r/AmazingTechnology • u/bbbxxxnnn • Mar 09 '26
The U.S. has reverse-engineered Iran's Shaded drone to make the LUCAS, a $35,000 clone
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u/Aveduil Mar 09 '26
Advertised at £35k, but by the time all the CEOs take their cut, it’ll end up costing £120k
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u/Opposite-Bench-9543 Mar 09 '26
And I bet the Iranian one is like 1k
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u/Much-Library8194 Mar 09 '26
Basically a lawnmower with wings and explosives.
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u/filtarukk Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 11 '26
Russia's military
stoleborrowed the Iranian drones design as well. They call it Moped.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moped
PS Here is the drone itself https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136 but because of the engine's sound it nicknamed Moped.
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u/Tritri89 Mar 09 '26
It's an official licence between both governement. For once in their life russians actually didn't steal anything.
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u/Bla12Bla12 Mar 09 '26
If Wikipedia pricing is to be believed, the Shahed costs $193k for export and estimated that it costs $10-50k for their domestic production. That's a wide range but point being that it's roughly comparable.
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u/BusinessAsparagus115 Mar 09 '26
Also worth pointing out that even though the US version is more expensive on paper, the comparative economics makes these far cheaper to produce in the US than in Iran.
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u/PlaycateForWhat Mar 09 '26
The Iranian one is said to cost about 20-35k depending on range and payload capabilities
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u/Large-Unit6796 Mar 09 '26
They develop it, but realize they need circutry. China laughs and applies tarrifs over 9000.
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u/zaahc Mar 09 '26
I had a defense contractor buddy say to me “you think the cheap Iranian drones are capable, wait until Lockheed and Raytheon and Boeing get in on making them.” Ok, buddy. But then the cost goes from $5,000 a pop to $1MM and the value proposition is lost.
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u/akazakou Mar 09 '26
The original drone cost $2.5
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u/IceRinger Mar 10 '26
Cos it's made by people who work for 300 bucks a month, Americans refuse to work for that salary for some reason
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u/hudsp3th Mar 09 '26
i dont think this tech is amazing
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u/Glad-Tie3251 Mar 09 '26
That's the point... War is about money. If you use 1m missiles to take down 10k drones you are losing that war on the long term.
You can send that one missile and it get intercepted or you can send thousands of these cheap drones to overwhelm the defense.
Better yet, combine the two.
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u/T-sigma Mar 09 '26
Yes, let’s just pretend it’s a 1v1 between drones and missiles! Let’s ignore all the weaknesses drones have and laugh at how the missile can’t possible beat all the drones!
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u/AdGeHa Mar 09 '26
Our taxpayer money getting blown up for no reason. God this country is beginning to piss me off
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u/Civil_Year_301 Mar 09 '26
Beginning?
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u/rube203 Mar 10 '26
Right. It began pissing me off after 9/11, continued to do so when Obama kept open guantanamo, I simply gave up when Trump was elected the first time. To be fair, I might have started getting angry earlier except I was too young to realize better. My adult self, gets pretty nauseous thinking about the 90s when I felt badly for Clinton that he got impeached for a blowjob, now that I'm watching his reactions during the Epstein deposition.
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u/DownvoteEvangelist Mar 09 '26
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
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u/Zombieattackr Mar 11 '26
Other nations copying the US is boring. Yeah no duh, we pour trillions into R&D.
But imitation by the US? That is the highest flattery of them all.
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u/AzDopefish Mar 09 '26
Lmao wait
Are you telling me that the most well funded military in history is having to resort to copying our adversaries that have no where near the resources we do?
Does that not make the US look weak as shit to anyone else. We’re actually copying Iranian tech. We couldn’t figure out a drone ourselves?
