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Comment by cingraa | Hacker News Reader

These are cheap decoy foam drones with less electronics. The amount of fuel decides how far they fly. Favorable wind? They fly further.

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They are cheap but the rockets to shoot them down cost (I've heard but don't count on it) around $480,000 per missile. That is not a minor consideration for a country like Romania.

Absolutely not the ideal weapon to fight them, and better(cheaper) options are coming to shoot down the drones, but until then the price is irrelevant as long as you're preventing loss of human life.

Saving any nonzero amount of lives for any unbounded cost is not necessarily a good trade, if there are ways to save more lives for the same cost, or the same number of lives for a lesser cost.

The actual volume here is tiny, so the costs pale in comparison to political and economic consequences

We're not at the point of making those kind of decisions in Romania, fortunately. Politically right now it would be very dangerous to say that "some of you may die".

> The amount of fuel decides how far they fly. Favorable wind? They fly further.

Is this true for non-decoy non-foam drones and basically everything else that flies, even things with solid boosters? Seems like a strange part to add here as it basically applies to aviation in general, replace "fuel" with "stored energy" and literally all type of "vehicle" fits basically.

A non-decoy drone would presumably go no further than its target, at which point any leftover fuel just adds to the fireball. Whereas making a decoy drone go down before the fuel is exhausted is pointless waste, when instead it could be decoying a little bit longer.

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