[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

I can see the future from a long way away, here. It is not the high tech drones that will matter most, but the bargain basement low tech drones - flying armadas of them.

Military history has many examples of the balance between quality and quantity in weaponry. If you do not have both, then you become vulnerable.

A single F-22 Raptor costs about $150 million. If the production costs of cheap, mass-produced drones could be kept under $50,000 each, you could buy THREE THOUSAND drones for the price of one F-22.

Keeping it simple, each drone could carry a common, 250 pound bomb. It would also need some shielding to protect its electronics, and some other things, but there would be no practical way to stop such an armada short of a nuclear detonation.

[Anton.Rutter]

I anticipate a lot of basement projects.

[shove_it]

The problem with products from China is quality control. Everything with a “Made in China” label on it is crap - everything from the fasteners that hold military gear together to the flapper valves on toilet tanks are junk. Maybe it’s just the stuff the Chinese export is junk and the stuff they produce for internal consumption is fine, I don’t know but we are being stiffed big time.

[cynwoody]

A single F-22 Raptor costs about $150 million. If the production costs of cheap, mass-produced drones could be kept under $50,000 each, you could buy THREE THOUSAND drones for the price of one F-22.

Keeping it simple, each drone could carry a common, 250 pound bomb. It would also need some shielding to protect its electronics, and some other things, but there would be no practical way to stop such an armada short of a nuclear detonation.

Will the future see a mission of thousands of $50k smart drones, each with its own detailed target list, overseen by a handful of people in a bunker watching computer screens?

What's needed is a vehicle with the smarts of an X-47B but with a less ambitious, and therefore much cheaper, airframe. The cost of smarts continues to fall with every new smartphone and driverless car. However, airplanes remain expensive.

You don't fly the X-47B. You give it a flight plan. It can carry up to 4500 lbs of ordnance and has a range of 2100 nm. An X-47C model is planned to have a 10,000 lb payload.

But it's not cheap. The X-47 program cost stands at $813m. I'm not able to find a unit cost estimate. As an example, the Predator unit cost is around $4m (program cost $2.38b), so I would expect the X-47's to be considerably higher.

The US military-industrial complex is not known for controlling cost and keeping things simple. Who knows how much a Lexus would cost if it were built by Northrop Grumman under contract to the Pentagon? What nation is most likely to innovate disruptively in this field?

[Hulka]

“I can see the future from a long way away, here. It is not the high tech drones that will matter most, but the bargain basement low tech drones - flying armadas of them”

Like, say hobby-shop RV aircraft. . .they are RPVs.