Comment by nosequel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nosequel | Hacker News Reader

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I won't comment on the UAV in the article, but you'd have to be a pretty wealthy person and have some really weird stuff on your kitchen table to have what is on the global hawk. I won't comment on specifics, but there is nothing simple about its gps and inertial navigation systems. Your categorization of UAV's was fairly simplistic and there are many more categories than two.

The Global Hawk is a much more expensive aircraft than the RQ-170 and is in a completely different category of aircraft. What happen to RQ-170 could not be done to the Global Hawk with they way its navigation works.

I don't want people thinking that autonomous aircraft are some simple thing that anyone can do. If that was the case, other countries would make them instead of buying them from the US.

Good luck making a laser ring gyro with a walk of < .002 deg/hr for $50 (or even $20,000) http://www51.honeywell.com/aero/common/documents/myaerospace...

I think you missed part of what I was saying.

Of course I don't have the requisite materials or fabrication equipment to build the type of inertial navigation equipment used in missiles.

My point was that, if the article is to be believed, and RQ-170 relies completely on GPS and gyros, then I have the stuff needed to build its guidance system.

(The point here being that of course I don't, and of course it's likely more complicated than a GPS, so the article is probably incorrect)

I plus +1'd your comment, I get what you were trying to say, sorry I came across wrong. I was trying to supplement it a bit by saying there are many tiers of UAV's. I was joking about you having crazy crap on your kitchen counter, but typed a bit too fast to make a point of me getting what you were saying.

You can see in my other comments that it is pretty nuts if they actually captured the plane the way they claim. Based my knowledge of navigation design, it seems to be pretty impossible to convince a properly designed plane that it is somewhere it isn't without turning off the inertial navigation equipment (what is done during testing in anechoic chambers).

I didn't get that entirely from the article. They had already cut off communications links, so it sounds like it was already running in some sort of backup mode, meaning that GPS and gyros were perhaps all it had left to go on.

I think he was just making fun of how easy it was to capture.

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