Guide to Ukraine's Long Range Attack Drones

hisutton.com

14 pointsBluestein5 comments

It is striking to me how small the payloads are for these drones - up to about 25kg.

There's a lot of talk about how cheap these drones are - and indeed they are. But the payload is like 1/20th of a classic cruise missile too.

If they are 100x cheaper, then sure, this maybe a decent tradeoff (depends also on reliability, probability of getting destroyed etc.) but it's not like a small drone is just as good as a big and very expensive cruise missile.

And all of them do it. Striking. But it seems possible that the price isn't what matters here. Rather, that the Ukrainians consider accuracty/reliability to be the key factors.

Hypothesis: They're using these things against targets where 5kg delivered to the right spot will do the job, so the manufacturers iterate their designs and optimise for delivering 5kg reliably and accurately rather than for delivering more explosives.

It helps them to stay "under radar", but their effectiveness is limited to something flammable. Pretty much any hit besides some oil refinery is mostly a PR, without real damage.

The Moskva would disagree.

The Moskva was, reportedly, sank by a "full fat" cruise missile, not some low-cost drone.

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