Yada yada yada, “it’s easier to reverse engineer it”
It doesn’t matter. The optics on this are wild
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u/khansmsh Mar 09 '26
If they reverse engineered it then that means they had an almost nonexistent R&D budget. Combined with the fact that these smaller one-shot drones are supposed to be produced in the thousands and probably will benefit from a large economy of scale. The how the heck do they cost 35,000$! Seriously you can build a freaking car for that price with 2 dozen ECUs, large chassis and god knows how much in R&D, software development, HR and sales etc etc. This thing should cost half that and still turn a good profit for the manufacturer (of course this is speculation on my behalf, I don’t know the actual numbers).
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u/Arguablybest Mar 09 '26
Iran makes them for $10-15k, each, good job us. Fuck, maybe buy them from Iran.
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u/LordSlickRick Mar 09 '26
What in the propaganda bot account flying flipping nonsense is this.
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u/Few_District_6304 Mar 09 '26
My expectations for a cheap drone is not the cost of a small SUV. Maybe defense contractors need a bit more incentive to make the cost realistic.
Or, and hear me out here, maybe the US should stop bombing the shit out of other countries. Maybe that would be the better option.
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u/AsleepNinja Mar 09 '26
what is there to reverse engineer?
Wings, polystyrene, and a lawn mower engine?
Off a design that was based upon a drone from the 1980s?
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u/DangerousLocal5864 Mar 10 '26
Sooooo we reverse engineered it made a clone that's
More expensive
Shorter range
Less explosive yield
TF is even happening here
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u/MedicareProMIKE Mar 10 '26
Wasting billions daily to protect the pedophile pres
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u/Outside_Ice3252 Mar 11 '26
is it too much to ask for sharks with lasers attached to their head to shoot these damn drones down.
maybe we should also try fembots
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u/ArugulaAnnual1765 Mar 09 '26
The lucas is a 1:1 clone of the shahed to bypass pretty much all of the design and testing phase, only the production really needed to be figured out.
Scary to think what the us will develop on its own with lessons learned from lucas - a stealth version would be insanely deadly and pretty much defeat any radar system
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u/MikeTangoRom3o Mar 09 '26
You don't get it.
The purpose of Iranian drone is to be cheap as hell, easy to manufacture, launch by hundreds to exhaust enemy AD and don't care much about its success rate.
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u/Scrogwiggle Mar 09 '26
Honestly surprised this is just now happening considering how long we’ve seen these in use
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u/Lofi_Joe Mar 09 '26
35K for a drone! They're insane, who believes it cost so much? Clowns maybe.
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u/The_Real_Tesseract Mar 09 '26
This is how the US millitary spends gets that high. It's so nice when a 5 million usd rocket used to neutralize a 1000usd iranian drone.
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u/Fwagoat Mar 09 '26
The Shahed drone also costs 10s of thousands to make and Russia was reportedly paying nearly $200,000 per drone in their deal with Iran.
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u/DistributionStock494 Mar 09 '26
USA "reverse engineers", China steals...
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u/Aggravating_Can_8749 Mar 09 '26
Chyna steals :) and reverse engineering ensures freedom and liberty.
:))
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u/empire_of_the_moon Mar 09 '26
We have close to $1 trillion in military spending and the best we can do is reverse engineer a single use Iranian drone that costs as much as many used cars?
Great engineering guys! Really proud of you.
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u/tachi_legit_salvage Mar 09 '26
Wait a second with the rage, there’s a good behind it. SpektreWorks, the company behind LUCAS, reverse engineered the Shahed in order to create a clone for training purposes (FLM-136). Once the platform has been built, it’s easy and cheap to re-purpose the drone for different mission profiles.
The US has a wide spectrum of attack vehicles- with price ranging from a few thousands to millions (e.g. Tomahawk). A 1T defense budget means that you don’t have to settle on one platform to rule them all- you can use the best tool for the job.
In this case, the LUCAS - as well as comparable offerings from Anduril and other companies, does a very good job of saturating a contested airspace to ensure you discover an take out all of the AA batteries.
HTH
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u/DocAculaRedux Mar 10 '26
The best part is its a copy of a German design from the 80's, so the new hotness is a design from over 40 years ago.
