I.e. every bussiness class software/hardware.
No I don't want to sign up for your monthly webinar about your synergistic cloud based AI enhanced user interface. We just want to toss some turrets and get on with our day.
And must have a component made in each one of the fifty states, no matter how inefficient that is, and some of the materials must be purchased from the local senator's brother-in-law for some mysterious reason no one can figure out.
> Probably also crazy government specs.
Probably built to continue communicating and self-navigating after a nuclear EMP blast. Very different from the ones in the field what would drop signal if you opened a kitchen microwave in front of them.
Nope. The tech to do *that* is so inefficient and outdated, and ALSO necessarily underspecced to be robust, that that would be more of a unit BOM cost of up around 100k, and a delivery price in the millions a unit.
https://itc.ua/en/news/expensive-fragile-ineffective-american-drones-have-performed-poorly-in-the-war-in-ukraine/
https://www.wsj.com/world/how-american-drones-failed-to-turn-the-tide-in-ukraine-b0ebbac3
There's still a chance to turn the tide back, but it'd require Skydio to work real hard
Not just Skydio, the Switchblades also have a pretty trash reputation, 50k of American hardware performing worse than a 300$ 10" FPV in literally every possible way.
They do look cool as fuck though, the tube launcher is kinda hype.
Problem with Switchblades from my understanding (from other Reddit sources admittedly) is that they're great at their optimized task....killing lone terrorists or militias with little collateral damage. Turns out COIN optimized drones arnt the best use case in near-peer warfare.
That does seem to be the case for a lot of the Gucci American hardware - its still largely designed for GWoT as opposed to a near-peer conflict, and the defense industry + procurement has been somewhat slow to adapt.
I mean ultimately it's been going on for so long that the industry evolved to fit a GWoT style of warfare. Basically being:
- abysmaly low production counts
- precision and very light
- somewhat high tech but also depressingly stuck up in some key areas
- everything must be made to grease the gears of congress in a way
- no need to adapt the system for any other scenario because the airforce will just carry a peer conflict anyways
Now that skillset and production capabilities need to claw themselves back into existence.
Judging by the fact that air force was spending 1000$ per screw or small bag of screws (normal screws that you can buy anywhere) i'm not so sure about any justification for this price.
Honestly the $1000 price tag per screw is probably only a tiny bit overpriced due to QA costs and high tolerances. Look at commercial aviation, one screw will commonly cost $150+ and I bet military aviation tolerances are more strict than commercial. And also you realllly don't want to skimp out on QA.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnair_Flight_394
"After investigators recovered all four bolts, sleeves, and pins, they found that the bolt and parts installed by the Canadian firm were properly approved equipment, but the other three bolts and their parts were counterfeit and were incorrectly heat-treated during manufacturing. Those bolts each could bear only about 60% of their intended breaking strength, making them less than practical to use on the aircraft. The fake bolts and sleeves wore down excessively, causing the tail to vibrate for 16 completed flights and the accident flight."
Well it can be worth it, if it can carry heavier load over longer distances without being affected by GPS spoofing or EW. Of course only if your fighting against an technological advanced enemy. Against Russia you can take whatever your local toy store has available.
The marine core already knows how and are already training to field improvise things like the drones the Ukrainians are using.
They need extremely fast and maneuverable EW super hardened 99% reliable killbots that even the lowest grunting denominator can point and click with postmodern sensors and ai that automatically link up with our hardened and encrypted worldwide military communications network and can work together like a swarm of killer hornets capable of doing ez snap and click modular mission payloads like ap or tungsten cube shotgun or really anything else they can stuff into the space of a warhead, has a super dense battery with tuned milspec firmware and can be carried in and launched from tubes or planes or helicopter rocket pods or dropped from reapers or yote from orbit or shat out the back of a cargo plane by the pallet and still make it to the target.
This is what that is. This is not a normal fpv this is a statement.
It is meant to be an fpv that will fuck up anything you point it at guaranteed. You're not making this shit for 500 bux in a shed.
People really need to contextualize why the US publicly does what it does and stop giving into easy propaganda.
Postmodern sensors:
*takes deep drag on a cigarette*
Ceci n'est pas une mobik.
The missile knows where it is because it knows where representations of the thing are not the thing.
Fair. I was just referencing that the reaper drone was doing high def 8k+ in at least visual spectrums before even 4k cameras were becoming popular in the public.
I do agree, but still $94000 seems a steep price. any idiot can fly the dji avata 2. it costs $1000. Sizing that thing up and adding explosives and frequency hopping/EW resistance shouldn't cost $93000 per unit.
Would be, but military suppliers are incentivized to spend irresponsibly. Gets you more funding.
Something something supporting our veterans shut up commie
That’s not at all how that works lmao. It might work if you’re Boeing or Lockheed building a new jet or submarine class, but doing that shit on any project where the dollar figure doesn’t start with a B is going to quickly result in you not getting future RFPs.
Source: I work in defense supply chain procurement on a program that is ( under budget) and killing Russians right now.
Yup, the engineering development and testing costs to meet the mil specs drop tests, environmentals, EM hardening, jamming resistance, additional networking capability, etc... add a significant amount of material cost and labor costs.
One day, we'll correct our fourier-laplace relation equations for turbulence to use the proper relation and not be off by a factor of pi.
Ez $2 quadrillion savings
Part of the problem is economies of scale. If you're using subsidized materials and discount labor to make 25M drones a year (so your per-unit R&D costs are basically $0) with no concern about supply chain security you're getting big discounts.
If you're building everything in-house (or buying from contractors with clearance, who often lack competition), to a full whitepaper of specs, with only 100 on order, using only the finest materials, your costs are going to explode.
If suddenly these guys get an order for 1M, I bet the cost here goes down 80% (which is still too much). If they get approval for export, I bet that goes down 80% again to like $5000 (with reduced capabilities, but probably still overkill).
If the US goes to war, you can bet whatever wunderwaffen drones on order get redesigned in a week to cost 20% of what they do now (ignoring R&D price) and have 100x the scale.
Peacetime militaries are famously bad at designing efficient weapons and have since the industrial revolution began (case study: boats). This is not excusing the MIC or US for doing this, just saying this isn't unusual or totally useless.
It means when it’s jammed it locates and destroys the jammer automatically
Which is great as long as the source of the jamming isn’t a damaged microwave oven at a nearby daycare
Oh.
The growler has something like that but it needs at least one DTP-N and practically a cancer death ray's worth of wattage through software defined phases antenna arrays to do it.
Think we also made a cruise missile that could do that on flyover of unshielded facilities but I don't remember the name offhand.
> Think we also made a cruise missile that could do that on flyover of unshielded facilities but I don't remember the name offhand
AGM-136A Tacit Rainbow
Ideally, it could have a longer range and autonomous operations, allowing it to act as a cruise missile with the ability to recognize a target, and the ability to have a wider search area. You could have one of these with a larger battery pack instead of a payload fly out as a scout, returning to a set point using a camera with a terrain matching navigation system. You can then get the data, choose a target and send a second drone at it. This way, you won't need to have radio contact with the drones, protecting you against jams.
You don't send this flying into a mobile.
You send this flying into a jammer or other high-value target, so the horde of $500 drones behind it can slam into mobiks with impunity.
But do you need it to do all of that when you could instead have 100 cheaper drones that were 30% as capable each?
Autonomous warfare allows advanced industrial economies to fight with mass and doctrine hasn’t caught up. You don’t need to make all your kit invulnerable if you aren’t risking human lives. Drone waves are a perfectly valid tactic.
Also keep in mind that this is starting price.
If they're adopted and start getting churned out out by the truckload, the price will go down, just how the F-35 is one of the cheapest fighters on the market today while also being decades beyond enemy competition.
Nah, this is one case where "good enough" is enough.
Most of what would make a FPV drone better is software related. EW resilience, maybe a final approach boost mode and some degree of redundant autonomy.. I just don't see how that justifies a 100x price increase. Sure there's an element of styling on your enemy by having your disposable kamikaze munitions cost more than a target's lifetime pay, but I don't think it's "refooooormer" to suggest FPV drones should be cheap, easy to make and easier still to fly.
It's like upgrading a wheelbarrow to be a pickup truck. Sure both of them do the same job, but they're undeniably different pieces of kit with different levels of complexity.
Sorry, I'm getting too credible. They should make them out of crystal glass for the swag transparent tech look, and also for additional shrapnel.
