Message posted by Q-nimbus on August 23, 2020 at 3:30:20 PST:
I'm wondering how sight sensitive the RQ-180 really is. The RQ-180 is a descendent of the X-47 program, before it was split up between the USAF and USN. I'm willing to bet that it really isn't that different from it's white world counterpart the X-47B, except that the RQ-180 must have much larger wings if it can fly that much higher. The upcoming X-47C should give us plenty of clues. Although I would be surprised if the Russians and Chinese wouldn't have much more detailed information about the RQ-180, and maybe even photo's (once again, plenty of spying and certainly a lot of hacking), I'm certain that based on the requirements their intelligence agencies can work out pretty well what it must look like and what it's capabilities are. So we have at least a decade old program. Certainly a prototype was build, but what evidence do we have that 6 more were build? These are big aircraft, and as such are very difficult to hide. Not only very difficult to hide physically, but also from a logistics and financial point of view. The unit that operates it must leave a fairly large footprint. If you know where to look (and a lot of people here do!) that shouldn't be to hard to figure out. Surely somebody has already done that? Any unit patches perhaps? I know a lot of people here are looking for these kind of telltales to find out about secret programs, but so far I haven't read anything about where it's based except Beale Afb. But they only have hangars for one, maybe two articles at most. It may be controlled from there, but where are the others? The RQ-170 was photographed, after which the French photographer sat on it for a year. If it's really out there, surely by now somebody must sit on a picture? But the longer it takes for even basic information te leak, the more I start to think that they might have produced 1 or 2 prototypes, after which the program was cancelled. But I hope I'm wrong of course. ;-)
In Reply to: Re: So, what about the RQ-180? posted by Smythers on August 21, 2020 at 5:16:18 PST:
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