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Research Papers: Pakistani Aerospace Technologies

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Ok I accept that I am illiterate in electronics and Computer hardware but 1 MB RAM ad 1 MB memory .... ???

I literally have no idea what how could thing could even start its operations ....
1. Embedded systems don't need as much oomph as your cell phone.
2. This is probably just the flight computer.
3. These things need to be hardened against mechanical and EM disturbances so often are pretty old designs.
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Autonomous terrain-following for unmanned air vehicles
Work on Burraq UCAV
View attachment 786506
Flight envelope for Burraq WOW:
View attachment 786507
View attachment 786509










Runway Detection and Localization in Aerial Images Using Deep Learning
and
Automated Military Vehicle Detection from Low-Altitude Aerial_Images

Some fun work done at National Center of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI)
Gotta love the obviously pasted background in the picture lol:
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This is a common trope, but one which is false. The power of the purse is the ultimate control and that is and always has been parliaments perogative. Your shiny new drone is a non starter if the treasury isn’t willing fund it. You can have all the support needed but if they don’t sign the cheque, it ain’t Happening.
And rest assured the treasury asks detailed question as to why a certain platform is needed.

Not in Pakistan, and Definitely Not with this govt. Maybe in Pakistan on Kepler 425B
 
I know that's a rhetorical question but I'll answer it anyway lol. It's simple:
1. All military tech industry in Pakistan is strictly controlled and micromanaged by the military so there are no alternatives.
2. The military often does a pretty bad job at it in many cases.
3. Our population thinks it's actually doing great because they have some successful programs and everything else is unquestionable behind scoorty.
4. This disconnect between 2 and 3 pisses me off because 3 forces us into a rut where we don't improve.

Having seen the military up-close (by studying with them and being taught by them), I can only be amazed at the magnitude of the difference between the public (civilian) perception of the military and the reality. But those are stories for another day.

Any criticism of the military in civilian circles is unpopular and is responded by allegations of treason and a recount of how glorious the armed forces are. And obviously, any criticism of the military in military circles is equal to a black Vigo at your door.

Really?! Well then, it looks like all the stories of navy being really forward thinking and sensible are true then.

That is very very welcome. You should write about those things in detail. We need some positive feedback in all the negative feedback I provide. I want to feel happy lol.

I'll tread carefully here by narrating some anecdotes and examples. The black Vigo prevents me from being very specific.
  1. As a lowly junior year student, my interview was conducted by one 1-star and two Captains - all US-educated PhDs. Not once did my lack of knowledge/experience/etc ever come up, no one gave me a dressing down. When I described my purpose of joining as getting practical research/project experience under a professor and my future plan of getting an MS from the US or Europe, the Commodore suggested to the Captains, "Maybe we can send him for an MS, fully paid and he can come back and join us". The Captains agreed. I don't think they were trying to humor me. Three of my friends and some other seniors had been shortlisted for this final interview and none of them reported any arrogant behavior or 'dressing down' incidents.
  2. We were working in specific labs and it was regular practice to approach the lab director/PI (Captain rank) directly in his office. My PI even conducted some after-hours sessions to help us with our Electromagnetics course (since we had a terrible professor in class) at our request.
  3. The PI and Co-PI (both PN) gave a full blown going-away dinner in honor of one of the (civilian) engineers who was accepted into a US university. Point being: there was no hint of the arrogance or bloody-civilian mindset around there
  4. All of us 20-somethings were working on live projects and using equipment worth hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of rupees. We were given a free hand to find creative solutions to whatever problems that would come up.
  5. There is a realization among the PN R&D people (the guys with PhDs) that we can not possibly develop everything in-house and so there is a combination of collaboration with local private industry and OTS procurements. Integration of systems from different OEMs was the main focus area.
However, everything is not all rosy, there's some bad news too:
  1. Project management practices are non-existent: as such there is huge underutilization or even wastage of very valuable resources. There are no set procedures for agreeing upon deliverables, timelines.
  2. The PN top brass (the guys at the very top) suffers from a deplorable lack of realization of the complexities of tech R&D and project delivery. They just think that by putting a bunch of PhDs, MS grads and UGs in a lab they have created the Pakistani equivalent of the Office of Naval Research, USN.
  3. The pay and benefits are mediocre (specially for those with MS or BE degrees) and this does not attract the best talent. The initial group of young geniuses (from the top national universities) has all moved on, leaving behind a mediocre to poor group of fresh grads from the lowest tier universities of Pakistan (no offence meant to anyone)
  4. There is zero cross-functional collaboration e.g. if LAB 1 requires a Vector Network Analyzer and LAB 2 (working on RF & comm projects) already has a VNA, LAB 1 will not ask LAB 2 for support. Instead, LAB 1 will go ahead and order a VNA for itself (price tag in crores of rupees)
  5. Poor work ethic of the (civilian) staff - 80-90% of the R&D staff is civilian - people use office PCs (mostly high end machines) to play games. This is in addition to the typical Pakistani practices of hours long namaz, lunch and smoke breaks. As a result, almost no work gets done during the day.
  6. Review presentations with the PI and other senior-level people is usually an exercise of falsifying test results and data, showing photoshopped pictures, etc
  7. Wrong people for the wrong jobs and frequent recruitment and resignations (i.e. coming and going of people is a routine)
I do work for a research group but the research is mostly for the USN and USAF so I don't think I can steer them to help Pakistan lol. However, I have tried getting Pakistani students into good PhD programs using my connections - however, the only people who got in touch were subpar students who weren't able to find other jobs in Pakistan so I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend them. It's a shame really. I could've helped someone but I couldn't find them and those slots got filled up by IIT grads from India instead.