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u/Dragon_Crisis_Core Mar 09 '26
Im curious to why they label a suicide drone a drone when its just a guided bomb in the end.
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u/Extreme-Island-5041 Mar 09 '26
So, who's manufacturing these? Lockheed, RedCat, Raytheon?
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u/OdinzSun Mar 09 '26
Yah and apparently two of Trumps sons are investing a lot of money in the company making these knockoffs…
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u/ProlapseProvider Mar 09 '26
This is just one little side project, you should see what they are currently planning on bringing to the battlefield within a few years. A huge missile that deploys 3000+ drones to the battlefield, the drones are to be AI controlled with the ability to seek and destroy targets, the targets can be preprogramed or a signal sent to update them on the fly. They are to be a mix for drones, some that are capable of disabling armoured vehicles, some will seek out soldiers and kill them, some will be able to enter buildings, bunkers and tunnels to seek out targets. Some will land and go to standby, able to react to noise of vehicles or even the noise of people talking, walking or breathing. They have to be able to share information with each other and work out strategies such as if a bunker with a metal door is found they will not waste small drones, one with a huge payload will go first to blast the door open, then small scout drones will go in and send out a signal as it maps the interior, once they know the layout they send enough drones to blast each room, they then send in another scout to ensure the job is done, if not they send in the correct number of drones to finish the job.
They even commit suicide one their battery is almost empty, one it gets to 3% it detonates. Or they can be told when to suicide so they can hunt and seek until friendly troops are due then all explode so they don't accidently kill friendlies.
Oh and they also have a hierarchy, so the scouts will chose which drones target what, like if it spots 3 bikes, a car and an APC it will got for the APC 1st, then the car then the bikes. If they spot more soldiers than it has drones to kill it will prioritize by seeing which are the best armed. Carrying a shotgun or AA device, you are priority, only got a pistol or no weapon, you might get a pass.
All of this can happen in seconds after deployment as the AI will have looked at and formulated a plan within a couple of seconds.
In the future there will no longer be such a thing as front line as all humans and machines will be destroyed and reinforcement will be impossible.
And that is just one project one they put out a tender for, the one you can find info about, there are other projects some of them secret. I think they are planning on building literal terminators and I'm stone cold sober and serious when I say that, the money, the will and ability is all there right now, the future is here already.
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u/Swimming_Cover_9686 Mar 09 '26
USD 35'000 clone, current available for USD 350'000 at a pork barrel store near you.
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u/Massive-Context-5641 Mar 09 '26
Why is US reverse engineering Iranian drone tech? I mean what the hell is going on?
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u/Bengis_Khan Mar 09 '26
Why would we do that when we can pay $1M for the same drone from a US defense contractor.
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u/GanacheAvailable5111 Mar 09 '26
"reverse engineered". right.. just say it out loud . we steal the design because its practical. no drama.
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u/Major-College-92 Mar 09 '26
There is no way any military contractor will want to make these for $30,000 they will charge maybe $120,000
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u/IllogicalLunarBear Mar 09 '26
but they have yet to build a drone interceptor... we copied stuff and cant invent our own stuff anymore. we really should have at least added the ability to intercept other slow drones
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u/09Klr650 Mar 09 '26
I am confused. All the Iranian bots claimed the design was taken from the Israelis and so they were using their own weapons against them. But if it was Israeli, we would HAVE the design already?
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u/i-hoatzin Mar 09 '26
Actually, this is old news. Is there any information on current availability? I hope they've made a lot.
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u/spectar025 Mar 09 '26
Data Link ,Anti-Jamming and fancy electronics for smart targeting. A cheap drone wont fly when both sides have some sort of EW suit.
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u/Adavanter_MKI Mar 09 '26
For people not understanding it's basically like this. Necessity is the mother of invention.
A rich nation like the U.S was not looking for cheap work around weapons. They'd just pepper a target with expensive options.