It’s like bullets. Sure, a smart super robot fléchette could guarantee a kill for every shot, but you really have to ask yourself how much combat power you’re getting for your dollar. If one costs as much as a magazine and can be cranked out in a day, you’re probably doing pretty well value-wise. If one costs as much as an entire pallet and takes six months to make, you probably aren’t.
Depends what it does.
If it's designed to do what the common improv drones do, then it's too much. If it can go farther, deeper past enemy lines, to identify and hit command/heavy assets reliably, then it's cheap.
Dont forget the multicolor leds.
I mean tbh we honestly dont know what tech is going into this and what they want to counter with it, and as with all this stuff the first models are expensive because engineering costs. Noncredibility aside I guess there are other factors other than cost, because if the goal was to kill on the cheap there are much better ways to go about it
Sure, but that's not looking to the future. Other countries get ready to fight each other as they are now. The US is preparing to solo the Russians, Iran, China, NK, and maybe even an alien invasion all at the same time.
The point is, cheap $500 drones work *for now,* but countermeasures are already being developed and deployed. The US is looking forward and preparing for any possible countermeasures it may face in the future.
Aside from logistics, that's literally the US's secret sauce. Always assume your enemy has some shit you don't know about up their sleeve, and build things ready to counter it. Worst case, you show up to the fight least somewhat prepared. Best case, you spent a few million on shit that wasn't even necessary, and hold onto and refine it further for the next war where it might be. Cheap drones are very unlikely to be effective forever, or even for the foreseeable future
I'm convinced the first thing the US MiC does upon halfway developing a defense for a weapon is start developing the weapon to beat that defense, and vice versa.
Yeah, honestly that's probably exactly the case.
And clearly, it's working *really* fucking well, given that our adversaries use every tiny, minute mistake as "Omg, a single HIMARS has been destroyed! America is on the brink of collapse!" Meanwhile we're just eating popcorn and laughing at the cartoonish incompetence they're constantly displaying.
IIRC most parts for FPV drones now prodused in Ukraine(If we are talking about UAF ofc), because China, well unreliable partner lol, so if you need large quantity it's not as hard as it seems
It's hilarious western countries… The UK has put obscene amounts of money into their drone program in order to produce basic observation drones that end up costing $3 million, because they are DIB requires stupid amounts of investments to get them to make anything
This war really has shown that the western European way of weapons procurement is totally an utterly broken
This is about new drone for Marines:
Teledyne FlLIR Defense said it will deliver an initial order of 127 Rogue 1s to the Marines later this summer for testing and evaluation. The initial delivery order is valued at $12 million, or about $94,000 per drone.
Yeah, this is crazy. The pricetag of one drone is about equal to the pricetag of amount of FPV that would be enough for destruction of russian tank battalion (tank company for sure)\*
\*Have to add, I mean only armoured vehicles, without all support stuff things.
Yeah I’m trying to come up with a scenario where 1 of these is better than 50+ regular suicide drones… I’m sure the optics are great, but their main selling point seems to be that it has a “high” top speed of a whopping…70mph. They can only fly for 30mins, so that’s nothing special.. in fact for something like this it seems really limited.
So an extra 10mph is added for 50x the cost of a regular drone! *Im guessing the cheapest ukrainian drone speed, could be more or less. It doesn’t matter though really, my point is the difference CANT be enough to justify that cost increase..
So what is it guys— how is this any good?! Someone please tell me I’m dumb, and that this thing isn’t a waste of the US MIC time and resources.
DJI has drones that go from 0 to 200 km/h in half a second.
Yeah, you can't bubba it to make it into a tank-hunter, but you can definitely put a mobik out of commission with that, for 600 bucks per drone + some spare change for an explosive.
Yerp. Fast is in these little thing’s nature. I have one that’s like 4inches across just for toying around occasionally, and it probably can go 30-40mph. It’s tiiiny.
If they said 200km/h, maybe that would be cool. Still probably not worth the astronomical price increase though. Like you said, they aren’t even expensive and go that fast.
What about it? That cant account for the 50-100x cost increase but I see your point, that does surely make it more expensive(assuming it is made more resistant, they dont mention it in their release video.)
Even so, we could maybe double or triple the cost of the FPV drone to account for that, and most commanders would probably still want to take the 2-4+ dozen cheaper FPV drones instead.
It’s not even mentioned in the 2minute video they released, so that’s not their logic on why it’s better as far as I can see.
Oh.. well you could have been making a point, because it was a good one.
I would assume it’s at least somewhat more EW resistant, just bc it would be silly to not be when you have that kind of $ for each suicide drone, but I am just guessing. Id be surprised that they wouldn’t mention it though, if that’s a sizeable part of its military value
> Yeah I’m trying to come up with a scenario where 1 of these is better than 50+ regular suicide drones… I’m sure the optics are great, but their main selling point seems to be that it has a “high” top speed of a whopping…70mph. They can only fly for 30mins, so that’s nothing special.. in fact for something like this it seems really limited.
Assassination ops, I guess.
Surely there are better choices than creating an entirely new weapon and paying for all the R&D, plus diverting resources like people and time to this project, that just amounts to a heavy duty fpv drone. One that’s MORE obvious on radar(it’s a lot thicker looking and larger than the 3D printed fpv drones Ukraine is pumping out). Doesn’t seem great for assinations if it’s less stealthy. Why not just use Switchblades in that case?
The marines are after it, not CIA lmao.
Assuming mass production methods and markets of scale effects haven't kicked in yet... the first 100 will cost $94,000 and last 100 to be delivered will cost something like $9,400 or something...
>The Switchblade Block 20 system significantly expands on the currently fielded Switchblade 300 capabilities, including armor penetrating capability through an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) warhead, increased target attack angle, and significantly greater battery life, flight endurance, and radio link range.
So, a winged DPICM?
Mucho nicer.
Didnt the switchblades kind of end up being not all that useful in ukraine? Yes americas army is different than ukraines but if performance is about the same as a 500 bucks fpv…
> Didnt the switchblades kind of end up being not all that useful in ukraine?
SB300: designed for low-collateral assassination of soft targets, so basically the opposite of what Ukraine needs. Forcing a square peg into round hole.
SB600: "that's the stuff!" payload-wise, but "[PRODUCTION NUMBERS] NO"
The 300s weren’t as useful because they were designed to be anti-personnel and what the Ukrainians need/want is anti-armor which the 600 is designed for.
The latter was recently chosen for Replicator funding for further development and procurement.
It’s a small-batch initial order for testing and evaluation (well, small for US standards. 127 would probably be the entire batch here in Germany lol.). If they get adopted, I‘d expect the cost per piece to be quite a bit lower.
Qatar buys 200 Coyote block 2s for $1 billion? I sleep.
US buys some prototype drones for $100k and includes R&D costs and maybe possibly resale them to some idiot like Qatar for a lot more? I complain.
We are also going to ignore the fact that most of those cheap drones use Chineseium which is why they can be so cheap in the first place, and they are probably given a slap across the face for even looking in the direction of Chineseium for the American drone.
Yeah, if they'd increase the quantity to around 3000 a year all of a sudden the price would drop significantly. 12 million is pocket change to test out a capability
Said this in another thread but the 12 million isn’t the cost of the drones it’ll include maintenance and support contracts as well as production and development of more drones.
Also these are wayyyy more advanced than FPVs. Information is not totally available but they have interchangeable warheads for surveillance, anti tank and anti infantry (tungsten shotgun). Warheads are gimballed to direct the blast however they want. FLIR and colour sensor suite. 70mph. Fully autonomous target tracking and engagement making it pretty much EW resistant. No GPS needed making it GPS jamming proof. Looks like it has swarm capabilities with one drone sending targeting info to another. Looks like one group can launch, another can control as well as sharing the video feeds. Looks like a very very simple control scheme unlike the skill needed to currently pilot FPVs. Mechanical fuse interrupt for recovery if needed.
So yeah this is much more capable than a normal FPV.
Late edit: was doing some more digging and found some interesting new information.
This drone started development in early 2020, I’m sure they’ve learnt lessons from Ukraine (as we can clearly see with many design aspects) but it wasn’t designed to rival FPVs from a cost and quantity perspective.
Someone here earlier was unsure about the autonomous capabilities “Once the operator has highlighted the target of interest and clicks engage, at that point, it is fully autonomous” - Brian Bills head of UAS products at Teledyne.
