there ought to be plenty of money in this for delivering explosive payloads...
(Edit: although come to think of it, in the animal world, jump height is much more constrained by 9,81 m/s2 than by body size)
(Edit: although come to think of it, in the animal world, jump height is much more constrained by 9,81 m/s2 than by body size)
What really matters is the energy density of your storage medium, which is the same to an order of magnitude for any system based on chemical energy. So both a flea and an elephant (along with battery-powered robots) can jump about a meter or two in height.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvHXwTa5-DA
(But for all but extreme designs I fully agree with you)
Delivering explosive payloads is a solved problem. Detecting humans is a solved problem. The hard part is reliably distinguishing enemy solders from friendly soldiers or civilians.
These could swarm in the back door.
This is why, despite being technically feasible, we haven't seen drone swarms yet. You can easily build 1000 drones, but you can't have 1000 channels of live video over radio back to 1000 drone operators.
It takes about 15 rounds of 155mm artillery per battlefield casualty. Each shot costs about $5k.
Robots like this might cost the same as a single artillery shot but have the ability to get multiple kills each.
It’s a cold arithmetic, but I guarantee you someone at DARPA is thinking and planning the future of warfare in these terms.
But some googling indicates this is about right, and prices have even gone up since the Russian invasion.
A typical round weighs around 40 kilos or 100lbs. For reference, from a quick web search, as commodities:
- 100lbs of TNT would be around $500
- 100lbs of stainless steel is around $250
I'm not sure what materials go in (I'd assume better explosives and worse steel), but I think $250-$500 is a good estimate for price of raw commodities (not including anything beyond that).
I would at least double that for having those shaped into an artillery shell, and add the cost of non-commodities (like a detonator), and you're easily at $1000. I would at least double that for the raw cost of distribution, sales, shipping, and logistics, and other overhead. We're probably at $2000.
At that point, toss in 30% profit margin for everyone along the way (30% to manufacturer, 30% to distributor, etc.). You're probably now around $3500.
I think that's a bare minimum baseline for what it would take to get a very, very dumb shell. This goes up if you want:
- Anything at all fancy or high-tech
- War profits
- NREs covered (building a factory, which might be idle 95% of the time and spin up for wartime)
- Military inefficiencies
- Regulatory compliance, quality inspection, etc.
Etc.
You can hit $5k very easily.