Well, when my time comes, I will definitely seek your help with this.
As a fresh grad, I am reeling with the realization of the true extent of what I DON'T know. If my BE degree taught me anything, it is the scale of how illiterate I am.

Deep Sea Motion under higher sea states
NESCOM's interest in UUV's?

I have seen some other public info which indicates this. The PN has also shown interest and has taken some practical steps in this area.


Btw If I am procrastinating these days, then @JamD you are to blame for it lol
Will have to go through all these papers, no doubt about it :lol:
 
I'll tread carefully here by narrating some anecdotes and examples. The black Vigo prevents me from being very specific.
  1. As a lowly junior year student, my interview was conducted by one 1-star and two Captains - all US-educated PhDs. Not once did my lack of knowledge/experience/etc ever come up, no one gave me a dressing down. When I described my purpose of joining as getting practical research/project experience under a professor and my future plan of getting an MS from the US or Europe, the Commodore suggested to the Captains, "Maybe we can send him for an MS, fully paid and he can come back and join us". The Captains agreed. I don't think they were trying to humor me. Three of my friends and some other seniors had been shortlisted for this final interview and none of them reported any arrogant behavior or 'dressing down' incidents.
  2. We were working in specific labs and it was regular practice to approach the lab director/PI (Captain rank) directly in his office. My PI even conducted some after-hours sessions to help us with our Electromagnetics course (since we had a terrible professor in class) at our request.
  3. The PI and Co-PI (both PN) gave a full blown going-away dinner in honor of one of the (civilian) engineers who was accepted into a US university. Point being: there was no hint of the arrogance or bloody-civilian mindset around there
  4. All of us 20-somethings were working on live projects and using equipment worth hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of rupees. We were given a free hand to find creative solutions to whatever problems that would come up.
  5. There is a realization among the PN R&D people (the guys with PhDs) that we can not possibly develop everything in-house and so there is a combination of collaboration with local private industry and OTS procurements. Integration of systems from different OEMs was the main focus area.
However, everything is not all rosy, there's some bad news too:
  1. Project management practices are non-existent: as such there is huge underutilization or even wastage of very valuable resources. There are no set procedures for agreeing upon deliverables, timelines.
  2. The PN top brass (the guys at the very top) suffers from a deplorable lack of realization of the complexities of tech R&D and project delivery. They just think that by putting a bunch of PhDs, MS grads and UGs in a lab they have created the Pakistani equivalent of the Office of Naval Research, USN.
  3. The pay and benefits are mediocre (specially for those with MS or BE degrees) and this does not attract the best talent. The initial group of young geniuses (from the top national universities) has all moved on, leaving behind a mediocre to poor group of fresh grads from the lowest tier universities of Pakistan (no offence meant to anyone)
  4. There is zero cross-functional collaboration e.g. if LAB 1 requires a Vector Network Analyzer and LAB 2 (working on RF & comm projects) already has a VNA, LAB 1 will not ask LAB 2 for support. Instead, LAB 1 will go ahead and order a VNA for itself (price tag in crores of rupees)
  5. Poor work ethic of the (civilian) staff - 80-90% of the R&D staff is civilian - people use office PCs (mostly high end machines) to play games. This is in addition to the typical Pakistani practices of hours long namaz, lunch and smoke breaks. As a result, almost no work gets done during the day.
  6. Review presentations with the PI and other senior-level people is usually an exercise of falsifying test results and data, showing photoshopped pictures, etc
  7. Wrong people for the wrong jobs and frequent recruitment and resignations (i.e. coming and going of people is a routine)
were you employed near the national stadium by any chance?
also, the second part is the story of every govt organization, even in nescom, but to a far lesser extent, nescom's project management is better than others.
 