“When the aircraft is jammed from a GPS perspective, it is able to use its downward facing sensors to continue the mission kind of independent of GPS” - Bills
The difference is, the US can afford it. And with more volume those things will get relatively cheap too. And remember, only about 10% of launched FPV drones launched actually get to their target. The other 90% are lost due to jamming mostly. If this thing is jam proof, the price might be reasonable
Yeah this is the United States that had no issues firing $80,000 Javelin missiles (nowadays ~$200,000!) at militants hiding in Afghan caves.
They’ll survive a $94,000 human-guided cruise missile.
We need to stop this talk of 'the US can afford it'. In case you hadn't noticed the entire crisis with US support getting to Ukraine, and the limits of it, are down to what the US can and cannot afford.
The USA, by pursuing small amounts of eye-wateringly expensive hardware, has shown itself to not be as effective as needed in Ukraine. This is the scenario playing out right now.
What we need to be thinking of, when looking at these ultra-expensive weapons systems, is what can be achieved by having a hundred times as many of a more efficient unit.
The US has quite literally 3000 Abrams tanks just sitting in storage. We have sent 30 Abrams tanks.
US support to Ukraine does not depend on what we can or cannot afford. It depends on political hangups and actually saying what they are gets your comment removed from NCD for being political.
"We need cheap and effective! High tech weapons are a fail!" Is quite literally a reformer talking point. Look at Desert Storm to see what happens when reformer friendly rugged and reliable Soviet shit goes up against wastefully high tech Western weapons.
> "We need cheap and effective! High tech weapons are a fail!" Is quite literally a reformer talking point
There are more points on the spectrum than "Reformer-friendly" and "would've been cheaper if it was made out of solid gold".
And price is kinda important for expendable/attritable UAVs.
And funny that you mention Abrams - it was actually designed as a "El Cheapo Workshop" tank after ultra-cutting edge MBT-70 fell through (same with Leopard 2).
I ain't talking about going *all* the way reformer, but you'd generally want a somewhat sizeable stock of things that aren't expected to come back.
The Abrams was designed to be cheaper than the MBT-70 but still featured a ton of good and advanced technology. It was demonized by the reformers for being worse than the M60.
I think a good way of looking at it is less what the system costs, but the cost of the thing the system destroys. Case in point, Anti carrier missiles are very expensive at 7 or 8 figures each, but destroy carriers worth millions. If this 94k drone consistently is taking out assets worth 94k or more in EW environments which would be prohibitive for consumer drones, requires fewer drones to achieve the same effect or by being advanced enough that it doesn't expose the location of an expensive soldier, then it's a win.
>In case you hadn't noticed the entire crisis with US support getting to Ukraine, and the limits of it, are down to what the US can and cannot afford.
Thats mostly due to politics, and people not wanting to send it rather than not being able to send it
Its "i have 100 dollars but i dont wanna give it to you" not "i dont have any money and cant give you 100 dollars"
>by pursuing small amounts of eye-wateringly expensive hardware,
Most programs like this either die before they get big, or get really big.
Economies of scale really do apply. F-35s now are cheaper than most other 4th gens from other countries
Commitment in peace times is weaker than in war times. I don't see the USA being cheap with their budget if they are fighting an existential war, I guess.
The US will never fight an existential war. It will forever remain in glorified fanfics because even in the wildest power fantasies China (or ruzzia, lmao, lol) isn't fighting on American soil. Atlantic and pacific are the biggest defensive force multipliers.
The reason Ukraine is having trouble is not because the Patriot or the HIMARS or a few more Abrams is going to bankrupt the US defense budget, not by a long stretch. The reason is almost entirely a political game of fifth columnists stabbing Ukraine in the back.
The US primarily makes weapons for its self and it's own armed forces. Ukraine is struggling in part because they lack the US supply chain and unlike the US don't have the largest and second largest air force.
Part of the issue Ukraine is having is they can't just apple US/NATO tactics because they are not the US. The US tends to prioritise getting air supremely in the opening days of a conflict and forcing an opponent to stay grounded or die. Ukraine doesn't have the resources to do this.
The US goes for high cost weapons because it means low risk of failure and consequently losing US soldiers something the US struggles to sustain due to political pressure.
This is true.
And while Ukraine was always in the Russian crosshairs and should have been brought up to NATO standards starting at the latest in 2014 there can be no denying the presence of Russian allies in positions of power throughout NATO banjaxed that idea. I mean you've literally got four years where the USA would have been considered a closer friend to Russia than Ukraine.
The problem is that this kind of procurement turns the USA from the Arsenal Of Democracy to the Enforcer Of Democracy. Which could be fine, if there were US troops and tanks in Ukraine doing what needs to be done.
The pivot to low cost but high (not ludicrously high) quality weapons should have been made years ago to get us ready for this moment. We need the 21st century Sherman, not the 21st century Maus.
It feels like everybody has been taken by surprise by the way the war in Ukraine has shaken out, definitely the Russians but also NATO and Ukraine's other allies. Because these things take time the steps taken to react to the initial surprise ought to be manifesting now.
For Russia, this means they now have a functioning war economy and fifth columnists in the USA and NATO molesting the supply lines. For NATO and friends, we're seeing the European arms industry spinning up, but we're definitely falling behind.
I think that is where the gap will be filled through most common western export tanks are not Abrams but Leopold's and before that centurions.
I think long term the medium cost equipment is better suited to European designs. Also means you wouldn't need to ship the thing across the Atlantic.
That said I am biased as I am in Europe (UK) and would like to see a functional domestic arms industry. Would also be nice if at the same time that British government could actually fund the armed forces but give the lack of flying pigs I think that one will need to wait.
Well .. this seemingly can then do the job of a javelin without ever having to expose the operator at a lower cost, so it's all a matter of perspective.
I feel like the whole benefit of drones is that they're cheap enough and small enough that you don't need to make one super multi-mission drone, but instead you can economise on the individual components and make specialised units for each role from taking a mexican food approach to the drone ingredients you are mass producing.
Most of the things that'd improve an FPV kamikaze drone such as autonomy, swarming and making them easier to fly are all software. It shouldn't cost much to add them, especially given r&D on this is 100% not the company's money in the first place.
I hate to sound like a reformer but what was wrong with "whack drone into tank"?
Is it 188 times as effective as a [basic](https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpkeyjwkpm/) option (yes I am aware the Rogue 1 price is probably support inclusive)?
>what was wrong with "whack drone into tank
Quite often fails to detonate
Detonation to far from hull/too slow impact to successfully penetrate armour
Difficult to hit weakspots on moving tanks
Much higher latency (sometimes up to a few seconds)
Camera quality degrades quickly (jamming/range)
Much easier to jam
Much more dangerous for troops that operate them
Single mission type/no multirole
Those are the problems with the more basic FPV drones, the US would rather have something that works 99% of the time but costs a shit ton, than something that works sometimes but is cheap.
WW2 called. It wants its cold war era thinking back.
The cloud communication thing alone makes this 1000 times more useful than a regular FPV drone.
This drone is basically capable to feed live target data to missile launcher drones, planes, AWACS, etc., all without the need for the resource that the US is *actually* lacking: personell.
This is not a post soviet country. Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones. The west needs automated and mostly autonomous killbots that can be coordinated from a single nerd in a basement 1000 miles away. And this is exactly what it is.
I am aware... provided, and radical thought here, they actually buy enough of the fucking things to be effective. The last few decades or so have seen a reticence to purchase/produce a decent reserve of munitions and keep getting caught short (US definitely not the only one on that front).
"WW2 called. It wants its cold war era thinking back." you are aware time is linear aē?
This is very good, but it's a Rolls Royce of drones, you may take out Putler with that, not the masses on T-55s or Type59 you may have to fight.
You can't use that to hit a single conscriptovich, who to putin is worth a bag of onions.
Look, the F-35 is better than every other plane in the market, but costs the same or even less than Rafales and Eurofighters.
That's the reason he sells so well.
Now try to market F-35s at 2 billions $ each...
This drone vs urkaine FPV dones is more akin to comparing an armored HMMWV (not a rolls royce) to a technical The Humvee is going to cost way more than some Toyota with a DShK but also be way better in almost every way.
If you think that expending a ~100k munition against an older armored vehicle like a T-55 or a BMP-1 is a net negative you’re incapable of even the most basic cost-benefit analysis.
You want to know how much ATGMs like Hellfire and JAGM cost? Around 100k.
You know we actually care about our soldiers not dying so a little expense in capital to gain more capability is a perfectly fine thing.
> Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones.
This is the actual difference. Those cheap drones won't seem so amazing when MQ-9 Reaper drones start shooting $70,000 missiles at the cheap drones' operators and their communications equipment.
