.

Most probably the aircraft lost contact with Khan ground station. And most probably ran out of fuel. Perhaps it has been programmed to glide down if that happens.

Musharraf pulled speculations onlee.

Gliding down safely is the last thing anyone would want. One wouldn’t want to gift away such piece of technology to the enemy; right?

Looking at the size of this thing, it would easily weigh close to a ton. How can such a heavy machine remain intact after a fall even from a thoussand feet? There wouldn’t be many people out there buying the theory that the Iranian cyber personnel hijacked it and brought it down.

As far as flat spin is concerned, the plane doesn’t come down gently like a leaf. It is a fast decent – saw it in a simulator. The simulation itself may not be very accurate but it still gives a reasonable idea.

UAV spying of Iran has been going on since 2004, according to article in FP.



http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/09/iran_has_americas_super_spy_drone_so_what

You'd be surprised how intact aircraft can be on crashing. If the primary FCS is working to keep the wings level, then it can easily survive impact. Large airliners are made to withstand belly-landings, why not a UAV with a very low stall speed? The most notable case is this one, where the aircraft was salvaged after the pilot ejected. A flat, controlled spin results in a surprisingly low velocity.

SaiK - Fair enough, but wouldn't you put in the edges if you had to design a stealthy UAV? IMO Stealth was not the primary driver behind the design, sensible aerodynamics was.

Shrnivasan

The bad news is it looks like NAL bought a kit aircraft and passed it off as their own development.

Rahul, thanks

er folks.... before we over a tube that is hot-glued on top of Burt Rutan's weiner-plane being passed off as cool by NAL...... Yes, pulse-jet (valved ones of V2 and the U-shaped ones) is old school and are poor burners of fuel (fuel burning method is conventional - deflagration or some such where the flame front goes at a lazy pace) with lots of wastage. If they improved that, it is not a bad thing in itself.

But if it is Pulse-detonation engines they are talking about here..... that is rocking. It needs serious research and the big boys of the world (Dark Agint Researchers Phor A-khans) were/are seriously looking into it. The burning method itself is exotic (detonation vs deflagr...whatever) and has issues with stabilizing the process as well as, er, noise. If we actually did some stuff on that and made it fly, kudos. And Burt-sahib's weiner-plane was the one that lugged a working version of khan's engine over Mojave.

IIRC, a few years ago, we drooled over a report of DRDO about some annular external combustion reference, wonder what happened there?

There are several possible scenarios. It could also have been a cheap/stripped down bait for the Russian made Avtobaza (ELINT) to test the Defense System. Google the term 'HONEYPOT' Drones are made to avoid loss of human lives. $6 million would rank it just ahead of a paper airplane in US military budget terms. While it is embarrassing for the US, it's not going to worry them too much. They lost an F-117 over Yugoslavia 12 years ago. That was a much bigger concern back then but nothing has come out of it now.

Accidents and malfunctions do occur in all the military equipments which is nothing new. Especially when there is a prolonged usage of it. The RQ-170 type has been in use for a while. What surprises me that generally the equipments of sensitive nature are equipped with micro thermites to self destruct the crucial electronics. I wonder if that has taken place Engine failure is another frequent issue in which case a flat spin will not necessarily damage the aircraft significantly. It was designed to fall flat in which case it might explain the tapes around the wings which might have snapped along with damaging the landing gear and undercarriage after a flat fall.

Next few weeks will hopefully shed some light on this.

A look at the specifications make me guess:-

Rustom 2 - piston engine powered MTOW around 1800kg

Rustom 3 - same wing but turboprop powered MTOW 5000kg

Rustom 4 - bigger airframe and wing turbofan powered MTOW 10 tons

global hawk is at rustom-4 level and china has also been showing off something similar in blurry photos , they are working hard on it. which is why
> UAV Rustom-2 project is spread over 66 months

is not good enough...esp given our limited manpower that can only work on serial projects not enough to work in parallel.

we need to start work on a global hawk sized project in a overlapping manner not wait until rustom2 is all done. if necessary we should obtain foreign help from whoever is willing or invite sukhoi into a JV that even russia could use with their own payloads.

use the Larzac , Al55 or honeywell jaguar engine whichever fits the bill. we will have base repair wkshops for two of them soon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EADS_Talarion

btw this EADS project has no buyers in the home nations but Turkey has funded it. so you can bet the pakis will close behind in the queue.

turks already have a rustom2 spec thing flying http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TAI_Anka

israel has the rustom-3 spec Eitan in service.

we are lagging behind...

Hnair has a good point , if its pulse detonation engine is indeed bleeding edge r&d
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_detonation_engine

To date, no practical PDE has been put into production, but several testbed engines have been built and one was successfully integrated into a low-speed demonstration aircraft that flew in sustained PDE powered flight in 2008. In June 2008, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unveiled Blackswift which was intended to use this technology to reach speeds of up to Mach 6.[4] However the project was cancelled soon afterward, in October 2008.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackswift#Blackswift

-
NAL has likely built a small scale model for bigger meat coming later..NAL being more a science facility than product lab would be in charge for laying the groundwork for what comes beyond the hypersonic engine in brahmos2.

