I am curious about everything concerning the drones, cost, effectiveness, and damage to payload ratios. How you, think they possibly could be applied? Just anything?
You may enjoy this video about an Irish startup doing drone food delivery. It’s only about 20 mins but I liked it.
200 lbs is not all that small.
I mean, yes, you have giant drones bigger than a 747 that fly recon, but I assume that’s not what you’re thinking of for a “big” drone, you’re thinking something like the Predator (capacity: 3,000 lbs). Compared to that, 200 lbs seems small.
But much of the fighting in Ukraine is done with FPV drones that carry just a couple pounds of explosives. They’re less like an aircraft and more like a piloted missile that’s capable of hovering and turning.
They are going to be potentially devastating against US forces some day because they bypass the main U.S. defense, which is against big missiles. The U.S. likes to use THAAD, Patriot, Aegis, all of which are meant for intercepting big enemy munitions that are few in number, not hundreds of cheap quadcopters.
You could even imagine an autonomous function one day where a crate carries small finger-sized or hand-sized drones that are designed to hunt down and kill all people within a certain radius, a way of clearing a region of enemy troops while doing no damage to buildings.
And there’s also a definite role in warfare for the drones that are even smaller, and don’t have any payload at all beyond a camera and an antenna. Recon is always valuable.
These small drones (with or without a hand grenade on board) are often the exact same drones that hobbyists buy as toys. Toy means mass-produced, and mass-produced means cheap. Traditionally, military hardware is built to be robust and reliable, but if your munitions are cheap and abundant enough, you don’t care if some fail.
This assumes that the US isn’t working on multiple avenues for countermeasures as we speak. Ukraine is teaching anyone who wants to pay attention a host of lessons about electronic and drone warfare.
They have a very long way to go