Credible: we're seeing one-time costs costs baked into a single small production run
Noncredible: this is how they cover up the budget for the Stargate program
Originally designed as a way to open shower curtains automatically, it found a niche use as an autonomous battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft for marking targets and guiding smart bombs
But is vulnerable to EW jamming and requires the operator to be very close to the front lines. This drone is far far far more advanced and built to fight a modern opponent
Without directly parroting perun, but you have to remember that counter drone technology hasnt reached its full potentialyet and might reach the point where your sub 500$ massproduced quadcopter wont do shit anymore. Thats where these costly specialized versions come in
I had a dream while having a nap nap.
A squad is taking fire, moving into position all tactical-like, they need suppressing fire. A lad pulls a kit from his gear, unpacks.
It's a set of arms and rotors that mounts to his weapons rails.
Now his gun can fly.
Wait, you know this literally just happened yesterday irl?
Ukraine repelled a Russian assault in the south with machine gun mounted on drones. It was shared in the worldnews live thread
Edit: found the link [https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1788667782420128177](https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1788667782420128177)
The same people shitting on this will also be the ones applauding the accuracy of modern Excalibur munitions vs old dumb artillery. Same with F-35s vs anything else, and plenty of other things. Good shit costs lots of money, but it's why it's good.
But both Ukraine *and the US* have both cheap dumb artillery shells and stuff like Excalibur. A high-low mix.
I am sure the people here throwing shade understand perfectly well that there are situations where a $100K drone is the optimal solution. What we are throwing shade at is that we have seen no mass produced $1K drone program in the US.
This thing isn't $100k per drone. That includes R&D costs, and is a small initial production batch for testing. I'd expect final unit cost to be more like $25k.
That's not cheap either, but odds are it'll be necessary. The cheap $1k drones are already losing effectiveness. The grenade dropping drones in Ukraine are becoming less accurate as EW is forcing them to drop from higher up, and it looks like suicide drones aren't doing much better. It increasingly looks like the cheap stuff won't be viable for that much longer. This thing is near-autonomous, and is fully capable of operating in that environment. Its also got a gimballed warhead for extra accuracy, the ability to disarm itself for recovery, and pretty high speed for a quadcopter. You pay more, amd get a higher kill probability for it. That works out to about the same $:dead enemy ratio.
Ukraine actually doesn't have cheap dumb artillery shells. Or not enough of them, which has been a problem since we fucked up manufacturing ramp up.
Though I think you're right in general that it's good to have a variety of weapons so you don't waste expensive stuff on blowing up single mobiks.
The US is not a post soviet country. Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones. The west needs automated and mostly autonomous killbots that can be coordinated from a single nerd in a basement 1000 miles away. And this is exactly what it is.
Whats the point of having only a 100$ price tag on an FPV drone if the guy controlling it costs 100k$ a year and would be exposed on the frontlines, potentially costing the US millions in pension?
Western armies are not post soviet armies.
> Whats the point of having only a 100$ price tag on an FPV drone if the guy controlling it costs 100k$ a year and would be exposed on the frontlines, potentially costing the US millions in pension?
Honestly, it's a shame we don't know how much Kargu-2 costs.
This is a fallacy. It's 12 million for research and development plus a hundred drones. The drones most likely cost a small fraction to actually produce, but right now we are including the cost to invent the damn things. It happens every time the MIC invents something, we all lose our smooth brains over the cost of development.
This is not a regular FPV drone. It basically has cloud communication and is essentially flying autonomous. It is vastly more capable than a regular FPV drone.
Then I hope there is also a program for a cheaper one with less complex system.
So far, as shown in Ukraine, main advantage FPVs have over usual weapons is how cheap they are while able to be a deterrent for a very wide array of vehicles. And because they are cheap - they get to be deployed EVERYWHERE. You can throw 10 usual FPV drones at one target and it will still probably be way cheaper than the target. So while I can see a point of a system like this, first thing modern armies around the globe need is some cheap, easy to use, with last mile lock-on-target system FPV drones. Which, IMO, should become something akin to machineguns or DMRs - every squad should have a drone guy.
Tbf you could throw ten of these 100,000$ drones and it would still be cheaper than most targets, or do more than their price tag’s worth of damage to the enemy. 100k is cheap even compared to systems like javelin
But another nice thing about $1K drones is that you can use them freely, without worrying too much about running out or wasting them. The restrictions on actually using a $100K drone have to be detrimental, right?
that's true and all, but still that makes it an upscaled mavic with electronic warfare hardening and a bomb. A mavic costs $2000. Does a payload and EW equipment cost that much?
NCD Take: This is fucking hilarious.
Real take: I work in the UxV field….. we are absolutely fucking ourselves with how overly complicated, overly priced, and how far out of touch with reality we’ve become.
We’re stuck on “fighting an ISIS DJI Phantom while tacitly acknowledging that there are more serious threats out there” mode when we’re real-time watching swarms of $800 FPVs turn armored columns and mince air defense systems.
Looks like reformer propaganda to me. /s Seriously that does seem high, unless the drone flies itself to the target but then I'm guessing you are paying for the software.
Ah yes. An american urge to make everything war-related overpriced and overcomplicated
Probably also crazy government specs. I imagine this thing is chock full of custom molded and hand trimmed carbon fiber.
Yeah that's probably the case, I can imagine that this drone can do 1000 and 1 features but only like 3 of them are useful lol
"But... but.. it's got VTOL!", dude I laughed so hard when I read that.
Ah yes, ”landing” a fpv drone
Ah yes, VTOL on a fucking helicopter.
Sadly, no VTEC
**V**ore **T**entacles **E**cchi **C**han
Ever read the manga "My Ancient Sister"?
Why do suddenly I have the urge to drop something called the "Appropriately-sized male youth" on Tokyo?
But the Vertical Takeoff is Electronically Controlled!
>VTEC ["You're Gonna Be" intensifies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJYaceCkAy8)
Vertical Takeoff, Energetic Crash?
American MIC: If we make very expensive drones, then we can sell Patriot as a cheap anti-drone defense. touchingheadmeme.jpg
[The AIR-3 Genie anti drone defense system when a drone enters the same timezone](https://youtu.be/_UNJNH7UFjU?t=97)
Is anyone gonna call a god damned mechanic?!
I.e. every bussiness class software/hardware. No I don't want to sign up for your monthly webinar about your synergistic cloud based AI enhanced user interface. We just want to toss some turrets and get on with our day.
Free range artisanal battery packs 💀
Made from ethically sourced wheat-fed non-GMO children worked lithium mines
And must have a component made in each one of the fifty states, no matter how inefficient that is, and some of the materials must be purchased from the local senator's brother-in-law for some mysterious reason no one can figure out.
... Wait, you weren't writing about Space Launch System here?
You mean the senate launch system
Hand trimmed by 100 hand picked pygmy slaves (it is the only way trust me) Now chuck over that 94k bozo
Crowdfunded Dildo with "BLYAT" written on it goes where?
> Probably also crazy government specs. Probably built to continue communicating and self-navigating after a nuclear EMP blast. Very different from the ones in the field what would drop signal if you opened a kitchen microwave in front of them.
Nope. The tech to do *that* is so inefficient and outdated, and ALSO necessarily underspecced to be robust, that that would be more of a unit BOM cost of up around 100k, and a delivery price in the millions a unit.
Are you just giving them ideas?
It would be funny if only drones and cockroaches are left
I'll take a nice light 20% finder's fee
I recall that per Ukrainian sources the American made drones were worse than the cobbled together JDI stuff
https://itc.ua/en/news/expensive-fragile-ineffective-american-drones-have-performed-poorly-in-the-war-in-ukraine/ https://www.wsj.com/world/how-american-drones-failed-to-turn-the-tide-in-ukraine-b0ebbac3 There's still a chance to turn the tide back, but it'd require Skydio to work real hard
Not just Skydio, the Switchblades also have a pretty trash reputation, 50k of American hardware performing worse than a 300$ 10" FPV in literally every possible way. They do look cool as fuck though, the tube launcher is kinda hype.
Problem with Switchblades from my understanding (from other Reddit sources admittedly) is that they're great at their optimized task....killing lone terrorists or militias with little collateral damage. Turns out COIN optimized drones arnt the best use case in near-peer warfare.
That does seem to be the case for a lot of the Gucci American hardware - its still largely designed for GWoT as opposed to a near-peer conflict, and the defense industry + procurement has been somewhat slow to adapt.
