Thought you might find interesting. Edited to reply with relevant section
SITREP 3/16/23: Reaper Developments And Major Advances
Simplicius The Thinker
21 hr ago
First thing’s first, some important updates on the ‘drone incident’. The US has now released their version of the footage, which can be seen here:
VIDEO 1.
They appear to still be tenuously clinging to the claim that the plane ‘struck the drone’s propeller’, yet that is not evident in the video at all. Much more likely the plane merely bucked the drone from sheer turbulence and jet-wash, causing it to flip over—but I’m not discounting that the prop was clipped. It
is strange that the drone camera continues to ‘malfunction’ each time the planes come close. Is the turbulence jostling the camera electronics too much, or the Su-27’s giving off some type of jamming signals at such proximity? Hard to know.
Some have pointed to this before and after shot, showing what
appears to be like a deformed prop blade after the Russian fuel dump. However, props can look that way on cameras depending on the sync between the camera framerate and propeller speed, and there’s a chance that the propeller changed speed (perhaps due to slight throttling down by the operator, etc.) causing it to appear differently at that point on video. Maybe there are some better video experts that can chime in. But perhaps a chance exists that the ‘heavy’ fuel load ricocheting off the propeller at such squirted speeds caused it to deform. This would lead to eventual catastrophic failure of the prop due to vibratory forces in the uneven distribution of weight/aerodynamics, etc.
What we
do know now however is that the MQ-9 Reaper is from one of the latest and most advanced Blocks, equipped with a highly advanced/sensitive ‘
Gorgon’s Stare’ electronics suite.
Along with the Gorgon Stare, the drone had a variety of sensors which could do everything from record pinpoint video footage, thermal footage, Synthetic Aperture Radar snapshots of Russian bases/assets, record electronic emissions and signal data from Russian command HQ’s (C3), radar sites, and their positions. The Gorgon Stare itself, if you read the supplied wiki article, is run through a devious DARPA A.I. program called
Mind’s Eye, which does all the things I once described
in this article—basically: neural-network ‘smart’ analysis of recorded ground data where the AI can track/locate/assess/transmit targets on its own, all while geo-tagging them with various meta-data, etc. With these tools the drone is said to transmit many gigabytes of data
per minute.
Getting their hands on this Gorgon suite would be a huge boon for Russia. Which is why they have now positioned their ships and as of this writing are getting ready to lift the drone from what is said to be 900m depth.
The US however has claimed that they’ve done a ‘remote wipe’ on the Reaper’s data. This is questionable for a variety of reasons. Firstly, wiping data just once will never delete it, recovery specialists, particularly Russian ones which are likely the best in the world, can easily recover the data. But full industrial data-stripping takes many recurring passes of data writes to the memory chip over and over for it to be truly irrecoverable. But this takes time—time that the drone likely didn’t have as it was going down into the sea, at which point its batteries would have been flooded and likely any ‘data wipe’ operation stopped. So, the verdict is: data is probably recoverable unless the US has a special detonating self-destruct device planted on the data chip just for these types of circumstances.
To save face, John Kirby tried to pretend that US still has the ability to recover the drone. He hemmed and hawed and temporized when asked during a press conference if the drone can be recovered, stating that US “isn’t sure it can do it” in that region and at that depth, veiling the fact that the Russian fleet has already positioned itself entirely above the site and US isn’t even allowed to bring warships through the Bosporous as per the Montreaux Convention.
Speaking of which—one very intriguing oddity should be mentioned. For the many months that US has flown its drones over the Black Sea, it has always strangely had to ‘go around’ Turkish territory.
Notice how the direct flightpath is always broken up by a necessary rerouting to the north into Bulgaria,
just around the tip of Turkish territory near the Bosporous. It’s clear that Erdogan does not allow US war assets to bypass his territory enroute to monitor Russian SMO.
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