V-1 does not count as a drone as there has to be a level of in-flight control, whether from embedded systems or remotely.
The best category for a V-1 is cruise missile.
UAVs that are basically motorized kites. Capable of loitering for days potentially.
They're very different from those very expensive, very obvious unarmed cruise missiles. There's just no use case that isn't done better and cheaper by something else.
It was designed exclusively for speed. The sr71 had a radar cross section of 10 cubic meters. The idea was to fly as close to Russian airspace as possible without touching it. And then out run anything the Russians tried to throw at them. It was actually in the US's interest to let the Russians see they weren't entering their airspace.
There were visibly evident concessions to reduced radar cross section (the inwards canted vertical stabilizers, the chine) but ironically the first doesn't apply at all to the D-21
11 months ago
Anonymous
Idk if I'd call them concessions. But they were interested in making missile lock difficult where they could. Still if you want to loiter above a target without being spotted. Making thinderscreech levels of noise isn't optimal.
Pretty sure it just got classified. However, it is also clear that inbetween satellites and slow crappy drones it is fairly irrelevant for the purposes of reconaisance.
In reality everyone who has ever read about the A-12 / SR-71 has made the thoguht "man if it could outrun missilesl like that, surely it would have made for an amazing bomber. Even if it could only carry 1 bomb at a time". and if I/we have made that thought surely others have as well.
I suspect that the SR-71 had the ability to ferry some sort of bomb, if only as an on the shelf "emergency" capability. (like, you need to make a very very specific missions and need something to bomb a specific SAM site no matter what. Or WWIII has started and really, really want to nuke something) And of cource if you are only able to carry 1-2, might as well make it a nuke.
As such, I am guessing the classified version of that is probably just a long range missile, stand off missile and other things like that.
>Pretty sure it just got classified
No, it failed. Took out an M-21 (A-12 carrier craft), one pilot died, real tragedy as well as enormously expensive/damaging/bad to lose such an aircraft.
SR-71 itself pushed the absolute, absolute limits of what material engineering, electronics, and piloting could do at the time. It was just too much on top of that, and top launch at that kind of speed has a shitload of failure modes. Maybe if they'd incorporated solid rocket separators, so that it'd be 100% assured to get away from the carrier aircraft in a repeatable fashion even if the drone engine went to shit right off the bat, but ultimately it didn't just fail to perform it caused major issues.
Also political problems were growing in that time period, as you say it wouldn't look any different from launching a missile. SR-71 and satellites both were distinctively for intelligence gathering.
>Separation at high supersonic speeds is extremely challenging.
May just have been beyond the tech at the time. Dropping something at supersonic would have been more doable but of course no way to actually take off with something that big that way.
I actually think that Skunkworks, which is a fricking awesome book everyone should read, said something about what was going on behind the scenes for this. I'll see if I can find it, nobody would know like Ben Rich. And if anyone on /k/ and in particular this thread hasn't read that book you owe it to yourselves to do so, Skunkworks was just an amazing thing in American aerospace/engineering history.
Found it. This is about the end of the program, fascinating stuff about what went into it, but: >About eleven months later, the Nixon White House again approved a flight against Lop Nor. This time the drone performed the mission perfectly, arriving back right on rendezvous point, but after dropping its camera and photo package, the chute failed to open and the package plummeted into the sea and was lost. >In March 1971, Nixon approved a third flight over the same area. This one also functioned perfectly; the drone separated its camera package on schedule and it parachuted into the sea where a Navy frigate was on station awaiting a pickup. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and the Navy botched the recovery, allowing the package to be pulled beneath the ship with the parachute on one side and the hatch on the other. The package sank before they could get cables around it. >The final flight occurred two weeks later. This time our bird was tracked nineteen hundred miles into China and then disappeared from the screen. The reason was never determined. No other flights were attempted. The complex logistics surrounding each flight, involving recovery ships and rendezvous aircraft, cost a bloody fortune to stage. We were canceled in mid-1972. >And Kelly was bitter about it. “I’m not one to find scapegoats,” he told me at the time, “but one reason why we had failures over China is that the birds we used had been stored up at Beale Air Force Base for nine months before the missions were authorized. The blue-suiters had 160 people there assigned to this program. Each of them had a salary to justify and took our drone apart frequently after our final checkouts here, just to put it back together again. And by so doing, they screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions and launch those birds. I’m telling you, Ben, that would have made all the difference in the world.”
Ah, forgot first one, and then very funny denouement: >After a single air-to-air refueling some twelve hours later, it reached its launch point at the fourteen-hour mark, and Tagboard successfully fired beyond range of Chinese early-warning radar nets. The next day Kelly told us, “Well, the damned thing came out of China, but was lost. It wasn’t spotted or shot down, but it must’ve malfunctioned and crashed on us.” Those monitoring the flight said Chinese radar never detected it, so we concluded the guidance had screwed up and the drone just kept on chugging until it ran out of gas, probably after crossing the Sino-Soviet border into Siberia. >On a February day fifteen years later, a CIA operative came to see me at the Skunk Works carrying a panel, which he plopped down on my desk. “Ben, do you recognize this?” >I grinned. “Sure I do. Where did you get it?” >The CIA guy laughed. “Believe it or not, I got it as a Christmas gift from a Soviet KGB agent. He told me this piece was found by a shepherd in Soviet Siberia.” >Actually, it was from the first D-21 mission into China in November 1969, when the drone flew off course into Soviet Siberia before running out of fuel. >The panel was from the drone’s engine mount. It was made from composite material loaded for radar absorption and looked as if it had been made just yesterday. The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.