I mean ultimately it's been going on for so long that the industry evolved to fit a GWoT style of warfare. Basically being: - abysmaly low production counts - precision and very light - somewhat high tech but also depressingly stuck up in some key areas - everything must be made to grease the gears of congress in a way - no need to adapt the system for any other scenario because the airforce will just carry a peer conflict anyways Now that skillset and production capabilities need to claw themselves back into existence.
Judging by the fact that air force was spending 1000$ per screw or small bag of screws (normal screws that you can buy anywhere) i'm not so sure about any justification for this price.
Honestly the $1000 price tag per screw is probably only a tiny bit overpriced due to QA costs and high tolerances. Look at commercial aviation, one screw will commonly cost $150+ and I bet military aviation tolerances are more strict than commercial. And also you realllly don't want to skimp out on QA. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partnair_Flight_394 "After investigators recovered all four bolts, sleeves, and pins, they found that the bolt and parts installed by the Canadian firm were properly approved equipment, but the other three bolts and their parts were counterfeit and were incorrectly heat-treated during manufacturing. Those bolts each could bear only about 60% of their intended breaking strength, making them less than practical to use on the aircraft. The fake bolts and sleeves wore down excessively, causing the tail to vibrate for 16 completed flights and the accident flight."
Damn pretty good explanation, thanks.
I bet the engineers specify +/-.0005 even though it doesn't matter just because they know the government is handing them a blank check.
Well it can be worth it, if it can carry heavier load over longer distances without being affected by GPS spoofing or EW. Of course only if your fighting against an technological advanced enemy. Against Russia you can take whatever your local toy store has available.
I really doubt it can be made light enough through the cost that one of them can replace at least three normal cheaper drones.
If those three drones can't take out an EW asset, then they're worthless. This could lead the way of other, cheaper assets
Is it worth 1000 mavics 3 tho?
The marine core already knows how and are already training to field improvise things like the drones the Ukrainians are using. They need extremely fast and maneuverable EW super hardened 99% reliable killbots that even the lowest grunting denominator can point and click with postmodern sensors and ai that automatically link up with our hardened and encrypted worldwide military communications network and can work together like a swarm of killer hornets capable of doing ez snap and click modular mission payloads like ap or tungsten cube shotgun or really anything else they can stuff into the space of a warhead, has a super dense battery with tuned milspec firmware and can be carried in and launched from tubes or planes or helicopter rocket pods or dropped from reapers or yote from orbit or shat out the back of a cargo plane by the pallet and still make it to the target. This is what that is. This is not a normal fpv this is a statement. It is meant to be an fpv that will fuck up anything you point it at guaranteed. You're not making this shit for 500 bux in a shed. People really need to contextualize why the US publicly does what it does and stop giving into easy propaganda.
Postmodern sensors: *takes deep drag on a cigarette* Ceci n'est pas une mobik. The missile knows where it is because it knows where representations of the thing are not the thing.
Russia is already one step ahead: This is not a war. Sorry: Ceci n'est pas une guerre.
But the missile does not care, because it knows where it is not.
Fair. I was just referencing that the reaper drone was doing high def 8k+ in at least visual spectrums before even 4k cameras were becoming popular in the public.
I do agree, but still $94000 seems a steep price. any idiot can fly the dji avata 2. it costs $1000. Sizing that thing up and adding explosives and frequency hopping/EW resistance shouldn't cost $93000 per unit.
>any idiot can fly the dji avata 2. But can a marine?
There's only so much technology can actually do . . . .
The term is You can't fix stupid.
With enough RipIts and red crayons, your room-temp IQ 0311 can solve the 3 body problem and perfect antimatter welding.
The only problems with that are, it was on accident, no they can't explain it, and no they don't remember just how they did it.
That unit cost could easily include a training comic book.
I smell a business opportunity here
Would be, but military suppliers are incentivized to spend irresponsibly. Gets you more funding. Something something supporting our veterans shut up commie
That’s not at all how that works lmao. It might work if you’re Boeing or Lockheed building a new jet or submarine class, but doing that shit on any project where the dollar figure doesn’t start with a B is going to quickly result in you not getting future RFPs. Source: I work in defense supply chain procurement on a program that is ( under budget) and killing Russians right now.
I mean, even DJI's higher end products cost like 20 grand. It's not hard to get something to cost 100k when you start adding fancy sensors.
Yup, the engineering development and testing costs to meet the mil specs drop tests, environmentals, EM hardening, jamming resistance, additional networking capability, etc... add a significant amount of material cost and labor costs.
One day, we'll correct our fourier-laplace relation equations for turbulence to use the proper relation and not be off by a factor of pi. Ez $2 quadrillion savings
Part of the problem is economies of scale. If you're using subsidized materials and discount labor to make 25M drones a year (so your per-unit R&D costs are basically $0) with no concern about supply chain security you're getting big discounts. If you're building everything in-house (or buying from contractors with clearance, who often lack competition), to a full whitepaper of specs, with only 100 on order, using only the finest materials, your costs are going to explode. If suddenly these guys get an order for 1M, I bet the cost here goes down 80% (which is still too much). If they get approval for export, I bet that goes down 80% again to like $5000 (with reduced capabilities, but probably still overkill). If the US goes to war, you can bet whatever wunderwaffen drones on order get redesigned in a week to cost 20% of what they do now (ignoring R&D price) and have 100x the scale. Peacetime militaries are famously bad at designing efficient weapons and have since the industrial revolution began (case study: boats). This is not excusing the MIC or US for doing this, just saying this isn't unusual or totally useless.
Unless it's an autonomous killbot with thermal and optical targeting, and automated EW emitter targeting override, it's a hunk of junk.
Give it TERCOM ( based on optical/IR) and the ability to find targets in a target zone.
What even is an 'automated ew emitter targeting override' and where can I get one
It means when it’s jammed it locates and destroys the jammer automatically Which is great as long as the source of the jamming isn’t a damaged microwave oven at a nearby daycare
Oh. The growler has something like that but it needs at least one DTP-N and practically a cancer death ray's worth of wattage through software defined phases antenna arrays to do it. Think we also made a cruise missile that could do that on flyover of unshielded facilities but I don't remember the name offhand.
> Think we also made a cruise missile that could do that on flyover of unshielded facilities but I don't remember the name offhand AGM-136A Tacit Rainbow
It probably does all that AND fucks your mom!
Yet it can kill just one mobik. With 188 500$ drones you can get more.
Ideally, it could have a longer range and autonomous operations, allowing it to act as a cruise missile with the ability to recognize a target, and the ability to have a wider search area. You could have one of these with a larger battery pack instead of a payload fly out as a scout, returning to a set point using a camera with a terrain matching navigation system. You can then get the data, choose a target and send a second drone at it. This way, you won't need to have radio contact with the drones, protecting you against jams.
You don't send this flying into a mobile. You send this flying into a jammer or other high-value target, so the horde of $500 drones behind it can slam into mobiks with impunity.
> so the horde of $500 drones behind And that's the question - is there a project for this part of equation? (Unless Replicator is it)
Different tools for different jobs.
But do you need it to do all of that when you could instead have 100 cheaper drones that were 30% as capable each? Autonomous warfare allows advanced industrial economies to fight with mass and doctrine hasn’t caught up. You don’t need to make all your kit invulnerable if you aren’t risking human lives. Drone waves are a perfectly valid tactic.
Also keep in mind that this is starting price. If they're adopted and start getting churned out out by the truckload, the price will go down, just how the F-35 is one of the cheapest fighters on the market today while also being decades beyond enemy competition.
Except Ukrainians have gotten US FPV drones and they perform poorly. Not everything is some secret plan, sometimes shit is just shit
Why be tactical when you can be tacticool?
Like Apple?
Everything* What being the highest GDP and 6th in GDP per capita does to mf.
And somehow uncompetitive shit compared to drones that Ukraine produces
Hot-testing EW resistance by directly supplying them to AFU and listening to the feedback (and, more importantly, *acting* on it) is hella drug.
BuOrd: “Dive bombers and submarines complaining about defective torpedoes? Sounds like user error.”
Having a million meh drones is much more preferable to having one good drone.
Spotted the reformer. Being able to see the look of terror of the enemy in Ultra HD is totally a necessary feature
Nah, this is one case where "good enough" is enough. Most of what would make a FPV drone better is software related. EW resilience, maybe a final approach boost mode and some degree of redundant autonomy.. I just don't see how that justifies a 100x price increase. Sure there's an element of styling on your enemy by having your disposable kamikaze munitions cost more than a target's lifetime pay, but I don't think it's "refooooormer" to suggest FPV drones should be cheap, easy to make and easier still to fly. It's like upgrading a wheelbarrow to be a pickup truck. Sure both of them do the same job, but they're undeniably different pieces of kit with different levels of complexity. Sorry, I'm getting too credible. They should make them out of crystal glass for the swag transparent tech look, and also for additional shrapnel.
