UK pledges $416 million to buy 10,000 drones for Ukraine
UK pledges $416 million to buy 10,000 drones for Ukraine
The U.K. will allocate 325 million pounds ($416 million) to purchase over 10,000 "cutting-edge" drones for Ukraine, the U.K. Defense Ministry announced on March 7.
You're viewing a single thread.
$41600 per drone? I mean, wow, these are not the cobbled together types.
the EW war is going to make retail cots drones a bit less common at the front
The majority of the drones will be highly effective first-person view (FPV) drones. The package will also include 1,000 one-way attack drones, researched and developed in the U.K., as well as surveillance and maritime drones.
The prices for the drones are not equal. I am guessing their maritime drones are the expensive bit because of their range and capabilities. This article from last September says they are about $250k a pop: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66373052
Even just one Russian ship loss would offset the costs for all of the drones. (How many submarine conversions does Russia have now?)
This is a fair take. Those marine drones are doing amazing work.
Somewhere in a timeline with an alternative timeline in Imperial Japan, there's a guy going "what if we didn't have to put pilots in our flying bombs...". And a bean counter is figuring out if that'll save money.
Nah, boomers here'd be like "That's unfair to us who did it without drones!"
That was actually being developed around that time, just not by the Japanese from what I am aware of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Aphrodite
Besides what is in that link, I believe there were several other similar things going on between the USAF(or equiv. I don't think the USAF was formed at the time.) and the RAF.
Those marine drones are five and a half metres long - so they're like speedboats, not those little hovering ones or those enormous UAVs.
I was looking at buying sprayer drones with 40kg payload, $35000 a pop.
What kind of spray would make Russians go away?