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Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

Idk how they wouldn't compete in terms of financials.

They are in effect the specced-down mass production version of the F-22 and are comparable in terms of cost relative to similar fifth generation fighters (and even comparable to many fourth generation fights) but go toe to toe with or outperform the competition.

This stacks the deck such that the F-35 will be a peer to or superior to any "opposition" aircraft or anti-air weapon system while the US keeps the F-22 around to serve as a dogfighter that is reserved for fighting the rare circumstance of something that's legitimately a threat to an F-35.

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Why can't small, cheap drones do to the modern fighters what they're doing to modern tanks?

F35 platform is built to allow the pilot to control “fleets” of drones.

Because small, cheap drones can’t fly at supersonic speeds at long enough range to matter.

Drones that can do that are called “anti-aircraft missiles”.

What are the speeds and the distances required to take down a jet like an F-35?

Are you absolutely certain that there's no other way to take down modern fighter aircraft?

Like isn't that the lesson from the Ukraine war w.r.t. tanks? That there are cheaper, more effective tools out there to take out state of the art equipment.

Well your drone would need to fly faster than an f35 to catch up, maneuver more effectively than an f35 to hit a defending f35 and have a sufficiently complex sensor array to track and defeat the f35 autonomously.

We have many drones much cheaper than an f35 that can do this already. They're called AIM-9, AIM-120, Meteor. Or if you're Russian they're called R77, or R73.

These are, of course, anti-aircraft missiles.

Do you think it is plausible that we will see an incredibly cheap anti-aircraft missile that can destroy the latest fighter aircraft just like we've seen incredibly cheap drones that can destroy the latest tanks?

Why or why not?

For one, because of physics: it's easy to hit a slow moving tank from a flying vehicle. It's impossible to hit a fast-moving flying vehicle from a slower moving one. And you can't make a cheap light rotor-based drone move as fast a jet-engine-powered plane no matter how hart you try.

For another, R&D: we've been working on fast autonomous flying vehicles to take down aircraft for decades: as the poster above keeps explaining, they're called AA missiles, and are extremely expensive, and even still have a hard time actually hitting a plain. Drones are an innovation in fighting tanks because they are much more maneuverable than traditional AT weapons and thus can more easily find chinks in the tank's armor. You could have always used the extreme maneuverability of AA rockets to hit those same chinks in the armor, but the cost was too high; drones were cheaper. AA rockets are extremely cost effective against plains though, as those jets are monumentally more expensive than a tank.

> Do you think it is plausible that we will see an incredibly cheap anti-aircraft missile ...

I misread the question a bit, sorry. Still, I believe the arguments hold - while I'm sure that it's possible to make cheaper missiles, especially if we take into account the markup typically associated with military contracts, I don't think there is any room to go anywhere near the cost savings that cheap drones brought against tanks.

The issue is that the F-35 when it's actually being competitive is practically invisible. The US actually has generally had to operate it without stealth coatings or while broadcasting a radio beacon while doing comparisons or competitions against other crafts and weapon systems because in an actual combat environment, an F-35 fit for stealth is completely invisible to electronics (and to a measurable degree eyesight) well within F-35 weapon systems' effective ranges.

So essentially you can't see an F-35 until it is already lined up to kill you. That tends to make it pretty difficult to hit it.

Truly modern fighters have advanced defenses across the EM spectrum. Hardening a drone against those defenses makes them no longer “small” and “cheap”. Also, drones typically have much lower speed than a modern fighter. An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone where a key property is that it is much faster than the fighter, but this makes it expensive.

    An air-to-air missile is essentially a single-use drone

Yeah.

And barring some big advance, an air-to-air missile can't be any smaller than it is currently. It needs to carry enough explosive to damage the target aircraft, and it needs enough fuel to travel at supersonic speeds for a long enough distance to actually intercept the target.

But can it be cheaper?

That's the lesson from drones vs tanks.

I think it would already be a big advantage not needing a very expensive launch platform like a fighter jet, even if the unit price of the drone was a bit higher than that of the missile.

No, because all the things you got rid of to make drones cheap when fighting tanks are required when fighting fighters. You only need to be slightly faster and slightly more maneuverable than your target to take it down, while older AT weapons were much faster: so slower drones could still be just as effective. This is not true for fighter jets.

You may find this link interesting:

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/ares-industries

> Ares is building a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles.

Not sure what this has to do with my claims about not being able to use cheap drones for taking down fighter jets. Military ships, like tanks, are also somewhat slower and somewhat less maneuverable than fighter jets, I believe.

Are you talking about cheap drones replacing modern fighters, or cheap drones shooting down modern fighters?

They will absolutely replace modern fighters to a degree and already have to an extent, like we've seen in Ukraine with drones serving as close infantry support etc. instead of manned aircraft.

There are still some things "cheap" drones won't be able to do.

Specifically, if you want to carry big bombs and missiles, you need a large aircraft even if it's unmanned. The drone is also presumably going to need to be able to survive enemy air defenses to some extent. So you wind up with a big expensive drone like the MQ-9 Reaper ($30mil plus, lol) that is approaching the size and complexity of a manned fighter.

Also, and I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but "small, cheap drones" are not likely to be shooting down modern fighters in the way that small cheap drones are currently killing tanks directly.

If you want an aircraft that can fly at mach 1.6+ and shoot missiles at other things (some of them stealthy) traveling at mach 1.6+, you are going to wind up with something fairly close to the size/cost/complexity of an F-35 even if you don't have a human being sitting inside.

And without the ability to operate in EMCON like an F-35 or F-22, unless it's fully autonomous.

Alternatively if/when starship is up and running it should be pretty trivial to ferry a lot of JDAM-esque weapons up to an orbital launch platform. From there you could practically throw bombs down in a suborbital path to a target and let the JDAM fins guide it in through the atmosphere.

A starship already costs around 90 million USD at cost (estimated based on parts cost currently) and is intended to cost around 10 million USD per launch commercially if it's able to be reused regularly.

And a single launch could carry a lot of bombs (like 50-400 based on the size). So on the high end after factoring in the cost of the bombs, amortising the cost of the initial orbital platform, and assuming a higher cost of like 120 million USD for a single launch, that would still almost certainly come out cheaper than sacrificing an MQ-9 or a much more expensive missile. And of course if you can get that cost down to 10 million USD per launch then other than artillery, that's going to be the cheapest way to deliver ordinance to any location in the world by far (after factoring in the cost of flight time for jets, etc).

This is all theoretical until properly tested.

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