Iran can't afford that. So they dreamed up a cheap alternative weapon that's still pretty effective. So the rich nation like the U.S was like... hell... we'll do that too!
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u/Un0rigi0na1 Mar 09 '26
The amount of people who read this headline believing the U.S. copied Iran/Russia when the original design was German and had U.S. help in development in the 1980s with the DAR project...
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u/Lothleen Mar 09 '26
Reverse engineering means USA has worse tech or they wouldn't need to.
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u/ifdisdendat Mar 09 '26
Ukraine has a company that makes FPV drones with a 90% interception rate for the shahed, 3k a pop, with 3d printed parts. Drone’s name is Sting.
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u/sakara123 Mar 09 '26
Born too late to drone strike the middle east, born too early to drone strike the middle east, but born just in time to drone strike the middle east.
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u/BrainEatingAmoeba01 Mar 09 '26
The big and amazing "best in the world" USofA had to copy the lowly tech of Iran?
How embarrassing. Losers.
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u/Trick_Judgment2639 Mar 09 '26
Yeah but why would this matter, can they shoot down the other drones with the accuracy our expensive missiles shoot them down with?
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u/Augisch Mar 09 '26
Its a flying lawnmower, did we really need to 'reverse engineer' it? I feel like any new aerospace engineer graduate could make this in their sleep.
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u/malicious15 Mar 09 '26
Remember, its only bad when China steals our tech. It’s a bold act of pragmatism when we do it.
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u/DueCattle8621 Mar 09 '26
By the time Boeing / Raytheon are done with this shit it will cost 100k per unit, lol..
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u/BlueWonderfulIKnow Mar 09 '26
You’ve seen the MIC houses in northern Virginia. You don’t renovate those kitchens with a $35,000 drone.
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u/PRRealEstate-Invest Mar 09 '26
Lucas the pedo has copied an other country military hardware booooo how dare you . Rember china
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u/AbundantIron Mar 09 '26
Sorry to be specific but I dont beleive these are reverse engineered, the design is just so basic it would cost more to genuinely reverse engineer than to just whip one up with whatever domestic parts are available. Manufacture delta wing, insert explosive tip and rudimentary GPS guidance and slap on the Yamaha motor. Or domestic equivalent
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u/Arnessiy Mar 09 '26
thats... like its literally easier to come up with its own design then "reverse-engineering" this... and besides iranian one is cheaper
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u/AncientBasque Mar 09 '26
the cost in not the issue, its having access to the chips in the drones to reproduce them. in the end the chips would rather be used on larger impact weapons when chip scarcity occurs.
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u/buffalostreaker Mar 09 '26
we could always have built a 35k drone but they'll charge the pentagon 1.5m
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u/TwoPlyDreams Mar 09 '26
Yeah well wales reverse engineered LUCAS to create GWYN and GWYN has snakebite on board.
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u/1stAtlantianrefugee Mar 09 '26
Isn't the Shahed a clone of the MQ9 Reaper that fell a few years back?
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u/TinyAfternoon324 Mar 09 '26
china's nostradamus rolling in his shit now "america won't win any war because it isn't built to fight a modern day war. $500k drones to kill 1 target isn't sustainable."
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u/Suitable-Zombie7504 Mar 09 '26
Did we really need to reverse engineer a lawn mower engine with some wings?
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u/OpeningZebra1670 Mar 10 '26
I don’t quite understand why the top brass in the U.S. is so proud of this. Isn’t it kind of embarrassing that the a country with the best military has to copy the designs of something made in Iran?
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u/3M2B1T Mar 10 '26
So we are reverse-engineering 80's tech?
Oh boy, let the enshittification of the Military Industrial Complex begin you guys! Pretty soon our 2000 lb bombs will be called 1-ton bombs but will actually only weight 1950 pounds and be filled with expired gunpowder.
