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Iranian Military Says It's Copying US Drone
New submitter skipkent writes "Iran's military has started to build a copy of a U.S. surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported on Sunday. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported."
#1 I doubt it .....
#2 who is running things over there, Dr. Evil ?
#3 In the extremely unlikely event that they somehow figured it all out - why on earth would you tell everyone ?
That strikes more at the heart of the issue here than you may realize. The actual aircraft sitting in their hands is much closer to a compiled binary than source.
You can poke at it, run it, look inside and try to reverse engineer it, but the real secret sauce that goes into making drones like this is the design/manufacturing techniques and massive high tech industrial base that are necessary to produce the components. The aircraft's engine isn't likely going to give up the secrets of directional crystal growth that go into manufacturing the turbine blades, and the camera's CCD isn't likely to yield the secrets of semiconductor fabrication necessary to produce another one.
You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car
The Iranians should be able to do 95% of a drone off the shelf.
However, their ability to add $5 Million in cost overruns for each drone might be hampered by an underdeveloped Corporate/Military Industrial Complex.
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