Video showing a Predator Drone over Yemen being shot down,
I am not the most well versed in drone tech but is the predator drone also a recon drone?
Or is it like, a dual role thing where you can use it to shoot frickers in trucks and take photos of iranian sites
https://twitter.com/AlMogawmah/status/1759423090440740951
I feel like you already know the answer to that question
I meant more I thought we had a recon drone specifically made for this and not the predator
>recon drone
That's how it began zoomer anon. It was a 1990s recon drone. The missiles were added a decade later.
Ah makes sense
still shitty thing to lose
ehh, they're expendable. it's why we don't put a human inside them
True
but at this point its funny that both us and the houthis are just blowing up drones to each other
>still shitty thing to lose
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident
Iran already hijacked newer recon drone
Yeah its still shitty to lose
The RQ-170 is still a pretty old system, it's been around since 2007. And it's largely already been replaced by the RQ-180, which nobody has been able to get a good picture of still even though we know it flies daytime sorties.
What? First recon drone flown was 1864. Us grant flew a hot air balloon with cameras over Confederate lines to photograph. It was the balloon corp.
Picture related. Zoomers and white trash from Confederate states or conservative states don't get educated on this stuff.
One of the first drones. Balloon corp 1864 . Us Grant.
Yes. Unmanned aerial drones were first used by the United States of America in 1864. The world is that far behind in warfare.
Let's try the picture again.
Just report him for crimes. Trust me.
>Unmanned aerial drones were first used by the United States of America in 1864.
>unmanned
Doubt, but i will allow you to extrapolate.
AFAIK, all the balloons used in the civil war were manned.
Thats what i thought, but i will allow arguments against this.
Else i will declare him a homosexual; sucker of ten thousand dicks.
I HAVE WAITED LONG ENOUGH.
YOU SIRE ARE A homosexual, SUCKER OF 10,000 DICKS.
The United States operates an entire suite of aerial surveillance technology. The Reaper and the Predator are just two of them. Spy satellites (satellites that take high resolution photography, more recent models now offer live video) have been in operation since at least 1960. Manned aircraft such as the U-2 and (allegedly) the SR-71 are still in service. Space Shuttles have also been used used on occasions for intelligence gathering.
As for drones, there's actually quite old. The first known reconnaissance drone was the D-21, a "parasite" aircraft that was designed to be launched from the SR-71 and B-52 bomber and would self-destruct upon completion of its mission. It saw limited use over the Soviet Union and China from 1964 to 1971, but was ultimately unsuccessful due to repeated accidents and the photographic film being lost during recovery.
One of the newer (known) reconnaissance drones is the RQ-170, which is structurally based on the B-2 series of stealth bombers. One was still infamously lost over ten years ago after the Iranians supposedly figured out how to feed it false landing coordinates.
IIRC it's a tradition that goes back to the Iran-Iraq War, where they would memorialize teenage martyrs by showcasing their portraits at events and in public places.
>there's
*they're
>Yemeni armed forces
Fricking twitgays never seem to get that the Houthis are not Yemen.
Eh when you control most of the population you kinda are
I guess you also believe that Hamas is not the government of Gaza
Not in the near future they wont. The “government” is hiding under tunnels. But they’re surely running out of tunnels
>predator drone also a recon drone?
Yes and yes it's been shot down numerous times before. It's a drone, it flies slow as frick in a predictable fashion.
If it keeps getting shot down why not develop a smaller faster drone that does the same thing for cheaper?
It just werks. Predators/Reapers are the Glock and AR15 of drones. They may not be the absolutely optimized best but they're cheap, they're good, and they're what everyone is used to using. They fly above 99% of trash fire and if one goes down now and then to a dedicated attack nobody cares.
Seems pricey,
Idk I look at the price tag of 30 million dollars for every one and I think
>we could just make a cheaper one for less
We can. Look up things like ALTIUS to see what's in the pipeline for low altitude recon in the next or Shikaka for high altitude.
But Reapers are already in inventory. They're in portable logistics containers. They don't need new gear. They don't need to be bought - they cost $0 to the guy using them.
And physically they're a meta. Medium altitude puts drones above HMG/AA gun fire, low enough to get good camera resolution, large enough to carry more stuff than cameras, and with thick enough air they can fly a long time with a moderate amount of fuel. You can't do that with a jet zipping around or a quadcopter with half an hour of time.
Fair
you think the pilots going to get chewed out tho for getting his drone lost
no. predators don't really have the ability to evade and their whole point is to go into dangerous areas and snoop around, losses are to be expected
>look it up
>Predator losses from accidents and hostile fire are over 60%
Man at that point just crash them into the enemy when you're done lmao
He might get yelled at. Idk I doubt he'd get fired or anything, it's not like he can do much about an improved manpads or mini-sam taking out a predator.
Predators used to be considered too high altitude to be hit by stingers/iglas, but as things improved and as insurgents/nations built bigger small missiles for this use case they no longer are.
Yeah seems Houthis have a bunch of "mini" sam sites
basically small ones that are mobile, easy to hide, and easy to move
So I can imagine even for the best pilots these are nightmares
What the frick is it with Iran and Iran-affiliated groups having weird memorial picture banners up at every weapon unveiling
Muslims are death cultists
The ghosts of the dead snackbars who are pictured haunt the war machinery.
A machine spirit if you will.