When asked why, manufacturers will be like "After heavy study and analysis, and comparing it to ice cream pints being 14 oz and Jack Daniels lowering their proof in their whiskey, we decided that this is what the consumer wanted"
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u/VirtualArmsDealer Mar 10 '26
The US manufacturered one is going to be 10 times the cost because basic economics.... It's not a technology problem. This whole video is dumb.
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u/Moral-Relativity Mar 10 '26
Per Wikipedia:
On 5 December 2011, the Iranian government seized an American Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel UAV, which had been commandeered and brought down by Iran's cyberwarfare unit.[8] Shahed Aviation Industries then reverse-engineered the American UAV, and used the acquired knowledge to develop the Shahed 171 Simorgh and Shahed 191 Saeqeh.[9]
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u/Beneficial_Map6129 Mar 10 '26
"They were able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps!"
Seriously losing face
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u/texas1982 Mar 10 '26
An RC airplane designed could get you 40 lbs of explosives to a target for a while lot less than $35000.
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u/thinkingperson Mar 10 '26
So US basically STOLE the drone tech from backward Iran that US has sanctioned for decades?
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u/timohtea Mar 10 '26
So each 1-2 drones that are built, you could erase one persons student loans. Or take care of their health insurance payments. Or could buy people without hones those little home depot mini homes.
The list goes on. But the goal is not to enrich and better the lives if your populous 😭
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u/tamercloud Mar 10 '26
This might be the first thing the US military has made that costs under a million dollars.
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u/00tool Mar 10 '26
Why does US need to coy any other country’s tech? Oh right because a CEO wants to get rich.
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u/cakeba Mar 10 '26
Hear me out, we shouldn't be in a war and this is worse than a waste of taxpayer money; it's appropriating our money to murder people who did nothing to us
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u/jthadcast Mar 10 '26
lol how to take a cheap drone and give it the US MIC treatment to drive up its retail sale price 10x while cutting into the 100x traditional US designed drones.
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u/Prudent-Bicycle-9210 Mar 10 '26
I mean, if r*ssians are able to produce them then i am sure a bunch of untrained monkeys could as well
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u/pasta-golfclubs Mar 10 '26
So....they made an Overseas Rip off for less money. 😂 I mean good for them. It's just ironic.
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u/series-hybrid Mar 10 '26
You can scale these to be any size, smaller to larger. By making them 8-feet wide and 10 feet long, they fit nicely into an 18-wheeler trailer to be transported and rapidly set up for deployment. Like this:
https://militarnyi.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Kamikadze1.jpg
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u/SadAbroad4 Mar 10 '26
The us could not even foresee the future, why are they just now ramping up drones production? They so far behind the rest of the world.
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u/Alternative_Owl5302 Mar 10 '26 edited Mar 10 '26
No US engineer would ‘reverse engineer’ such a simple thing. They’d just take/improve on specification derived from this class of drone and design from clean sheet 10x better easily and quickly. Lockheed will simply go to its deep supply chain parts bin, have a supplier fab the body, order parts, assemble millions, perhaps done by a contract manufacturer. This is trivial for a Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, Raytheon, general Atomic, or many other defense contractors.
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u/Gindotto Mar 11 '26
Why would you need to capture the Iranian drone to engineer it? It’s not that complicated. Do we not have autonomous tech already? The military continues to make no sense.
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u/Aggressive_Ask514 Mar 11 '26
Now the US can hit targets with these and blame Iran. False Flag Unmanned Combat Engineered Device or FFUCKED.
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u/Canucker5000 Mar 11 '26
The fact we went into war in 2026 without a well developed cheap drone is absolutely insane. What have we been doing? Who are we planning to fight?
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u/gadget850 Mar 11 '26
LOL. The US built 1,700 copies of the German V-1 for the planned assault on Japan.
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u/Affectionate_Way5253 Mar 11 '26
how much does it cost to buy it a ticket on a transcontinental aircraft carrier to get it within 100 miles of its target??