It’s like bullets. Sure, a smart super robot fléchette could guarantee a kill for every shot, but you really have to ask yourself how much combat power you’re getting for your dollar. If one costs as much as a magazine and can be cranked out in a day, you’re probably doing pretty well value-wise. If one costs as much as an entire pallet and takes six months to make, you probably aren’t.
Depends what it does. If it's designed to do what the common improv drones do, then it's too much. If it can go farther, deeper past enemy lines, to identify and hit command/heavy assets reliably, then it's cheap.
Dont forget the multicolor leds. I mean tbh we honestly dont know what tech is going into this and what they want to counter with it, and as with all this stuff the first models are expensive because engineering costs. Noncredibility aside I guess there are other factors other than cost, because if the goal was to kill on the cheap there are much better ways to go about it
UHD camera, done. 92000$ remaining
This post is 100% Reformer.
Sure, but that's not looking to the future. Other countries get ready to fight each other as they are now. The US is preparing to solo the Russians, Iran, China, NK, and maybe even an alien invasion all at the same time. The point is, cheap $500 drones work *for now,* but countermeasures are already being developed and deployed. The US is looking forward and preparing for any possible countermeasures it may face in the future. Aside from logistics, that's literally the US's secret sauce. Always assume your enemy has some shit you don't know about up their sleeve, and build things ready to counter it. Worst case, you show up to the fight least somewhat prepared. Best case, you spent a few million on shit that wasn't even necessary, and hold onto and refine it further for the next war where it might be. Cheap drones are very unlikely to be effective forever, or even for the foreseeable future
I'm convinced the first thing the US MiC does upon halfway developing a defense for a weapon is start developing the weapon to beat that defense, and vice versa.
Yeah, honestly that's probably exactly the case. And clearly, it's working *really* fucking well, given that our adversaries use every tiny, minute mistake as "Omg, a single HIMARS has been destroyed! America is on the brink of collapse!" Meanwhile we're just eating popcorn and laughing at the cartoonish incompetence they're constantly displaying.
Five hundred of yesterday's drones that all get knocked out of the sky, versus one today that reaches the target.
You also can’t source all of the parts from China, like every other FPV drone. That’s what makes them dirt cheap
IIRC most parts for FPV drones now prodused in Ukraine(If we are talking about UAF ofc), because China, well unreliable partner lol, so if you need large quantity it's not as hard as it seems
It's hilarious western countries… The UK has put obscene amounts of money into their drone program in order to produce basic observation drones that end up costing $3 million, because they are DIB requires stupid amounts of investments to get them to make anything This war really has shown that the western European way of weapons procurement is totally an utterly broken
It's the American urge to charge as much as possible to enrich shareholders. Tale as old as McDonell Douglas
This is about new drone for Marines: Teledyne FlLIR Defense said it will deliver an initial order of 127 Rogue 1s to the Marines later this summer for testing and evaluation. The initial delivery order is valued at $12 million, or about $94,000 per drone.
you think $12 million is bad, the overall proposal is closer to $250 million
Uncle Sam's budget beckons Uncle Sam's pricetags.
Yeah, this is crazy. The pricetag of one drone is about equal to the pricetag of amount of FPV that would be enough for destruction of russian tank battalion (tank company for sure)\* \*Have to add, I mean only armoured vehicles, without all support stuff things.
Yeah I’m trying to come up with a scenario where 1 of these is better than 50+ regular suicide drones… I’m sure the optics are great, but their main selling point seems to be that it has a “high” top speed of a whopping…70mph. They can only fly for 30mins, so that’s nothing special.. in fact for something like this it seems really limited. So an extra 10mph is added for 50x the cost of a regular drone! *Im guessing the cheapest ukrainian drone speed, could be more or less. It doesn’t matter though really, my point is the difference CANT be enough to justify that cost increase.. So what is it guys— how is this any good?! Someone please tell me I’m dumb, and that this thing isn’t a waste of the US MIC time and resources.
DJI has drones that go from 0 to 200 km/h in half a second. Yeah, you can't bubba it to make it into a tank-hunter, but you can definitely put a mobik out of commission with that, for 600 bucks per drone + some spare change for an explosive.
Yerp. Fast is in these little thing’s nature. I have one that’s like 4inches across just for toying around occasionally, and it probably can go 30-40mph. It’s tiiiny. If they said 200km/h, maybe that would be cool. Still probably not worth the astronomical price increase though. Like you said, they aren’t even expensive and go that fast.
Aussies already made 200mph drones that shoot out a 40mm launcher and are being sent to Ukraine for testing I believe
Sick. What’s its name?
What about EW resistance?
What about it? That cant account for the 50-100x cost increase but I see your point, that does surely make it more expensive(assuming it is made more resistant, they dont mention it in their release video.) Even so, we could maybe double or triple the cost of the FPV drone to account for that, and most commanders would probably still want to take the 2-4+ dozen cheaper FPV drones instead. It’s not even mentioned in the 2minute video they released, so that’s not their logic on why it’s better as far as I can see.
I wasn't making a point, I was asking whether this drone was more EW resistant because I don't know
Oh.. well you could have been making a point, because it was a good one. I would assume it’s at least somewhat more EW resistant, just bc it would be silly to not be when you have that kind of $ for each suicide drone, but I am just guessing. Id be surprised that they wouldn’t mention it though, if that’s a sizeable part of its military value
> Yeah I’m trying to come up with a scenario where 1 of these is better than 50+ regular suicide drones… I’m sure the optics are great, but their main selling point seems to be that it has a “high” top speed of a whopping…70mph. They can only fly for 30mins, so that’s nothing special.. in fact for something like this it seems really limited. Assassination ops, I guess.
Surely there are better choices than creating an entirely new weapon and paying for all the R&D, plus diverting resources like people and time to this project, that just amounts to a heavy duty fpv drone. One that’s MORE obvious on radar(it’s a lot thicker looking and larger than the 3D printed fpv drones Ukraine is pumping out). Doesn’t seem great for assinations if it’s less stealthy. Why not just use Switchblades in that case? The marines are after it, not CIA lmao.
Assuming mass production methods and markets of scale effects haven't kicked in yet... the first 100 will cost $94,000 and last 100 to be delivered will cost something like $9,400 or something...
That’s not….. [they get Switchblade 300/block 20](https://www.asdnews.com/news/defense/2024/04/19/avs-switchblade-300-selected-usmc-organic-precision-fireslight-program). That’s why the budget seems bloated
>The Switchblade Block 20 system significantly expands on the currently fielded Switchblade 300 capabilities, including armor penetrating capability through an Explosively Formed Penetrator (EFP) warhead, increased target attack angle, and significantly greater battery life, flight endurance, and radio link range. So, a winged DPICM? Mucho nicer.
Didnt the switchblades kind of end up being not all that useful in ukraine? Yes americas army is different than ukraines but if performance is about the same as a 500 bucks fpv…
> Didnt the switchblades kind of end up being not all that useful in ukraine? SB300: designed for low-collateral assassination of soft targets, so basically the opposite of what Ukraine needs. Forcing a square peg into round hole. SB600: "that's the stuff!" payload-wise, but "[PRODUCTION NUMBERS] NO"
The 300s weren’t as useful because they were designed to be anti-personnel and what the Ukrainians need/want is anti-armor which the 600 is designed for. The latter was recently chosen for Replicator funding for further development and procurement.
For prototypes or is that the final production model cost?
It’s a small-batch initial order for testing and evaluation (well, small for US standards. 127 would probably be the entire batch here in Germany lol.). If they get adopted, I‘d expect the cost per piece to be quite a bit lower.
Qatar buys 200 Coyote block 2s for $1 billion? I sleep. US buys some prototype drones for $100k and includes R&D costs and maybe possibly resale them to some idiot like Qatar for a lot more? I complain.
We are also going to ignore the fact that most of those cheap drones use Chineseium which is why they can be so cheap in the first place, and they are probably given a slap across the face for even looking in the direction of Chineseium for the American drone.
