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Comment by petcat | Hacker News Reader

Russia lost most of its drone capacity when USA destroyed the Shahed factories and stockpiles in Iran and it has taken awhile for them to ramp-up their own domestic production. Both Russia and Ukraine are limited in the volume of drones operational at the same time so they deploy them as they become ready. There really isn't enough at any one time to do large coordinated swarm attacks like you're describing.

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Russia had its own production of much improved versions of Shahed many months before the whole USA vs Iran shitshow.

> shitshow

From a Russian or Chinese perspective it is probably seen as a great success.

Iran has an economic disaster on its hands but it’s held on and has the US squealing with the Houthi, oil prices and all the destroyed US bases. That may well be seen as a win by some there.

China depends on Iranian oil, but so far have been resilient with reserves. IMO prolonged conflict is good as it will start starving China eventually.

Iran is still shipping oil to China. And the west will be dying of starvation by the time China starts to feel it.

Russia has been self sufficient in drone production for more than a year. Not only that, they’ve innovated on the Shahed design by adding a jet engine. Production of drones is not the issue, lack of satellite internet is.

I refuse to believe russia cannot get infinite drone supply from china

They can, at a markup. An imported Shahed-style drone might cost you ~$20,000-30,000 USD if you import it, but building it domestically could bring the costs below $5,000. If your goal is to maximize munition mass, then you use China to supply things like INS systems, engines, Nvidia Tegra boards or camera technology that's harder to build in-house. That's what Russia does with the Geran program.

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