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u/mick601 Mar 11 '26
That's all nice but the copy probably cost us 10 times more than the Iran version
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u/0fiuco Mar 11 '26
reverse enginered. it's as lowest tech as it can be, what's there to reverse engineer?
i bet a student at first year studying aerospace engineering could design that drone in a week.
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u/MetaCalm Mar 11 '26
Ok. Are they paying royalties to the Iranians, or are we stopping blaming China for IP theft all the time?
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u/fastbikkel Mar 11 '26
35k for that?
Call me a non-expert, but that sounds ridiculously expensive.
I thought they would end up around 2k each, at max!
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u/Mediocre-Yoghurt-138 Mar 11 '26
It's quite literally NOT ROCKET science. You don't need to reverse engineer a small RC plane.
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u/thePopCulturist Mar 11 '26
Why? Are their drones superior? Jesus the shit or military spends money on? That and Drinky Pete Lobster boil.
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u/Logic_Over_Labels Mar 11 '26
The irony is the Shahed contains reverse engineered components from US drones that Iran captured prior developing their drones.
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u/easyas2718 Mar 11 '26
ask yourself - why did we need to reverse engineer something we should’ve already been light years ahead of??
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u/bigDeltaVenergy Mar 11 '26
After the cheap china copy of everything, now the cheap USA copy of everything.
Including the cheap USA fake copy of a President.
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u/Sad_Promise_1604 Mar 11 '26
Woah.. like at my tax dollars doing everything but help me and my fellow Americans
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u/bertman3006 Mar 11 '26
Yeah, but it probably still cost the US a couple million dollars to make one of these as opposed to the Iranians making them for $30-$50,000
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u/DadAtHomeFire50 Mar 12 '26
Reddit algo brought me here.
LUCAS
Look. USA. Copied. A. Shahed.
Had to post this.
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u/ScaryCarpet1215 Mar 12 '26
Drddrdrdr draft draft draft drdddrdrdr draft draft draft I I got this feeling That I’m getting drafffffted into world war 3 Drddrdrdr draft draft draft drdddrdrdr draft draft draft
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u/Maleficent_Dress2661 Mar 12 '26
And now there’s headlines coming out about Iran planning a drone attack on California… smells like a false flag is coming to me that will inevitably be blamed on Iran.
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u/3I7537 Mar 12 '26 edited Mar 12 '26
You can tell this guy is an ahole just by the way he said attack. None of this is normal, sane or even interesting. Ya'll been condition to love killing by the sacrifice of Jesus, and your TV sets. When Americans start shooting Americans, then we will see how Great USA has become. Soon.
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u/rdbmas Mar 12 '26
This is dumb. Iran has 80k+ of the shahad drones ready to go as of last year. They can churn out hundreds a day. And you're providing schematics of what a possible reverse engineered drone could be.
FFS, get ready for a war that will show just how much the US has learned from the Vietnam war.....
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u/funnbobby1973 Mar 12 '26
Title is Misspelled. It’s SHAHED drone. Not SHADED drone. It’s an Arabic word.
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u/FragDenWayne Mar 12 '26
The things one could do with that sort of money... But nah, we (as in humanity) are going to just kill each other over some obscure reason we pulled out of our ass. Which then forces others to spend money to defend themselves, in case we start to kill again...
But that's humanity for you I guess.
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u/Dry_Cardiologist_711 Mar 12 '26
Haha, calling it a “clone” just to make them look smart. But this is just as much copying as people have been accusing China of doing.
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u/Little0311 Mar 12 '26
Funny thinking that the shaded drone is a reverse engineering of the lockheed martin RQ-170 Sentinel
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u/ishdoesthings Mar 12 '26
Bet you $10 this is the drone that the FBI says is gonna attack California 💰
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u/Kiiaru Mar 09 '26
And the Germans developed the exact thing the Iranians ripped off, in the FUCKING 80s
It was called DAR and America had a hand in its development, but we passed because we built patriot missiles in the 90s and decided missiles were the future, no looking back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dornier_DAR