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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the problem with these missile defense systems that the per-unit cost is very high? And so in a longer term battle (like Russia vs Ukraine) one side can drain the other's defenses and $$ through the continuous use of cheap drones where the cost of the missile defense rocket far exceeds the cost of the sent drone?

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yes and no. the difference in cost between the weapon and the countermeasure matters, but it's not the whole story. the value of the thing being defended also matters. in the absence of a viable alternative, it's easily worth burning $1-2mm per interceptor to prevent a mission kill on a $2bn destroyer or a strike on a major population center.

not saying this is you personally, but people seem to view this kind of thing as being similar to RTS, where players start on even footing on a symmetrical map, and games are won or lost by stringing together resource-efficient "trades". real world conflicts aren't like that. western countries have relatively deep pockets and low tolerance for casualties (and collateral damage to an extent). as a result, they are willing to pay a premium for training, survivable equipment, and precision munitions. it's a different doctrine altogether.

Deep pockets in the sense of "can print indefinitely or until the inflation leaks into Bitcoin", and shallow pockets in the sense of actual artillery shells and interceptors.

Why would "inflation leaking into Bitcoin" stop governments from printing money?!?

It's not as if the shady "crypto" tail wags the big dogs of the real economy, is it?

There's just never been anywhere for the coordinated inflation to leak into before. Novel territory, just keeping an eye on the future. A dollar continues to buy less of everything, be it equities or commodities.

The cost per unit could be dramatically lower for drones soon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam

A 100 kW shot is a big one. 100 kW is around $15 from the grid in Israel. Maybe double that a few times for inefficiencies, it's still a lot cheaper than an effective drone.

Yes, and this has been anticipated for a long time. The US started doing serious R&D work on dealing with autonomous swarm attacks 30-40 years ago. Recent generations of solid state lasers appear to fill that role nicely, since they are very cheap to operate. Some of the US test systems actually use white light, which I did not anticipate, which means that wavelength-selective defenses (e.g. dielectric mirrors) won't be effective.

The next gen systems being developed are laser based. Bringing the cost per interception way down.

We've had the idea of directed energy beams, but I don't know. The US likes to spend big money at small problems. And then we're surprised when Ukraine (e.g.) uses low cost tech to make big advances.

Slow drones can be shot down even with machine guns, but missiles require expensive interceptors, and fast missiles can't (practically) be intercepted (yet).

Cheap drones are evolving fast, but so too are counters for them.

I’m guessing they’ll come up with cheaper solutions for shahed type drones, as they are slow and comparatively easier to shoot down.

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