I agree. Pragmatism is what you need in war (and also was what made the USSR produce way more tanks than nazi Germany in world war two. You really don’t need paint on a tank that’s expected to last less than a few months).

However, I would be worried about the dependencies taken on.

Knowing this, the west will make the export of plastic bottles (and DSLR cameras) to Russia illegal. If they don’t have domestic industry to fall back on, they have a problem. If they _do_ have such industry, why don’t they use it? I doubt it’s already running at full speed. Automation can easily crank out this kind of stuff by the thousands each month.

Edit: I guess Canon also could be coerced into releasing firmware that, if that control hasn’t been turned in a few hours/days of operation, and, assuming this camera has it, GPS tells it’s airborne near Russia, runs some code that puts the camera on fire or just randomly disables the video output stream.

Yeah, the same goes with the plastic bottle petrol tank. Drones are made to be expendable. A cheap DSLR and other off-the-shelf components will cut costs drastically, and allow for higher production numbers.

Imagine having to recoup the drone to get the SD card from the DSLR in order to look for images of worth. Also, the fuel is kept in a plastic bottle.

edited for typo

You can also import an off-the-shelf DSLR via Kazakhstan or as a private person property. If it would be a custom imaging sensor, its supply will be disrupted by sanctions (a long time ago perhaps), and I doubt Russia has capacity to produce sensors of such price and quality.