As a fresh grad, I am reeling with the realization of the true extent of what I DON'T know. If my BE degree taught me anything, it is the scale of how illiterate I am.
Feeling Exactly the same. And its overwhelming.
Don't let this realization die, use it. Don't aim for good, but the best.
Be sincere with everyone, and ask the Almighty to shower his blessings on you, it will come in torr.ents, and you will rise to heights you cannot possibly fathom.
 
Having seen the military up-close (by studying with them and being taught by them), I can only be amazed at the magnitude of the difference between the public (civilian) perception of the military and the reality. But those are stories for another day.

Any criticism of the military in civilian circles is unpopular and is responded by allegations of treason and a recount of how glorious the armed forces are. And obviously, any criticism of the military in military circles is equal to a black Vigo at your door.
Huh..I keep trying to make this thread a happy place and failing lol.

Let me narrate a recent story. I met a NUST-CAE (Risalpur) civilian graduate recently. Extremely bright guy pursuing a PhD here. I met him for the first time and he had what I can only describe as PTSD from spending four years at CAE. As he narrates being a civilian in CAE was hell. He was constantly treated/roughed up like a cadet, especially so because he was top of his class. He was full of rage how barely passing cadets behaved like (and were treated by faculty like) superior in caliber to civilians. He said from day one the cadets were taught they were better than everyone and the cadets never made him forget it. There were different bathrooms for cadets and civilians. This didn't sound like a Pakistani in a Pakistani university in 2010s. This sounded like a brown person in the British Air Force Academy in 1930. The colonial hangover is strong with the military - that is obvious.

But then I think this isn't JUST the military. I look at SUPARCO and they had different bathrooms for officers and "others". All these civilians do exactly the same horrible things that we talk about the military. The colonial hangover is with everyone, not just with those few that end up in the military. I have very little doubt that if we had civilian supremacy in Pakistan we would be talking about the exact same things, just with different actors. It's just that the military is in control and is efficient in maintaining its control so it's the "gora sahb".

I just keep thinking how many good people we have pushed out of Pakistan forever like this. Not that we have a hundreds to replace them either.