Fun.
Found it. This is about the end of the program, fascinating stuff about what went into it, but: >About eleven months later, the Nixon White House again approved a flight against Lop Nor. This time the drone performed the mission perfectly, arriving back right on rendezvous point, but after dropping its camera and photo package, the chute failed to open and the package plummeted into the sea and was lost. >In March 1971, Nixon approved a third flight over the same area. This one also functioned perfectly; the drone separated its camera package on schedule and it parachuted into the sea where a Navy frigate was on station awaiting a pickup. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and the Navy botched the recovery, allowing the package to be pulled beneath the ship with the parachute on one side and the hatch on the other. The package sank before they could get cables around it. >The final flight occurred two weeks later. This time our bird was tracked nineteen hundred miles into China and then disappeared from the screen. The reason was never determined. No other flights were attempted. The complex logistics surrounding each flight, involving recovery ships and rendezvous aircraft, cost a bloody fortune to stage. We were canceled in mid-1972. >And Kelly was bitter about it. “I’m not one to find scapegoats,” he told me at the time, “but one reason why we had failures over China is that the birds we used had been stored up at Beale Air Force Base for nine months before the missions were authorized. The blue-suiters had 160 people there assigned to this program. Each of them had a salary to justify and took our drone apart frequently after our final checkouts here, just to put it back together again. And by so doing, they screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions and launch those birds. I’m telling you, Ben, that would have made all the difference in the world.”
Ah, forgot first one, and then very funny denouement: >After a single air-to-air refueling some twelve hours later, it reached its launch point at the fourteen-hour mark, and Tagboard successfully fired beyond range of Chinese early-warning radar nets. The next day Kelly told us, “Well, the damned thing came out of China, but was lost. It wasn’t spotted or shot down, but it must’ve malfunctioned and crashed on us.” Those monitoring the flight said Chinese radar never detected it, so we concluded the guidance had screwed up and the drone just kept on chugging until it ran out of gas, probably after crossing the Sino-Soviet border into Siberia. >On a February day fifteen years later, a CIA operative came to see me at the Skunk Works carrying a panel, which he plopped down on my desk. “Ben, do you recognize this?” >I grinned. “Sure I do. Where did you get it?” >The CIA guy laughed. “Believe it or not, I got it as a Christmas gift from a Soviet KGB agent. He told me this piece was found by a shepherd in Soviet Siberia.” >Actually, it was from the first D-21 mission into China in November 1969, when the drone flew off course into Soviet Siberia before running out of fuel. >The panel was from the drone’s engine mount. It was made from composite material loaded for radar absorption and looked as if it had been made just yesterday. The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.
Fun.
Skunk Works and Stealth are two great books for anybody interested in the beginnings of modern combat aircraft design.
the airframe was decades ahead of it's time but long range UAV electronics were still in their infancy
consider that the D-21 is only 20 years younger than the V-1 suicide drone
V-1 does not count as a drone as there has to be a level of in-flight control, whether from embedded systems or remotely.
The best category for a V-1 is cruise missile.
Why is the shasneed a drone then? My understanding is it's preprogrammed on the ground and has a commercial GPS chip for guidance.
It didnt have a wienerpit for a person to actualy pilot it. by the time the engineers figuree out they are missing a wienerpit it was too late.
attempts to train pigeons to fly it failed because they kept crashing into parks
Tragic. Many such cases.
Satellites made this tech tree obsolete.
but we have way more operational UAVs today
UAVs that are basically motorized kites. Capable of loitering for days potentially.
They're very different from those very expensive, very obvious unarmed cruise missiles. There's just no use case that isn't done better and cheaper by something else.
>very obvious
I wonder what the D-21's radar signature looks like, the A-12 it was derived from had some early stealth shaping
It was designed exclusively for speed. The sr71 had a radar cross section of 10 cubic meters. The idea was to fly as close to Russian airspace as possible without touching it. And then out run anything the Russians tried to throw at them. It was actually in the US's interest to let the Russians see they weren't entering their airspace.
There were visibly evident concessions to reduced radar cross section (the inwards canted vertical stabilizers, the chine) but ironically the first doesn't apply at all to the D-21
Idk if I'd call them concessions. But they were interested in making missile lock difficult where they could. Still if you want to loiter above a target without being spotted. Making thinderscreech levels of noise isn't optimal.
>"fail"
Pretty sure it just got classified. However, it is also clear that inbetween satellites and slow crappy drones it is fairly irrelevant for the purposes of reconaisance.
In reality everyone who has ever read about the A-12 / SR-71 has made the thoguht "man if it could outrun missilesl like that, surely it would have made for an amazing bomber. Even if it could only carry 1 bomb at a time". and if I/we have made that thought surely others have as well.
