How many missile carrying drones do you think we could make for the cost of one $80mm F35
You can buy five MQ-9 Reaper drones ($16mil each), or three MC-C Gray Eagles ($31mil each). These things have flight performance similar to early ww-2 era bombers but with tiny munitions payloads. That is, they are very slow, high-altitude, high-endurance and non-maneuverable. Their only real plus is that they are small and thus have a small radar cross section. They are sitting ducks for any sort of half-way decent air defense. I suspect that any fighter jet or SAM built in the last half century would swat such drones out of the sky without breaking a sweat.
Those are still built by dedicated defense contractors with a military purchasing process. It's like comparing Graf Spee with Vittoria Veneto, not comparing a Swordfish biplane with Vittoria Veneto.
I haven't really seen anyone analyze the threat model of attaching a shaped charge & microchip to a balsa model airplane or plastic DJI drone. The cost of those is in the $1000 range (including the chip and warhead), and they're virtually invisible to radar, or to the naked eye for that matter. Hell, for the cost of a single AMRAAM missile you could field > 1000 drones. You lose on range (~20 miles max) and performance (~200 mph), but for close air support, you probably don't need it: just blanket the whole airspace with tens of thousands of tiny drones so that the whole battlefield becomes a giant no-fly zone.
>Named TAM-5, the 11-pound plane flew 1,888 miles from Canada to Ireland in 38 hours, 53 minutes. It set world records for longest distance and longest time ever flown by a model airplane.
>[...]To qualify for flight records, a model airplane has to weigh less than 11 pounds, including fuel. So, TAM-5 had room to carry just under 3 quarts of gas. This meant that the plane had to get the equivalent of about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, Brown says.
>The biggest challenge in building the model, Brown says, was figuring out how to make TAM-5’s engine efficient enough to cross the ocean. Most model airplanes use alcohol-based fuels. Instead, Hill used Coleman lantern fuel because, he says, it’s more pure and performs better. He tweaked a regular model airplane engine to make the valves smaller and more efficient.
>The plane also carried an impressive set of electronics. Every hour during the flight, crewmembers were able to get information about the plane’s location from a Global Positioning System (GPS) device on board. The GPS device communicated with a satellite orbiting Earth to determine the plane’s exact latitude, longitude, and speed.
>The route was programmed into the computerized autopilot, which automatically adjusted the plane’s direction to stay on course. There was also a transmitter on board that sent signals directly to crewmembers on the ground when the plane was within 70 miles of its launch and landing sites.
So that's 2003-class "impressive set of electronics", with artificial fuel restrictions for record purposes to boot, yet nearly a couple thousand miles of range. Only going about 50 MPH granted, but presumably a weaponized design would only need to burst speed briefly and slow loiter might actually be a strength in some CAS scenarios. Napkin math'ing it, seems feasibly dangerous, 3 US quarts of kerosene is about 5 lbs and a couple lbs of shaped RDX is plenty to do some real damage if a pinpoint strike. Just saying that I think you're even more right than you suggest there! A scenario of fielding thousands/tens of thousands of cheap drones offers chances for a pretty radical rethink in doctrine.
Interesting read, although the derived applications are not great. ^^
Now for more military applications, I think some of the calculations might break down due to weight. Missiles/shell can be in the order of hundreds of pounds, with the heavier ones above a ton.
The use case for military being more oriented toward heavy vehicles, tanks and buildings, I don't think a few pounds of explosive would be anywhere near enough. The plane would have to increase in size (structure and fuel) in similar proportions to the load it has to carry, certainly negating a lot of the efficiency.
Well, if we streamline a model plane as a one off directed explosive, that will eventually be a missile and long range ballistic missiles are not a novelty.
> The use case for military being more oriented toward heavy vehicles, tanks and buildings, I don't think a few pounds of explosive would be anywhere near enough.
That describes a bazooka warhead perfectly, and they had no problem penetrating tanks. More recently, TOW anti-tank missiles are used to great effectiveness by many armies (including us) and their warhead is only 13 lbs.
One of the amazing things about shaped charges is that penetration depends only on the diameter of the charge, not its weight or velocity, and it can penetrate 7-10x its diameter in armor. So a 4-inch diameter shaped charge can blow through a meter of solid steel.
The other interesting development is that nearly all the advances in armor designed to defeat shaped charges (ceramics, Chobham armor, reactive armor) have an assumption that the same spot will never be hit twice in battle. The first shot basically destroys the (roughly 1 sq. foot) armor tile, which is useless for further protection, but this doesn't matter because in a traditional gun/missile tank duel the chance that the exact same spot will be hit twice is miniscule. This assumption falls apart with advances in robotics and AI. You could imagine a drone swarm where instead of launching themselves at the target, they land on the target, crawl to the most vulnerable parts (on top of turret or on the magazines/engines, for example) or those that have sustained previous battle damage, and then detonate themselves.
Awesome, I thought of shaped charges as well, but trying to keep the post short.
I assumed the goal was to have something similar to the model plane and particularly its incredibly range and efficiency. 1 gallon for 1000 miles. The plane shape and aerodynamics certainly help the efficiency.
However if there was an explosive charge to carry, the charge certainly can't improve the plane structure or aerodynamics (hence reducing the efficiency of the plane overall) and I'm not sure the charge could be shaped and mounted in the most optimal way (reducing the efficiently of the explosive itself).
So while the model plane might be incredibly efficient at flying, I question whether it could be anywhere near as good for the new purpose.
You've just described the GBU-39 Small Diameter Bomb. It's a GPS guided glide bomb with a 93kg warhead and a range of 110km which costs $40000 per unit. However, the successor is the SDB2 which is far more expensive because it contains a radar and can hit moving targets. It was developed in 2006 so your idea has been done a long time ago.
Sure the army could build much smaller ones but how would it use those effectively? Would they have to use face recognition to lock on to individual humans?
If you want to hear a decent long form podcast on the issue I can reccomend ep 31 of popular front podcast. The guy interviews a Bellingcat researcher about the use of commercial camera drones in insurgencies around the world, both for intelligence gathering and literally strapping hand grenades to drones (which occurs surprisingly often - there are production lines for these things out there)
You can buy five MQ-9 Reaper drones ($16mil each), or three MC-C Gray Eagles ($31mil each). These things have flight performance similar to early ww-2 era bombers but with tiny munitions payloads. That is, they are very slow, high-altitude, high-endurance and non-maneuverable. Their only real plus is that they are small and thus have a small radar cross section. They are sitting ducks for any sort of half-way decent air defense. I suspect that any fighter jet or SAM built in the last half century would swat such drones out of the sky without breaking a sweat.