I'll tread carefully here by narrating some anecdotes and examples. The black Vigo prevents me from being very specific.
  1. As a lowly junior year student, my interview was conducted by one 1-star and two Captains - all US-educated PhDs. Not once did my lack of knowledge/experience/etc ever come up, no one gave me a dressing down. When I described my purpose of joining as getting practical research/project experience under a professor and my future plan of getting an MS from the US or Europe, the Commodore suggested to the Captains, "Maybe we can send him for an MS, fully paid and he can come back and join us". The Captains agreed. I don't think they were trying to humor me. Three of my friends and some other seniors had been shortlisted for this final interview and none of them reported any arrogant behavior or 'dressing down' incidents.
  2. We were working in specific labs and it was regular practice to approach the lab director/PI (Captain rank) directly in his office. My PI even conducted some after-hours sessions to help us with our Electromagnetics course (since we had a terrible professor in class) at our request.
  3. The PI and Co-PI (both PN) gave a full blown going-away dinner in honor of one of the (civilian) engineers who was accepted into a US university. Point being: there was no hint of the arrogance or bloody-civilian mindset around there
  4. All of us 20-somethings were working on live projects and using equipment worth hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of rupees. We were given a free hand to find creative solutions to whatever problems that would come up.
  5. There is a realization among the PN R&D people (the guys with PhDs) that we can not possibly develop everything in-house and so there is a combination of collaboration with local private industry and OTS procurements. Integration of systems from different OEMs was the main focus area.
However, everything is not all rosy, there's some bad news too:
  1. Project management practices are non-existent: as such there is huge underutilization or even wastage of very valuable resources. There are no set procedures for agreeing upon deliverables, timelines.
  2. The PN top brass (the guys at the very top) suffers from a deplorable lack of realization of the complexities of tech R&D and project delivery. They just think that by putting a bunch of PhDs, MS grads and UGs in a lab they have created the Pakistani equivalent of the Office of Naval Research, USN.
  3. The pay and benefits are mediocre (specially for those with MS or BE degrees) and this does not attract the best talent. The initial group of young geniuses (from the top national universities) has all moved on, leaving behind a mediocre to poor group of fresh grads from the lowest tier universities of Pakistan (no offence meant to anyone)
  4. There is zero cross-functional collaboration e.g. if LAB 1 requires a Vector Network Analyzer and LAB 2 (working on RF & comm projects) already has a VNA, LAB 1 will not ask LAB 2 for support. Instead, LAB 1 will go ahead and order a VNA for itself (price tag in crores of rupees)
  5. Poor work ethic of the (civilian) staff - 80-90% of the R&D staff is civilian - people use office PCs (mostly high end machines) to play games. This is in addition to the typical Pakistani practices of hours long namaz, lunch and smoke breaks. As a result, almost no work gets done during the day.
  6. Review presentations with the PI and other senior-level people is usually an exercise of falsifying test results and data, showing photoshopped pictures, etc
  7. Wrong people for the wrong jobs and frequent recruitment and resignations (i.e. coming and going of people is a routine
Thank you! :)







Well, when my time comes, I will definitely seek your help with this.
Definitely. Just fair warning that I was talking about very specific positions that have been filled since. However, I can still put you in touch with the right people with the right recommendations. Funny story: I even tried advising an FYP for some Pakistani students - it didn't turn out well. But that's a story for another day.


As a fresh grad, I am reeling with the realization of the true extent of what I DON'T know. If my BE degree taught me anything, it is the scale of how illiterate I am.
Feeling Exactly the same. And its overwhelming.
At the risk of sounding like a sasta motivational speaker, this is very very good. I wish more people had this realization when they graduated. You shouldn't be like the PAF flt lt with the 2.0 GPA that thinks they can now design Azm lol.

Not sure how scientifically verified this "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is but it sure is useful to talk about things. Most UG's are at the peak of mount stupid when they graduate. Our research group had one this month - an American that thought he was the top of the world because he knew how to run some software packages that we didn't know about, he quit because he didn't want to work unless he was the first author of a paper that had 30 percent chance of being accepted. So stupid arrogant people everywhere is the point.

You guys are lucky that you have passed the peak and are probably at A? That's the good news.

The bad news is that it gets worse. Point B will probably happen somewhere towards the very end of your PhD if you pursue one. And then the rest of your life is spent slowly climbing the slope of enlightenment and then you die before reaching any sort of plateau (that plateau is a fiction in my opinion).
1634822734612.png





Btw If I am procrastinating these days, then @JamD you are to blame for it lol
Will have to go through all these papers, no doubt about it :lol:
Please don't lol. These papers are fun as curiosities and to see what fun secret applications they are being applied to but they are not great scientific papers and you won't learn much of value. Many of these have been submitted to subpar journals and conferences, which means they will have lots of errors/typos and reading a paper with those is not a burden a researcher should take. It's the author's job to make their paper as perfect as possible if they want it to be read seriously.
 
