Tailhook
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Joined: 1/18/2015
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Are the drones that fly so high the ones that usually fire off missiles?
The ones he mentioned specifically (Global Hawk, Triton) are known as High Altitude Long Endurance, meaning they sit up high and soak up intel of all sorts. Generally speaking these are not the armed ones, at least as disclosed by any military power. The two examples he gave specifically are not armed.
Do they usually fire from that height?
Again those two don't fire anything, but depending on the weapon it's certainly possible to drop that high. It just depends on the guidance. A GPS guided bomb against a known fixed target with no restrictions will not have any problems. Where you run into issues is with the more precise strikes against like high value targets, where you need to keep a close eye on the target, make sure there aren't any civilians around, etc. This becomes a function of optics and sensitivity, but for a rough ballpark expect a 20-30,000' altitude, but as with pretty much anything military, "It depends"
Would a drone operator usually keep his a/c close to the ground, or way high in the sky?
You'd want it to be as high as possible without exceeding the capability of it's sensors. This keeps it harder to detect and allows it to get the most amount of relevant information possible. Also let's you see the "big picture". Drones aren't really meant for the low level, show of force, nap of the earth style flying jets can do. That said, a lot of the smaller observation drones (Raven, etc) can't go much higher than an RC plane because they're basically RC planes. They're also usually not the armed ones you see striking Al-Qaeda targets though.
How visible are they to the naked eye?
Not very. A Reaper isn't particularly big, and the big ones fly incredibly high up. They also aren't going to be right on top of the target thanks to powerful optics (and other things). You'd have to know exactly where to look and probably wouldn't know what it was anyway.
How close would they have to be before a "normal" military radar would pick up a larger drone?
You mentioned non-L-Band radars, I assume that that is the majority of them. Can you give a few examples of L-Band radars, and tell me why they are so much better?
I'm not really a radar expert so I can't be a ton of help here, but it just depends on the stealth characteristics of the drone. There are some really stealthy ones out there for sensitive targets, and then there are less stealthy ones. The answer to your question is probably, "not as far out as you can think, but still likely far enough". L-band radars are usually long range search radars. These are the ones where you can tell something is out there, but not very precisely.
The thing to know about a lot of the drone stuff you see in the news (that you hear about) is that they're in permissive environments, or there are agreements worked out with local governments. You wouldn't see Reaper drones flying into a heavily defended IADS because they'd just get slaughtered, but that's not what they're for.
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For those who know....how detectable are drones? - 
RE: For those who know....how detectable are drones? - 
All in good fun, but a real human on the other side probably would figure out after the first time, that the speck flying on radar so near to the enemy that just splashed a Su- must be a friend to that enemy or it would have been shot down as well.
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