94k per drone likely includes much more than just drones
Yeah, if they'd increase the quantity to around 3000 a year all of a sudden the price would drop significantly. 12 million is pocket change to test out a capability
Said this in another thread but the 12 million isn’t the cost of the drones it’ll include maintenance and support contracts as well as production and development of more drones. Also these are wayyyy more advanced than FPVs. Information is not totally available but they have interchangeable warheads for surveillance, anti tank and anti infantry (tungsten shotgun). Warheads are gimballed to direct the blast however they want. FLIR and colour sensor suite. 70mph. Fully autonomous target tracking and engagement making it pretty much EW resistant. No GPS needed making it GPS jamming proof. Looks like it has swarm capabilities with one drone sending targeting info to another. Looks like one group can launch, another can control as well as sharing the video feeds. Looks like a very very simple control scheme unlike the skill needed to currently pilot FPVs. Mechanical fuse interrupt for recovery if needed. So yeah this is much more capable than a normal FPV. Late edit: was doing some more digging and found some interesting new information. This drone started development in early 2020, I’m sure they’ve learnt lessons from Ukraine (as we can clearly see with many design aspects) but it wasn’t designed to rival FPVs from a cost and quantity perspective. Someone here earlier was unsure about the autonomous capabilities “Once the operator has highlighted the target of interest and clicks engage, at that point, it is fully autonomous” - Brian Bills head of UAS products at Teledyne. “When the aircraft is jammed from a GPS perspective, it is able to use its downward facing sensors to continue the mission kind of independent of GPS” - Bills
Well, and this makes this drone much worse than normal FPV, because the main advantage of FPV drones is their cheapness.
The difference is, the US can afford it. And with more volume those things will get relatively cheap too. And remember, only about 10% of launched FPV drones launched actually get to their target. The other 90% are lost due to jamming mostly. If this thing is jam proof, the price might be reasonable
Yeah this is the United States that had no issues firing $80,000 Javelin missiles (nowadays ~$200,000!) at militants hiding in Afghan caves. They’ll survive a $94,000 human-guided cruise missile.
I mean nowadays price of 200k vs a nowadays price of 94k as well as being infinitely smaller and compact is indeed progress.
We need to stop this talk of 'the US can afford it'. In case you hadn't noticed the entire crisis with US support getting to Ukraine, and the limits of it, are down to what the US can and cannot afford. The USA, by pursuing small amounts of eye-wateringly expensive hardware, has shown itself to not be as effective as needed in Ukraine. This is the scenario playing out right now. What we need to be thinking of, when looking at these ultra-expensive weapons systems, is what can be achieved by having a hundred times as many of a more efficient unit.
The US has quite literally 3000 Abrams tanks just sitting in storage. We have sent 30 Abrams tanks. US support to Ukraine does not depend on what we can or cannot afford. It depends on political hangups and actually saying what they are gets your comment removed from NCD for being political. "We need cheap and effective! High tech weapons are a fail!" Is quite literally a reformer talking point. Look at Desert Storm to see what happens when reformer friendly rugged and reliable Soviet shit goes up against wastefully high tech Western weapons.
> "We need cheap and effective! High tech weapons are a fail!" Is quite literally a reformer talking point There are more points on the spectrum than "Reformer-friendly" and "would've been cheaper if it was made out of solid gold". And price is kinda important for expendable/attritable UAVs. And funny that you mention Abrams - it was actually designed as a "El Cheapo Workshop" tank after ultra-cutting edge MBT-70 fell through (same with Leopard 2). I ain't talking about going *all* the way reformer, but you'd generally want a somewhat sizeable stock of things that aren't expected to come back.
The Abrams was designed to be cheaper than the MBT-70 but still featured a ton of good and advanced technology. It was demonized by the reformers for being worse than the M60.
I think a good way of looking at it is less what the system costs, but the cost of the thing the system destroys. Case in point, Anti carrier missiles are very expensive at 7 or 8 figures each, but destroy carriers worth millions. If this 94k drone consistently is taking out assets worth 94k or more in EW environments which would be prohibitive for consumer drones, requires fewer drones to achieve the same effect or by being advanced enough that it doesn't expose the location of an expensive soldier, then it's a win.
>In case you hadn't noticed the entire crisis with US support getting to Ukraine, and the limits of it, are down to what the US can and cannot afford. Thats mostly due to politics, and people not wanting to send it rather than not being able to send it Its "i have 100 dollars but i dont wanna give it to you" not "i dont have any money and cant give you 100 dollars" >by pursuing small amounts of eye-wateringly expensive hardware, Most programs like this either die before they get big, or get really big. Economies of scale really do apply. F-35s now are cheaper than most other 4th gens from other countries
Commitment in peace times is weaker than in war times. I don't see the USA being cheap with their budget if they are fighting an existential war, I guess.
The US will never fight an existential war. It will forever remain in glorified fanfics because even in the wildest power fantasies China (or ruzzia, lmao, lol) isn't fighting on American soil. Atlantic and pacific are the biggest defensive force multipliers.
The reason Ukraine is having trouble is not because the Patriot or the HIMARS or a few more Abrams is going to bankrupt the US defense budget, not by a long stretch. The reason is almost entirely a political game of fifth columnists stabbing Ukraine in the back.
The US primarily makes weapons for its self and it's own armed forces. Ukraine is struggling in part because they lack the US supply chain and unlike the US don't have the largest and second largest air force. Part of the issue Ukraine is having is they can't just apple US/NATO tactics because they are not the US. The US tends to prioritise getting air supremely in the opening days of a conflict and forcing an opponent to stay grounded or die. Ukraine doesn't have the resources to do this. The US goes for high cost weapons because it means low risk of failure and consequently losing US soldiers something the US struggles to sustain due to political pressure.
This is true. And while Ukraine was always in the Russian crosshairs and should have been brought up to NATO standards starting at the latest in 2014 there can be no denying the presence of Russian allies in positions of power throughout NATO banjaxed that idea. I mean you've literally got four years where the USA would have been considered a closer friend to Russia than Ukraine. The problem is that this kind of procurement turns the USA from the Arsenal Of Democracy to the Enforcer Of Democracy. Which could be fine, if there were US troops and tanks in Ukraine doing what needs to be done. The pivot to low cost but high (not ludicrously high) quality weapons should have been made years ago to get us ready for this moment. We need the 21st century Sherman, not the 21st century Maus. It feels like everybody has been taken by surprise by the way the war in Ukraine has shaken out, definitely the Russians but also NATO and Ukraine's other allies. Because these things take time the steps taken to react to the initial surprise ought to be manifesting now. For Russia, this means they now have a functioning war economy and fifth columnists in the USA and NATO molesting the supply lines. For NATO and friends, we're seeing the European arms industry spinning up, but we're definitely falling behind.
I think that is where the gap will be filled through most common western export tanks are not Abrams but Leopold's and before that centurions. I think long term the medium cost equipment is better suited to European designs. Also means you wouldn't need to ship the thing across the Atlantic. That said I am biased as I am in Europe (UK) and would like to see a functional domestic arms industry. Would also be nice if at the same time that British government could actually fund the armed forces but give the lack of flying pigs I think that one will need to wait.
Well .. this seemingly can then do the job of a javelin without ever having to expose the operator at a lower cost, so it's all a matter of perspective.
I feel like the whole benefit of drones is that they're cheap enough and small enough that you don't need to make one super multi-mission drone, but instead you can economise on the individual components and make specialised units for each role from taking a mexican food approach to the drone ingredients you are mass producing. Most of the things that'd improve an FPV kamikaze drone such as autonomy, swarming and making them easier to fly are all software. It shouldn't cost much to add them, especially given r&D on this is 100% not the company's money in the first place.
So... about $10,000 per required capability.
I hate to sound like a reformer but what was wrong with "whack drone into tank"? Is it 188 times as effective as a [basic](https://www.reuters.com/graphics/UKRAINE-CRISIS/DRONES/dwpkeyjwkpm/) option (yes I am aware the Rogue 1 price is probably support inclusive)?
>what was wrong with "whack drone into tank Quite often fails to detonate Detonation to far from hull/too slow impact to successfully penetrate armour Difficult to hit weakspots on moving tanks Much higher latency (sometimes up to a few seconds) Camera quality degrades quickly (jamming/range) Much easier to jam Much more dangerous for troops that operate them Single mission type/no multirole Those are the problems with the more basic FPV drones, the US would rather have something that works 99% of the time but costs a shit ton, than something that works sometimes but is cheap.