Let me narrate a recent story. I met a NUST-CAE (Risalpur) civilian graduate recently. Extremely bright guy pursuing a PhD here. I met him for the first time and he had what I can only describe as PTSD from spending four years at CAE. As he narrates being a civilian in CAE was hell.
Is He by any chance Imran Hayat?
 
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Huh..I keep trying to make this thread a happy place and failing lol.

Let me narrate a recent story. I met a NUST-CAE (Risalpur) civilian graduate recently. Extremely bright guy pursuing a PhD here. I met him for the first time and he had what I can only describe as PTSD from spending four years at CAE. As he narrates being a civilian in CAE was hell. He was constantly treated/roughed up like a cadet, especially so because he was top of his class. He was full of rage how barely passing cadets behaved like (and were treated by faculty like) superior in caliber to civilians. He said from day one the cadets were taught they were better than everyone and the cadets never made him forget it. There were different bathrooms for cadets and civilians. This didn't sound like a Pakistani in a Pakistani university in 2010s. This sounded like a brown person in the British Air Force Academy in 1930. The colonial hangover is strong with the military - that is obvious.

But then I think this isn't JUST the military. I look at SUPARCO and they had different bathrooms for officers and "others". All these civilians do exactly the same horrible things that we talk about the military. The colonial hangover is with everyone, not just with those few that end up in the military. I have very little doubt that if we had civilian supremacy in Pakistan we would be talking about the exact same things, just with different actors. It's just that the military is in control and is efficient in maintaining its control so it's the "gora sahb".

I just keep thinking how many good people we have pushed out of Pakistan forever like this. Not that we have a hundreds to replace them either.

And I thought the Navy was bad. Compared to this guy, my 4 years were heaven.
Ragging of any sort (by civilians against civilians or cadets against civilians) was a cardinal sin and any offender was liable to be kicked out. A high-level PN board of inquiry had done this to a group of students in the past and no such incident even occurred again. We shared the same classrooms, bathrooms and cafeteria with the cadets and the cadets were very civil and respectful towards us. There was general consensus that they weren't exactly good in academics but this was welcomed since it ensured a lower overall class average and helped a lot of us get good grades with lesser effort. However, this does not change the fact that the military must remain in the barracks and not venture into education or R&D.

Of course, both the military and civilian bureaucracy are just two children of the apparatus that the white man set up to rule and plunder. Both children maintained the family legacy (the attitude towards the 'natives'), but only one (the military) remained good at what it was supposed to do.


Definitely. Just fair warning that I was talking about very specific positions that have been filled since. However, I can still put you in touch with the right people with the right recommendations. Funny story: I even tried advising an FYP for some Pakistani students - it didn't turn out well. But that's a story for another day.

That's okay. Don't plan to return to school for a while :lol:
But whenever I do, any help provided by anyone would be welcomed. A little push in the right direction can go a long way.
And ouch, would love to hear that story


At the risk of sounding like a sasta motivational speaker, this is very very good. I wish more people had this realization when they graduated. You shouldn't be like the PAF flt lt with the 2.0 GPA that thinks they can now design Azm lol.

Not sure how scientifically verified this "Dunning-Kruger Effect" is but it sure is useful to talk about things. Most UG's are at the peak of mount stupid when they graduate. Our research group had one this month - an American that thought he was the top of the world because he knew how to run some software packages that we didn't know about, he quit because he didn't want to work unless he was the first author of a paper that had 30 percent chance of being accepted. So stupid arrogant people everywhere is the point.

You guys are lucky that you have passed the peak and are probably at A? That's the good news.

The bad news is that it gets worse. Point B will probably happen somewhere towards the very end of your PhD if you pursue one. And then the rest of your life is spent slowly climbing the slope of enlightenment and then you die before reaching any sort of plateau (that plateau is a fiction in my opinion).
View attachment 786646
You do love your graphs :lol:
One of the best professors I had (again a PN Captain lol) said: "A PhD only shows how little a person really knows"
I wish I had lived in the age of Galileo or Newton, relatively simpler times when the overall body of knowledge was way smaller. If I never do a PhD, it will probably be because I chose to explore knowledge of a wider variety rather than being an expert in one extremely specific area. And also because I sometimes feel I am too dumb to literally create new knowledge - the true aim of a PhD.