I'm starting to have the feeling you're not being genuine here
The US acknowledges every predator/reaper drones shot down, you know? What I'm saying is I'm going to wait for a few days to see if this news you post is even true
Nah I'm kinda more shocked that the fail rates for these things was way higher than I thought
Like, I'm not lying when I say I really thought we thought super highly of our drones,
Of course not the smaller ones but these larger ones I kinda thought they were seen as far more important
tbqh one of the biggest points of using drones is that they're attritable. the long loiter times and increased range potential are the other big points but being attritable is the biggest point in their favour. No mama drone gets a knock on her door or a letter in the mail.
oh of course,
Christ could you imagine if this was an F-18 pilot?
You'd never hear the end of it
Getting shot down isn't really a failure for a drone, it's why they're used. They're cheaper and easier than an aircraft and a pilot by a country mile. You send them into airspace you want to be in but don't have cause to endanger a pilot for. You might as well call hollow points shitty bullets because they deform when they hit the target
Nah, I had a professor in college who flew drones as a contractor in the early 2010's and he said that one time his predator had engine troubles, and that they told him to just crash it into the side of the nearest mountain. Another drone came by sometime later and hellfire'd it just so that nobody could dig through the wreckage.
They really seem not to care about these things as long as they get the result they want, because hey, its just an overgrown RC plane at the end of the day and nobody got hurt so who really cares.
You think we haven't? Predator drones aren't even produced anymore, last ones were built in 2018
Ah so we're just running through the inventory
Basically, it was retired from Active air force duty in 2018 and only border patrol and the CIA use it these days.... apparently.
So it's likely a CIA loss?
I mean the Coast guard is in the area so it could be border patrol.... but probably.
Sounds kinda silly to have coast guard over there but we do we I guess
I mean they have a coast so it makes sense to me. Really we need larger CSGC cutters to get them up to cruiser size at least.
True
Reminds me I live near a coast guard base and an auxiliary
It's super cool seeing the larger planes and helicopters flying by
Their MSSTs and MESs are the only people in the military who have maritime law enforcement/search and seizure as their number 1 full time job.
Coasties are the perfect people to have doing this shit, and I fricking wish I'd done that instead
>t.bought the "you'll play with guns!" meme and spent 4 years as secfor
Sure.. sure still waiting on proof of the F-22 that was shot down by these derka derka goat frickers.
The USA needs to do a blockade of the Houthis and starve them to death. After 50% of them die from starvation, then see how much fight they have left in them.
Probably wait a few hours
Those frickers love their propaganda
did they claim they shot down a f22?
why tf would a f22 even fly over there
Heard the Houthi talking shit and intel suggested they were hosting a birthday party with some balloons.
i can't see this shootdown going to waste since the sam launchers are presumably mobile and hard to find. maybe the US will strike them in a few days?
>I am not the most well versed in drone tech but is the predator drone also a recon drone?
recon
>Or is it like, a dual role thing where you can use it to shoot frickers in trucks and take photos of iranian sites
the hellfire missiles were slapped on because by the time they could call in a strike, the target had left the area
the reaper was a result of this need to be able to fire on targets directly after seeing them, instead of just observing them
and so was designed from the ground up to hold weapons, resulting in an armament of 8 hellfires instead of just 2, or a 500lb guided bomb
The huthis did what Russia tried and failed to do.
Russia shot one down
The Russians did it by complete fricking accident because their pilots can't fly for shit.
>exploding almost every time they make it to the target
That's what a missile is supposed to do morono.
Wow lots of gaslighting in here. While it’s true that that these UAVs (not drones) are much MORE expendable than a manned aircraft, they are NOT disposable. Losing one hurts, just less so than losing a manned aircraft — they aren’t viewed as mass-disposable missile sponges, they are expensive, capable airframes which require a runway, ground crew, maintenance, etc and so on just as any other aircraft except the pilots are sitting in a hardened control bunker instead of in a wienerpit. I guarantee that this Predator was NOT flown purposefully into range of known threats. The main value of these UAVs isn’t that they save the lives of pilots, it’s that they’re CHEAPER, smaller and have longer endurance because they don’t need a pilot onboard.
The USAF is actually trying to ditch the MQ-9 and RQ-4s for exactly this reason- they are not survivable in AD environments and it's better served by stealthy stuff like the RQ-170 and -180
I swear
>MQ9 Predator Drone
Reaper. MQ-9 Reaper. The Predator was the MQ-1 and the they were all retired from the USAF in 2018 for the Reaper.
It still might have been a Predator though because the CIA still operates a small fleet of them.
Oh okay
Hellfires are anti-tank missiles used on the Apache and Cobra helicopters and can be easily be mounted to Predators/Reapers (they use the same mounting pylons) and can be used to destroy soft-skinned vehicles, small buildings, or people. The anti-tank and HE-FRAG variants of the Hellfire have increasingly fallen out of favor for the R9X variant, which has an inert warhead and instead deploys blades (as in sword blades) that can be fired at a vehicle-sized target and basically guaranteed to kill anyone in that very small proximity with minimal risk of harm to bystanders.
>Meanwhile the USN literally shoots down dozens of drones in single day and suddenly the thirdies start laughing about how the USN considers them a big enough threat to shoot down. It's complete cognitive dissonance.
Goat frickers always shoot down a drone and then dance like they've just destroyed the entire US armed forces, only to be promptly bombed into the dirt. It's hilarious every time. Congrats are killing the robot we sent to a dangerous place precisely because robots are not alive. I guess valuing human life isn't a Muslim thing though so they wouldn't understand.
Thirdies have no value for their own life at all and their meta is to exploit that civilised people do
so this it the power of trillion dollar mutt army ?
My prosperity is feeling so guarded right now.
>MQ9
>Predator
Drones are intended to be disposable you dumbshit.
You mean the Predditor Drone isn't stealth and can be locked on radar? No way!
Useless tech are these large drones
Worked well against the Armenians. I guess even terrorists know how to deal with them now.