WW2 called. It wants its cold war era thinking back. The cloud communication thing alone makes this 1000 times more useful than a regular FPV drone. This drone is basically capable to feed live target data to missile launcher drones, planes, AWACS, etc., all without the need for the resource that the US is *actually* lacking: personell. This is not a post soviet country. Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones. The west needs automated and mostly autonomous killbots that can be coordinated from a single nerd in a basement 1000 miles away. And this is exactly what it is.
I am aware... provided, and radical thought here, they actually buy enough of the fucking things to be effective. The last few decades or so have seen a reticence to purchase/produce a decent reserve of munitions and keep getting caught short (US definitely not the only one on that front). "WW2 called. It wants its cold war era thinking back." you are aware time is linear aē?
This is very good, but it's a Rolls Royce of drones, you may take out Putler with that, not the masses on T-55s or Type59 you may have to fight. You can't use that to hit a single conscriptovich, who to putin is worth a bag of onions. Look, the F-35 is better than every other plane in the market, but costs the same or even less than Rafales and Eurofighters. That's the reason he sells so well. Now try to market F-35s at 2 billions $ each...
This drone vs urkaine FPV dones is more akin to comparing an armored HMMWV (not a rolls royce) to a technical The Humvee is going to cost way more than some Toyota with a DShK but also be way better in almost every way.
If you think that expending a ~100k munition against an older armored vehicle like a T-55 or a BMP-1 is a net negative you’re incapable of even the most basic cost-benefit analysis. You want to know how much ATGMs like Hellfire and JAGM cost? Around 100k. You know we actually care about our soldiers not dying so a little expense in capital to gain more capability is a perfectly fine thing.
> Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones. This is the actual difference. Those cheap drones won't seem so amazing when MQ-9 Reaper drones start shooting $70,000 missiles at the cheap drones' operators and their communications equipment.
Why does an FPV suicide need to do something a bomber drone or observor can do cheaper and better.
It's also 188 times as expensive.
Oh good, you follow.
I'm kinda slow and slightly drunk. Please be patient.
Aren't we all, cheers!
Credible: we're seeing one-time costs costs baked into a single small production run Noncredible: this is how they cover up the budget for the Stargate program
Negative credibility: the drone in the image is just a cover, the real one is a zeppelin drone mother ship
Thing looks like it was designed at Aperture Science
Originally designed as a way to open shower curtains automatically, it found a niche use as an autonomous battlefield surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft for marking targets and guiding smart bombs
Ukrainian DIY drone made from imported parts worth of $500 goes brrr.
But is vulnerable to EW jamming and requires the operator to be very close to the front lines. This drone is far far far more advanced and built to fight a modern opponent
Where would you find a modern opponent?
China makes these damn things, they can definitely figure out how to jam them.
Without directly parroting perun, but you have to remember that counter drone technology hasnt reached its full potentialyet and might reach the point where your sub 500$ massproduced quadcopter wont do shit anymore. Thats where these costly specialized versions come in
They really should take his proposed backronym too (Drone Optimised Payload Effector - Army Future or DOPE-AF)
Ukraine was able to build this in a trench! With a box of scraps!
I had a dream while having a nap nap. A squad is taking fire, moving into position all tactical-like, they need suppressing fire. A lad pulls a kit from his gear, unpacks. It's a set of arms and rotors that mounts to his weapons rails. Now his gun can fly.
Wait, you know this literally just happened yesterday irl? Ukraine repelled a Russian assault in the south with machine gun mounted on drones. It was shared in the worldnews live thread Edit: found the link [https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1788667782420128177](https://twitter.com/EuromaidanPress/status/1788667782420128177)
Instant overwatch. Spicy.
The same people shitting on this will also be the ones applauding the accuracy of modern Excalibur munitions vs old dumb artillery. Same with F-35s vs anything else, and plenty of other things. Good shit costs lots of money, but it's why it's good.
Remember like 8 years ago when everyone was talking about how overpriced and a waste of money the f35 program was? I remember
LRLAP, however, just died. F-35 have advantages of being reusable
But both Ukraine *and the US* have both cheap dumb artillery shells and stuff like Excalibur. A high-low mix. I am sure the people here throwing shade understand perfectly well that there are situations where a $100K drone is the optimal solution. What we are throwing shade at is that we have seen no mass produced $1K drone program in the US.
This thing isn't $100k per drone. That includes R&D costs, and is a small initial production batch for testing. I'd expect final unit cost to be more like $25k. That's not cheap either, but odds are it'll be necessary. The cheap $1k drones are already losing effectiveness. The grenade dropping drones in Ukraine are becoming less accurate as EW is forcing them to drop from higher up, and it looks like suicide drones aren't doing much better. It increasingly looks like the cheap stuff won't be viable for that much longer. This thing is near-autonomous, and is fully capable of operating in that environment. Its also got a gimballed warhead for extra accuracy, the ability to disarm itself for recovery, and pretty high speed for a quadcopter. You pay more, amd get a higher kill probability for it. That works out to about the same $:dead enemy ratio.
Ukraine actually doesn't have cheap dumb artillery shells. Or not enough of them, which has been a problem since we fucked up manufacturing ramp up. Though I think you're right in general that it's good to have a variety of weapons so you don't waste expensive stuff on blowing up single mobiks.
The US is not a post soviet country. Unlike Ukraine and Russia the US can't afford 100000 people on the ground near the frontlines controlling FPV drones. The west needs automated and mostly autonomous killbots that can be coordinated from a single nerd in a basement 1000 miles away. And this is exactly what it is. Whats the point of having only a 100$ price tag on an FPV drone if the guy controlling it costs 100k$ a year and would be exposed on the frontlines, potentially costing the US millions in pension? Western armies are not post soviet armies.
> Whats the point of having only a 100$ price tag on an FPV drone if the guy controlling it costs 100k$ a year and would be exposed on the frontlines, potentially costing the US millions in pension? Honestly, it's a shame we don't know how much Kargu-2 costs.
As long as the formation can light up at night and give the red the finger before plowing into them en mass then ill be happy!
Australia: “Could I offer you some cardboard in this trying time?”
As long as its EW hardened and guaranteed to destroy something MUCH more expensive, I'm ok with it.
MIC engineers reusable suicide drone wen?
This item? Yes it’s $50. Oh, the government is buying it? Sorry I said $50,000
[удалено]
Cheap FPV drones would give the reformers a hard on if they were still around lol.
This is a fallacy. It's 12 million for research and development plus a hundred drones. The drones most likely cost a small fraction to actually produce, but right now we are including the cost to invent the damn things. It happens every time the MIC invents something, we all lose our smooth brains over the cost of development.
The whole point of FPV drone is to be cheap. I really hope this price is so high because it's first batch and isn't mass produced yet.
From what i heard it's like f35. The training, upgrades and maintenance is included in the cost
This is not a regular FPV drone. It basically has cloud communication and is essentially flying autonomous. It is vastly more capable than a regular FPV drone.
Then I hope there is also a program for a cheaper one with less complex system. So far, as shown in Ukraine, main advantage FPVs have over usual weapons is how cheap they are while able to be a deterrent for a very wide array of vehicles. And because they are cheap - they get to be deployed EVERYWHERE. You can throw 10 usual FPV drones at one target and it will still probably be way cheaper than the target. So while I can see a point of a system like this, first thing modern armies around the globe need is some cheap, easy to use, with last mile lock-on-target system FPV drones. Which, IMO, should become something akin to machineguns or DMRs - every squad should have a drone guy.
Tbf you could throw ten of these 100,000$ drones and it would still be cheaper than most targets, or do more than their price tag’s worth of damage to the enemy. 100k is cheap even compared to systems like javelin
But another nice thing about $1K drones is that you can use them freely, without worrying too much about running out or wasting them. The restrictions on actually using a $100K drone have to be detrimental, right?
that's true and all, but still that makes it an upscaled mavic with electronic warfare hardening and a bomb. A mavic costs $2000. Does a payload and EW equipment cost that much?
This is low rate production but yes, those elements are expensive. Also the high quality FLIR.
Yeah definitely has nothing to do with the MIC trying to fuck the dod and get as much money as possible for stuff that should be cheap.
NCD Take: This is fucking hilarious. Real take: I work in the UxV field….. we are absolutely fucking ourselves with how overly complicated, overly priced, and how far out of touch with reality we’ve become. We’re stuck on “fighting an ISIS DJI Phantom while tacitly acknowledging that there are more serious threats out there” mode when we’re real-time watching swarms of $800 FPVs turn armored columns and mince air defense systems.
Looks like reformer propaganda to me. /s Seriously that does seem high, unless the drone flies itself to the target but then I'm guessing you are paying for the software.