IRGC Gunakan 7

This video was released by the IRGC showing their domestically produced UCAV with some similar features we have seen in other states' UCAV's .
What can we gleam from this short clip about its capabilities? This footage was from their recent strike into Syria as their response to the attack on a military parade last month. It claims that they have integrated technology they reverse engineered from our RQ-170.


Thoughts?

It's difficult to ascertain much from the short video, except it has got lot of lights. It's quite well known that Iran had reverse engineered the RQ-170 that was lost by the US a few year back, although there's reverse engineering to build a shiny model for propaganda, and there's reverse engineering to produce a UAV clone that works. I have no doubt of the competence of Iranian engineers, but suspect there's a big bucket of hype in anything they say.

That said, I did read something about an Iranian UAV shot down by Israel a few months ago may have resembled the RQ-170.

a reply to: paraphi
I like to wonder if getting that 170 jumped them ahead a generation from where they were at in UAV technology. Clearly they made improvements to their existing airframe design , and I am betting the layout and composition of the circuitry, sensors, and mineral composition of it all was beyond what they were even capable of.

It's like when one those things from space crash in the northern latitudes and then suddenly technology jumps i to overdrive and everyone starts shooting each other with their new discoveries??

Remember to tungaska event happened at the onset off ww1. And another massive blast in Siberia in 2013 or 2014 and suddenly the Russians are jumping around the world with their own improved tech.

That's what this drone was for Iran. Their Innovation has jumped ahead some years as a result.

a reply to: worldstarcountry

The problem with that is that it's really not easy to reverse engineer things. You can figure out what they did, but as far as many times go, it's not just a matter of "we got our hands on this, now we're 20 years ahead". Just look at China. They've been reverse engineering Russian gear for decades, and it's still not quite the same. Their J-15 has had a lot of problems, is overweight, and under powered.

The best example of this is the Chinese 727. It looked identical, and was an exact copy, using a 727 that they had bought. But the cockpit was cruder, and you could barely move the flight controls.

The RQ-170 would have given them a leg up, but not a huge one until they can make everything they need to, at the level they need to.

They may not 100% replicate the material used but they may substitute it with inferior ones..

a reply to: Blackfinger

Which reduces its effectiveness significantly.

a reply to: Zaphod58
Well it is flying better than the previous stuff they had. I'm not saying it is anywhere near as stealthy. Maybe they were more Interested in the avionics than the stealth?? I see they are doing the internal weapons bay, with some sophisticated missiles I may add.

But they did always focus on their missile program pretty heavily.

Maybe they are also getting more efficient data streams as well. We should shoot some of them out the sky. You k ow they are about to tear off a piece of south Iraq, can't we use that as a justification or something??

Then we could learne what exactly they were able to adapt from our stuff to see just how good they are at this.

a reply to: Zaphod58

There's an interesting anecdote I remember hearing a while ago. When the Soviets got their hands on B-29s they were instructed to reverse engineer them exactly. Some of the areas where they ran into issues were replicating American Imperial system's 3/8 inch fasteners or inch standard sheet aluminum. 3/8" is 9.525mm, and from an engineering precision standpoint getting precision down to a thousandth of a millimeter is pretty tight without CNC tools (especially for 1940s russia). Because the entire bomber was in imperial measurements, it took them months/years of re-engineering even though Tupolev had 3 flying examples and 1 crashed example right infront of them in Moscow

Knowing what the parts and materials are and how they're made is nice, but it's kinda useless if you don't have the ability and machine tools to manufacture the parts.

a reply to: hawkguy
Nobody here is saying this thing is any kind of equivalent to the device it was replicated from. This is merely an observation of what they have managed to learn and apply to their equipment. Clearly it achieved it's task and purpose. They successfully hit terrorist targets that are surrounded by USA backed forces in conjunction with a ballistic missile attack.

I guess they sorta did us a favor, that is if those elements are in fact terrorists in need of elimination.