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Comment by chickenbig | Hacker News Reader

The original press release from HMG is https://www.gov.uk/government/news/groundbreaking-ukraine-te... .

This has barely more information, but enough to establish an order of magnitude:

> The drone developed under Project OCTOPUS was designed by Ukraine with support from UK scientists and technicians and has already proved successful on the battlefield, proving highly effective against the Shahed one-way attack drone variants used by Russia – despite costing less than 10% to produce than the drones they are designed to intercept.

What does a Shahed cost? https://www.twz.com/news-features/what-does-a-shahed-136-rea... says about US$50k, so they're saying that the Octopus drones cost on the order of US$5k, and "thousands" of them costs on the order of US$10M. So this is a single-digit percentage of Ukraine's yearly drone budget: not insignificant, but far from game-changing.

The main article has that the Ukrainians are investing US$271m in UK plants so presumably more than $10m worth.

But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.

Is it possible that this paragraph isn't actually about Octopus?

> The agreement followed investment from Ukraine’s largest drone manufacturer, UKRSPECSYSTEMS, which announced that it would invest £200 million (US$271.2 million) into two new UK facilities – the first major investment by a Ukrainian defence company in the UK, according to Healy.

My guess is that they will producing a lot of the interceptor drones and keeping the plant there for a long time even if the war ends.

If the interceptor-drone agreement followed the investment, the investment can't have been conditional on the agreement, so maybe the plant was intended to produce other drones, perhaps for sale to, for example, the Allance of Sahel States (ASS).

£200M is the same order of magnitude as Ukraine's total yearly spending on drones, I think.

I think Ukraine is investing large sums into its arms industry and it will probably continue as a large part of its economy, exporting arms after the war is over.

They would after all be in a strong position as one of the only countries to have successfully fought a major power in recent times.

Probably a better position than the Taliban, actually, who actually won the war and recouped all their lost territory. That seems unlikely to be in the cards for Ukraine.

> But that would mean that the Octopus interceptor drones cost more than the Shaheds they're designed to shoot down.

But does it cost more than the Shahed plus the target of the Shahed? That it the equation Ukraine is using.

That's a different question; I'm just saying it would contradict the "less than 10%" claim in the article and the press release.

It would maybe also not be a great idea to field weapons that cost more than their targets, because, measured in dollars, it means you're doing more damage to yourself than to the enemy. Economically speaking, it's like a handgun that shoots both backwards and forwards. If you're immensely richer than the enemy—and the UK's GDP is almost twice the size of Russia's, even before you add in Ukraine's GDP, Poland's GDP, Germany's, etc.—it can still be a winning strategy. But it's still pretty galling.

Of course they cost more per unit than Shaheds, because they wouldn't be using CH32V as sole CPUs and JLCPCB PCBA outsorces to do these. They're going to use proper defense parts and defense outsources that make Apple upgrade premiums look like paid junk food sauce packets in comparison.

That doesn't sound like Ukraine's approach, if they designed the thing.

You're equating the cost of building the factories producing these drones with the cost of Shaheds alone. What do you think is the cost of a factory to build those Shahed drones in Iran? Why would you even include the CapEx as part of the cost ratio here? Mind boggling.

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