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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

At those higher altitudes they are trivial for radar to detect, and from farther away too. They are adapting cheap commodity used marine radars to get this done in some places

I suspect the Shaheds are going higher to mitigate AA ground fire. Higher up you have to send a missile or interceptor up.

It’s a trade off.

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And interceptors are more expensive than Shaheds. A $100k interceptor (guessing here) to shoot a $10k Shahed can be an acceptable deal for the side launching the Shaheds.

Interceptor in this case refers to reusable aircraft. They are sending up cheap to operate prop planes to intercept Shaheds in Ukraine now.

Sending up a plane that costs $500/hour to operate to take down a few Shaheds an hour works out really well.

YouTube has plenty of videos of these guys going up and just shooting them out of the air.

Reusable interceptor has BOM of 3000$, 15000$ sales price. Wanted to start this project with an ex-colleague, but he bought old house and is stuck trying to make it livable.

Anyone interested in cooperation? I am hardware and math guy.

maybe this is a stupid question but how could you possibly re-use a thing that explodes in use

Multiple shotgun shells mounted inside of flying platform for final product. For prototyping it is regulatory nightmare in Germany though. That’s a trade-off reusability vs. hard hit. I took Rheinmetall’s calculation of 1000€ for single piece of their magic anti drone munition for business case.

In some cases they are literally flying small prop aircraft and shooting Shaheds down with a rifle from the cockpit, almost like WWI.

I've also seen videos of drones equipped with shotguns shooting down drones, but those seem to mostly be smaller drones, not long range Shahed drones.

In either case, both are examples of re-usable interceptors, manned and unmanned.

Interceptors can just be an aircraft that goes up and sends a munition at the target.

Think of fighters going up to intercept bombing missions in wwii.

A $100k interceptor to save a $10 million critical facility against a $10k Shahed is a bargain. You saved $9.9 million dollars.

Interceptor economics makes more sense when you reason about the bigger picture. The point is to buy you time to remove the supply chain and the stocks so that you're not trading 1:1 forever. It's a stop-gap, or at least it's supposed to be.

However that only works in a war where you have air and informational superiority. In a peer-like conflict with information asymmetries and air parity (no way to remove the opponent's industrial base), such as Ukraine-Russia, the intercept economics are less appealing.

With interceptors that cost the defender $100k/unit and shaheds that cost the attacker $10k/unit, over time the attacker can bankrupt the defender if the target is something the defender cannot afford to lose. Sometimes it takes several interceptors to eliminate the threat. Therefore part of the focus in the design of interceptors is to keep their unit cost low. The unit cost of the first versions of shaheds may have been $10k; more recent models that fly higher, are equipped with a jet engine, more sophisticated electronics, cameras etc. are significantly more expensive. To the point it's not clear to me, of Ukraine or Russia, who pays the higher price during a mass attack at the moment.

Yes, unit costs should be kept as low as possible. My point is that not all wars are wars of attrition with air parity, which is where interceptor economics make the least sense.

No worries, europe will print money to subsidise ukraine forever.

A $100k interceptor to save a $10 million critical facility against a $10k Shahed is a bargain. You saved $9.9 million dollars.

Your enemy probably isn't sending one drone.

> A $100k interceptor to save a $10 million critical facility against a $10k Shahed is a bargain. You saved $9.9 million dollars.

Sure until they send 200 Shaheds at a night. Another another 200 next night and so on.

Hence the second paragraph

Ukrainian P1-Sun interceptor FPVs were built specifically for this purpose. They are way cheaper than a Shaheed drone and have a practical ceiling of 5000+ meters according to wikipedia.

https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/P1-Sun

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