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That drone is battery powered and has a ceiling of hundreds of feet. So no. You would also be able to see it with night vision. They reported that they weren’t able to see it with night vision which seems impossible at first. But they probably were able to do that by painting it with something like vanta-black.

Nobody is building something like that with 25k. Sure you could build it, but it wouldn’t work. And it wouldn’t be anywhere close to reliable enough for a mission as crazy as entering into restricted military airspace. It would take lots of testing and iteration for someone to produce something that worked reliably and has been shown to be able to do things like evade night vision detection. It’s a specialized price of hardware developed specifically for this kind of task. Nobody is their right mind would do anything like this unless they already had access to the hardware and flippantly decided to take it for a cruise over and air force base (idiot employee at government contractor) or if they had an interest in doing this (China/Russia).

[showerst]

Fair enough on the flight ceiling, I misread that, so it's a substantially higher spec drone.

> idiot employee at government contractor) or if they had an interest in doing this

I guess that's where my Hanlon's razor comes in. Idiot employee(s) just seems so much more reasonable to me.

China is testing a hardcore stealth drone over a military base, but chooses one in CONUS in a highly civilian accessible major metro area, and then leaves the running lights on? It strikes me as far less likely than domestic alternatives.

[101001001001]

Holy shit it was China after all. They linked to this in the article.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/36085/troubling-drone-...

That is terrifying.

They commit brazen acts of cyber espionage targeting our infrastructure all the time so it doesn’t seem like much of a stretch for them to do something like this.