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Comment by freediddy | Hacker News Reader

I think ultimately the real weapon of mass destruction will be long-range drones the size of a DJI drone, each holding a small but extremely powerful explosive.

And then send millions of them, with specific single targets. Each AI controlled to target single weakpoints in buildings, bridges, or even specific people. You can't stop a million of them even with EMPs because you can just end a million more. You can destroy entire cities with a technology like this. If each drone costs $10,000 and you send a million of them that's only $10 billion for a war and complete destruction of your enemy.

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Explosives don't scale in the way you seem to think they do. Below a certain threshold of warhead mass, you won't do much more than scratch the paint. The effects aren't linearly additive. The warheads required to penetrate military targets are incredibly heavy; you won't be loading them on a DJI drone nor traveling far even if you could.

A thousand sparrows does not an eagle make.

I think the opposite. Drones are subject to the tyrany of the rocket equation: they need fuel (or batteries) to fly, then fuel (or batteries) to carry the fuel, etc, in a compounded way. Which makes long range drone inherently more expensive than short range ones.

Right now, the novelty of the technology means the offensive has an advantage. But long term it will be the defensive who will benefit the most from drones.

I described below how you could launch thousands of them from a single massive container that gets dropped by B2 bombers. You have to use your imagination, you're not limited by today's technology anymore.

Why not just drop a container of tnt instead of drones with tiny bombs ?

I was answering to your comment in the current thread, where you explicitly said "long-range" drones. Long-range drones will always be more expensive than short range drones, and not in a linear way, in an exponential way.

Thousands of short range drones dropped from B2 bombers sound like an interesting idea, until you hear about JDAM bombs, of which the US has a virtually unlimited supply, which are cheap, and are incredibly powerful compared to anything one could attach to a DJI-sized drone.

You could also just write "magic" and say we should invest in wizards.

No DJI sized drone using any available or near future technology is going to have a range of more then whatever 20 to 30 minutes of well-below subsonic flight time can get you.

You could drop them from B2 bombers and they could fall to the ground en masse at hundreds of miles an hour and then the propellers could open up as they get closer to the ground.

Or you could launch them in massive containers like in Infinity War and these containers filled with thousands of them would land on the ground and open up and release the drones.

You're just not imaginative enough to solve the problem you described.

If you want to target a large area, there’s already cluster munitions and/or thermobarics.

So you know. Glide bombs. Which already exist and are already used and have a range of about 130km for a high altitude launch and a lot payload.

Or some absurdly heavy ballistic missile...which would be worse then existing ballistic missiles and is the type of target for which Patriot is specifically designed for (along with a number of other systems now).

This is an amazingly unserious post to the point I hope you're trolling. Or just twelve.

Ukraine, in operation spiderweb, has already launched drones from containers deep within Russia to damage "... one third of Russia's strategic cruise missile carriers, estimated to be worth $US7 billion ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

> like in Infinity War

Referencing Marvel movies in one's description of proposed military hardware is not only immediately discrediting but also a good sign that self-reflection is in order.

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