blue vein steel - 2016-10-09
aside from the basic shape, it's doubtful that it's a true reverse-engineered copy. The RQ-170 is a electronic intelligence platform, and doesn't carry weapons. It's also, technologically, at least a decade old. So, while it does give them a nominally stealth shaped drone, it's not clear if they were able to reverse-engineer the skin coating (arguably as important as the shape of the vehicle for avoiding radar detection) or any of the internal intelegence gathering electronics.
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blue vein steel - 2016-10-09 also, take all of this video with a grain of salt. The drone repeatedly shown with the mesh over the intake appears to be the actual downed RQ-170. The drones in shot with a bunch of drones lined up, as if they had just been built, lack the same air intakes, and the video of the 1 flying drone is from 2014, or so, when they first claimed to have built a copy.
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blue vein steel - 2016-10-09 Iran claims to have actually "hacked" it in flight and landed it. Nearly impossible to know how they obtained it. According to wiki, the RQ-170 doesn't have a lot of typical stealth features, and was designed to fly at medium altitudes, so it appears to be primarily used in places like Iran and North Korea where an eventual capture was almost inevitable.
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blue vein steel - 2016-10-09 also interesting, the Iranian capture of the RQ-170 was actually the first time anyone in the general public had actually seen one. The RQ-170 was a black project, and all information on it up to that point was speculative. The Air force currently uses the significantly larger RQ-180 (wingspan is reportedly 130 feet) stealth drone, of which there is nearly zero public information about, and no known photographs. It allegedly has a radar signature significantly smaller than even the F-22
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Maggot Brain - 2016-10-09 Really, Iran? You "hacked" the drone :-/
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