Please don't lol. These papers are fun as curiosities and to see what fun secret applications they are being applied to but they are not great scientific papers and you won't learn much of value. Many of these have been submitted to subpar journals and conferences, which means they will have lots of errors/typos and reading a paper with those is not a burden a researcher should take. It's the author's job to make their paper as perfect as possible if they want it to be read seriously.

Lol I actually realized this once I looked a bit closely. The only paper worth reading imo is the Burraq one - it has some technical info that MIGHT add to my knowledge 🤷‍♂️

The quality of the other papers reminds me of some real horror stories. "Ganda hai par dhanda hai ye" sums up the 'business' of writing papers in Pakistan
 
On a positive note, Civilians in Pentagon/American Military faces the same issues

Ex Pentagon Software Chief resignation note. He resigned due to the same fauji mindset being discussed here
"
In his resignation announcement, too, he did not reveal his disappointment with the way Pentagon functions. "Please stop putting a Major or Lt Col. (despite their devotion, exceptional attitude, and culture) in charge of ICAM, Zero Trust or Cloud for 1 to 4 million users when they have no previous experience in that field – we are setting up critical infrastructure to fail. We would not put a pilot in the cockpit without extensive flight training; why would we expect someone with no IT experience to be close to successful? They do not know what to execute on or what to prioritize which leads to endless risk reduction efforts and diluted focus," he had written."

 
He taught us CFD and was also from CAE, basically recounted the same experiences, and told us how blessed we are to be NOT in CAE. And when discussing careers told us to run in opposite directions. Now in the US for Ph.D. To be honest we thought he was exaggerating and things couldn't be that screwed up.
 
I really don't think they do in terms of R&D. They are much closer to Russia or North Korea. Pakistan is a weird mix of extreme capitalist and extreme communist systems I've noticed. There is very little room for private enterprise in the military space. This is diametrically opposite to the US where the private military industrial complex is a thing (not something we should aspire to either).
Based on what the members here are saying as per their experiences...I guess the only way out(somewhat) would be to start private companies(like for example Boeing or Hyundai but much much smaller)...
...where two things will be required
1) A few talented ppl who r willing to stay in the country and work for this company(despite income and perks being considerably less than some foreign opportunity). It would help immensely if they themselves held some stake in this company.
2) This company...whatever field it works in...must have some overlap between civilian R&D and products...and military R&D and products. So that it can continue to make profit...even if Pak military doesn't buy its products...and instead chooses some foreign option(or from the state owned enterprises like HIT, PAC, KSEW, etc). This is why I mentioned examples like Boeing or Hyundai...bcuz they research and develop products for civilian use...but some of that inevitably ends up benefitting them in developing products for use by the military. If the military does end up buying the products of this private company...well then even better as it will make them grow further.

...once these types of private ventures...make a foothold...they should be able to outcompete fauji minded inflexible state enterprises.

I know this discussion is going off topic from the main purpose of the thread...but I think it is a crucial discussion that we should have. Perhaps create a separate thread for it if necessary...
...while it's all good and fun when ppl make fun of Tejas, Arjun, etc.(products resulting from the same problems we r discussing...in their state owned entities), we ignore how fast India's private companies like Tata are making progress. They have vast amount of resources and talent...that they are gearing towards providing solutions to their military..added to that is the willingness of established defense companies(from all over the world) to make partnership with these Indian companies...in return for big orders or for JV type projects...
...this gives them a further jump start. If this continues...and Pakistan's private sector remains in the sorry state we r in...
...soon they will be laughing at our equivalents of Tejas, Arjun(or whatever our state owned entities can cook up)...all the while they will have their own equivalents of Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, etc.

@JamD @SQ8 @S A L M A N. @Quwa @Raider 21 @Akh1112 @messiach
@Blacklight @HRK @Dazzler
 
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