General Atomics Protector

A procedural model built in Blender from the type’s published dimensions, painted as PR009, a General Atomics Protector RG1 of No. 31 Squadron at RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire, the first Protector delivered to the United Kingdom, in October 2023: the RAF’s MQ-9B SkyGuardian, a remotely piloted reconnaissance and strike aircraft built to be certified to fly in civil airspace, flown by a pilot and a sensor operator on the ground, with a 24-metre wing ending in upturned winglets, a bulbous nose housing the satellite-communications dish, an electro-optical sensor ball under the nose, a V-tail with a ventral fin beneath it, a Honeywell turboprop driving a four-bladed pusher propeller at the tail and retractable tricycle undercarriage, shown standing level on its wheels without weapons: medium grey overall with black ‘ROYAL AIR FORCE’ and No. 31 Squadron’s green and yellow chequers on the forward fuselage, a low-visibility roundel and black ‘PR009’ aft of the wing, a red and pale blue flash on each tail surface, ‘SM’ and the squadron badge on the ventral fin, a low-visibility roundel under the starboard wing and a bright spinner with yellow-tipped blades, as photographed at its arrival in October 2023, on its first flight in UK airspace in November 2023 and on the Waddington runway in 2025 (no three-view of the MQ-9B is published, so the shape was taken from a side-on photograph of PR009 scaled to the published length and from a manufacturer’s overhead photograph of the MQ-9B demonstrator scaled to the published span; the markings on the starboard side of the rear fuselage and ventral fin mirror the port side, which the photographs show; no photograph shows the upper wing, so it carries no roundels; the badge is simplified and the small stencils are left off). Drag to orbit, scroll or pinch to zoom · all 289 models · download .glb (735 KB) · Plate 289 in The Hangar