$41600 per drone? I mean, wow, these are not the cobbled together types.
The majority of the drones will be highly effective first-person view (FPV) drones. The package will also include 1,000 one-way attack drones, researched and developed in the U.K., as well as surveillance and maritime drones.
The prices for the drones are not equal. I am guessing their maritime drones are the expensive bit because of their range and capabilities. This article from last September says they are about $250k a pop: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66373052
Even just one Russian ship loss would offset the costs for all of the drones. (How many submarine conversions does Russia have now?)
This is a fair take. Those marine drones are doing amazing work.
Somewhere in a timeline with an alternative timeline in Imperial Japan, there’s a guy going “what if we didn’t have to put pilots in our flying bombs…”. And a bean counter is figuring out if that’ll save money.
Nah, boomers here’d be like “That’s unfair to us who did it without drones!”
That was actually being developed around that time, just not by the Japanese from what I am aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite
Besides what is in that link, I believe there were several other similar things going on between the USAF(or equiv. I don’t think the USAF was formed at the time.) and the RAF.
Those marine drones are five and a half metres long - so they’re like speedboats, not those little hovering ones or those enormous UAVs.
Don’t they 3D print a lot of those parts?
