In terms of bucks per kill the West is doing an order of magnitude worse.
eleitl
joined 4 years ago
I am aware. The 3 mm calibre difference has no impact on fabrication costs.
I know it already does, at least in newer Lancets. Expect this in fpv type devices soon.
These small drones attack single people and small infantry groups as well as small vehicles up to heavy armor. With laser there is the issue of portability, especially power supply. Also cheap reflective coating requires very high power densities for a kill. Apart from detection and tracking which can use fused microphone array and camera array data the time to react is very short and it has to provide high density of fire on the cheap. I've seen some shotgun use with very limited effectivity. Ditto nets. Maybe antidrone swarms can work, but power limits loitering time. Swarm attacks can easily overwhelm protection.
It looks like a hard problem.
That's what it costs in Russia and North Korea. In the EU the costs are as I cited. And there are no production capacities at the volume required. China stopped exporting the specific type of cotton used for cordite production. Nitric acid is expensive and hard to get.
You can print billions of banknotes easily. You cant do that with millions of shells.
Tracking a moving object in realtime with video is a standard task for a machine learning engineer. You can do it on an embedded platform with ML hardware support. I don't know what hardware newer Lancets use but they can already do it according from developer reports from Telegram channels like e.g Разработчик БПЛА.
AI visual navigation has already been deployed in russian drones. Not yet in low-end ones.
Dumb artillery shells are more 6000-8000 usd in the West.
GPS jamming is widespread.
AI guidance does not rely on remote.
How would that anti-air against small drones look like? It is not easy.
There are cheap continuous operation 2 kW fiber lasers for material processing which could be enough for the flimsier slower drones.