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Comment by Neil44 | Hacker News Reader

This is true, but the author also talks about cost e.g. $500 for a drone vs $100 for an artillery shell with far more effect. Surely at the point where the drone has visual on the target you can fire 5 x shells over for massively greater effect on target, and keep the drone flying for the next target, and the next.

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$100 is a cost of a 60mm mortar shell. It is a hand grenade sized munition lobbed from a Pringles can sized weapon to the range of 1-2km. This is generally not the thing that comes to mind when you think of artillery strike.

A 155mm (dumb, unguided) shell would set you back 5-8K USD. That's before the propellant charge, fuse and amortization of the artillery piece and its 5 man crew.

That's interesting thankyou. It's a good google rabbit hole. Apparently we're in surge pricing right now because of Ukraine, and Russian shells are only costing them $1000. It seems they caught us sleeping, manufacturing wise.

The heavy Soivet calibre used by Russia is 152mm which translates to a slightly cheaper shell (though not 5x for sure). Russia also uses 122mm arty which is substantially cheaper: the costs follow to the cube volume. Another factor is that a lot of supplies are Iranian and North Korean old stock with what we can assume reasonable prices. Ukraine was getting Vietnam war era 155mm stock relatively cheap too, while it lasted.

Then again the payload of an FPV is much more comparable to the mortar round than to the 155mm one

But theoretically much better aimed. Don’t know if there’s enough data here to do the math. Plus that it’s a bit gauche to do math about human lives, but here we are.

don't need to aim a large shell as accurately though.

It averages out at 8-10 shells to kill or disable one soldier.

Do you have numbers for that? Because the higher-end munition also has (rudimentary) steering capabilities? And higher end stuff obviously has the same or better honing software

An FPV drone can take out a tank, missile erector-launcher or a dugout. Kinda hard with 60mm mortar.

The estimate is 20 FPV hits for one kill right? But sure, the last one kills it

A M107 155mm round weights 95lbs when launched. Assuming that is pure lead (this is false, but lead is very cheap and it gives us numbers to work with) I can buy lead ignots for $2.89/lbs. Which puts us at $293 per rounds in just materials. Since we assume the other materials cost money too, plus there is the energy used to turn ignots into a round, it seems unlikely you can get the cost to much under $1000 no matter how good your mass production is.

And then you need to add that 5-10x government contract price multiplier to the cost as well.

But how much of the shell cost is the capital cost of precision machining ? And how much is the capital & operating costs of workforce safety ?

Mortar is notoriously inaccurate, while a drone is a precision guided weapon. To compare apples to apples, a drone needs to be compared to other precision guided weapons. Think Stinger or other TOW missiles instead. Those are at least two orders more expensive.

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