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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

Bullets are cheap, but an AI airplane with a gun is far more expensive than almost any fire and forget missile since it is effectively a larger, more complex, more expensive fire and forget missile.

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That’s the point though, AI is replicable. You don’t have to create the AI every time you fire, just once, and then copy it over forevermore.

The software is freely replicable, the hardware is not. And the hardware for just the “running the AI” part of the reusable AI fighter is going to be more expensive than the electronics of a single use fire-and-forget air-to-air missile, and so will most of the parts of the fighter compared to the missile.

You don’t need a 1.8T parameter LLM to control an AI guided missile. In all likelihood, the model to control these can be run on an iPhone-level computer, which is max $1000. The bottleneck is still the missile.

The idea would be that an AI airplane with a gun would destroy more targets, on expectation, in its lifetime than a missile would.

Depends greatly on the AA capabilities of your adversary. Slower moving, larger drones with guns are easier to detect and shoot down than missiles, and probably more expensive than the average missile as well.

The only way a gun might be more efficient is in a situation with total air supremacy like Iraq or Afghanistan, and the targets would ideally be in the open.

Couldn't the aeronautical capabilities of an unpiloted aircraft have a significantly higher ceiling if the design doesn't need to accommodate for limiting g-forces on a human?

Not by much. Building airframes that can handle higher G forces than a human comes at a huge weight penalty which impacts cost, range, and payload. Plus, it becomes really tough to avoid compressor stall when the flight envelope gets into high AoA plus high speed. The engineers end up having to do funky things with the inlet that increase drag and radar signature.

Yes, but it is potentially reusable.

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