^^^ from the same wiki link for PDE



So its primarity designed for supersonic/hypersonic speeds ! Though It is possible to have subsonic flight tests, mating it with the current Rustom airframe (which doesnt look like designed for super/hyper sonic flights), would not be very productive.

If they are working on a supersonic derivative of Rustom which will eventually house this engine, that would be interesting

Though we have the fuel mix, tech for sustained combusion at hypersonic speeds etc, wont get my hopes up. Got this link. It lists valving, structural strengthening, life span and noise as the major problems faced by any PDE.

^ The other difference is that the shutters are replaced by more sophisticated valves

livefist: indigenously developed valved pulsejet engine.

tea leaves...

Chaiwalla says - The problem with Iran's account is that three drones were in air at the time of malfunction, flying a grid pattern. The one that malfunctioned was spotted by one of the two when it hit the ground. Sources are saying that a pre planned flight contorl locked in a tight turn, thus causing the drone to fly in a tight circle at 35k feet for approximately 8.5 hrs. Control was lost, and the thinking is that computer system shutdown, and never came back up. It seems from sources that this drone has had a problem in past. There is a lot more to the story that will be coming out. Over 1,100 flights have been flown in the area, and one hits the ground... 1100 to one... The other two drones showed no problems, and one of the two was above and below the malfunctioning drone watching it hit the ground... Kinda reminds me of Baghdad Bob.

Oh come on Gerard

how did you not post this gem

Iran does have a formidable track record in events like IMO and IPO. no doubt they can find the people for EW or anything math oriented.

I would have thought that military grade GPS signals are encrypted! How could they spoof them?

They are. US Military GPS uses the L2 frequency and P-code encryption. They would have to use four channels of the frequency at least, break the encryption AND hide the existing channels so that the UAV does not notice the discrepancies.

All the time while synchronising the four fake channels with an accurate clock (something nearing atomic clock precision) and transmitting the right locations.

And they would have to know exactly what the UAV's guidance profile is, how it is brought in to land.

And they would have to broadcast from above, since the GPS on the UAV would have its antennae pointing upward. The UAV's body would severely attenuate signals from below, enough to not overcome actual GPS signals.

Oh, and I'm willing to bet that it carried dual redundant GPS - since it has been proved that it's possible to determine the attitude of the aircraft by detecting the difference in phase of the signal when the antennae are sufficiently apart.

And my final question - if it was spoofed into landing in such a nice and easy manner... why hide the bottom half of the UAV?

So forgive me if I'm more than a bit sceptical of Iranian claims

No doubt they can find the people - I went to uni with a few Iranians and they had the same distribution of super-smart to what-the-hell-is-this-guy-doing-here people. My question is, can they find the right tech? I'll put it this way: I think India is way ahead in tech as compared to Iran, and we would find it hard (if not impossible) to do what they are claiming to have done. They have had it much worse than us in access to even high-tech education - let alone being able to use the actual tools.

Aditya




They say there is damage because of slight altitude difference between the drone's home base and the base they made it land on.

While still not fully convinced the manner to accomplish this task claimed by the Iranians is at least theoretically possible and has at least increased their credibility.


Regarding comparison between us and them - when you have the world ranged against you with sanctions and actions - your mind can wonderfully focussed. They have definitely shown a steely determination.

Iranians are like Indians, one of most creative and super smart breed...They are equal genius in Math and Poetry as Indians...Don't underestimate them and they have money also...
Zoroastrians are of Iranian origin only, which we call Parsi's in India...

Though I still find they exaggerate things...

I won't underestimate them, Surya and Manum - I have no doubt they have some incredibly smart people just like every other country does. But intelligence means little when you don't have the tech to learn from and to manufacture the latest stuff. That's all.

Manum, I know that Parsis are Iranian in origin, but that's all that there is to it. I don't believe that having common ancestors from centuries ago qualifies your intelligence in either a good or bad way - the Parsis for all intents and purposes are their own special culture now.

This talk will go OT...
anyways I am just saying..the way Indian did respond in difficult times by mastering few things...Iranians can do too at crude level...Lets leave it at that, Though I agree they exaggerate..

Any thoughts on the American drone did crash in Iranian territory and was fully or partially destroyed, but enough structure survived for the Iranians to build a replica shell of the aircraft to display to the cameras? It did take them a few days to display it, enough time for them to build a replica. They may have had images of the drone beforehand from other sources that they could've used to determine the size, shape and visible features of the drone besides studying the wreckage. I find it hard to believe that the Iranians were able to take control of the drone so easily and land it at their base. In the Iranian video the underside of the drone being obscured is rather curious.

On the other hand, if the drone indeed land intact at the Iranian base, another possibility could be that it was accidentally landed their by the American controllers due to a multitude of malfunctions causing confusion on the Americans part. Sort of like the recent Indian Army helicopter incident across the line of control. These kinds of unintended landings of aircraft in enemy territory/base has happened through out history.

From Livefist
India's SLYBIRD Mini-drone Payload Flights Soon