I suspect that the SR-71 had the ability to ferry some sort of bomb, if only as an on the shelf "emergency" capability. (like, you need to make a very very specific missions and need something to bomb a specific SAM site no matter what. Or WWIII has started and really, really want to nuke something) And of cource if you are only able to carry 1-2, might as well make it a nuke.
As such, I am guessing the classified version of that is probably just a long range missile, stand off missile and other things like that.
>Pretty sure it just got classified
No, it failed. Took out an M-21 (A-12 carrier craft), one pilot died, real tragedy as well as enormously expensive/damaging/bad to lose such an aircraft.
SR-71 itself pushed the absolute, absolute limits of what material engineering, electronics, and piloting could do at the time. It was just too much on top of that, and top launch at that kind of speed has a shitload of failure modes. Maybe if they'd incorporated solid rocket separators, so that it'd be 100% assured to get away from the carrier aircraft in a repeatable fashion even if the drone engine went to shit right off the bat, but ultimately it didn't just fail to perform it caused major issues.
Also political problems were growing in that time period, as you say it wouldn't look any different from launching a missile. SR-71 and satellites both were distinctively for intelligence gathering.
>D-21
Wait a fricking minute, that's just a MiG-21 in a body kit. Lockheed!!!
Afaik it destroyed the carrier aircraft once or twice.
Separation at high supersonic speeds is extremely challenging.
>Separation at high supersonic speeds is extremely challenging.
May just have been beyond the tech at the time. Dropping something at supersonic would have been more doable but of course no way to actually take off with something that big that way.
I actually think that Skunkworks, which is a fricking awesome book everyone should read, said something about what was going on behind the scenes for this. I'll see if I can find it, nobody would know like Ben Rich. And if anyone on /k/ and in particular this thread hasn't read that book you owe it to yourselves to do so, Skunkworks was just an amazing thing in American aerospace/engineering history.
Found it. This is about the end of the program, fascinating stuff about what went into it, but:
>About eleven months later, the Nixon White House again approved a flight against Lop Nor. This time the drone performed the mission perfectly, arriving back right on rendezvous point, but after dropping its camera and photo package, the chute failed to open and the package plummeted into the sea and was lost.
>In March 1971, Nixon approved a third flight over the same area. This one also functioned perfectly; the drone separated its camera package on schedule and it parachuted into the sea where a Navy frigate was on station awaiting a pickup. Unfortunately, the seas were heavy and the Navy botched the recovery, allowing the package to be pulled beneath the ship with the parachute on one side and the hatch on the other. The package sank before they could get cables around it.
>The final flight occurred two weeks later. This time our bird was tracked nineteen hundred miles into China and then disappeared from the screen. The reason was never determined. No other flights were attempted. The complex logistics surrounding each flight, involving recovery ships and rendezvous aircraft, cost a bloody fortune to stage. We were canceled in mid-1972.
>And Kelly was bitter about it. “I’m not one to find scapegoats,” he told me at the time, “but one reason why we had failures over China is that the birds we used had been stored up at Beale Air Force Base for nine months before the missions were authorized. The blue-suiters had 160 people there assigned to this program. Each of them had a salary to justify and took our drone apart frequently after our final checkouts here, just to put it back together again. And by so doing, they screwed up the works. We should have had the Skunk Works doing complete field service and even fly the actual missions and launch those birds. I’m telling you, Ben, that would have made all the difference in the world.”
Ah, forgot first one, and then very funny denouement:
>After a single air-to-air refueling some twelve hours later, it reached its launch point at the fourteen-hour mark, and Tagboard successfully fired beyond range of Chinese early-warning radar nets. The next day Kelly told us, “Well, the damned thing came out of China, but was lost. It wasn’t spotted or shot down, but it must’ve malfunctioned and crashed on us.” Those monitoring the flight said Chinese radar never detected it, so we concluded the guidance had screwed up and the drone just kept on chugging until it ran out of gas, probably after crossing the Sino-Soviet border into Siberia.
>On a February day fifteen years later, a CIA operative came to see me at the Skunk Works carrying a panel, which he plopped down on my desk. “Ben, do you recognize this?”
>I grinned. “Sure I do. Where did you get it?”
>The CIA guy laughed. “Believe it or not, I got it as a Christmas gift from a Soviet KGB agent. He told me this piece was found by a shepherd in Soviet Siberia.”
>Actually, it was from the first D-21 mission into China in November 1969, when the drone flew off course into Soviet Siberia before running out of fuel.
>The panel was from the drone’s engine mount. It was made from composite material loaded for radar absorption and looked as if it had been made just yesterday. The Russians mistakenly believed that this generation-old panel signified our current stealth technology. It was, in a way, a very nice tribute to our work on Tagboard.
Fun.
Skunk Works and Stealth are two great books for anybody interested in the beginnings of modern combat aircraft design.
Thanks for the req, forgot about that one and somehow hadn't gotten around to reading it yet.
>long-range drones
>in the 1960s
Yeah I can't imagine what the issue was
It still lives: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/18/china-supersonic-drone-taiwan-leaks/