Some of the drones that entered Poland the other day were made from styrofoam. The cost to intercept probably need to go close to 100$ because the drones that attack are going super cheap.
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
revx · 3m ago
"""
Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. [...]
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic.
"""
Having more and better drones now matters more than having more soldiers
kragen · 1h ago
This article doesn't provide enough information to be useful. Is "thousands" a lot? It depends on what kind of drones we're talking about. Ukraine produces on the order of ten thousand military drones per day, as does Russia. So the UK sending "thousands" one time might be insignificant. On the other hand, thousands of properly equipped Reapers would be enough to allow Ukraine to defeat and possibly conquer Russia—but nobody has or will ever have thousands of Reapers, which would cost on the order of 3% of the GDP of the UK.
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
dmix · 1h ago
~~deleted, misread the article, I thought this was about a different drone program~~
kragen · 1h ago
Are you guessing at random, or do you have more information about Project Octopus than the article contains?
stronglikedan · 24m ago
best to not make assumptions since it ultimately makes one look like, well...
eimrine · 1h ago
Interception drone can't be similar to Shaheed.
poszlem · 1h ago
Only by taking annual production (4 million) and averaging it daily, but that's not daily actual production and includes all drones (many small FPVs).
clickety_clack · 44m ago
Given that comment said “in the order of 10 thousand” and that he gave a single number and not a number for a particular day, I think we can assume that daily is a daily average.
kragen · 59m ago
You mean, because maybe most drone production stops on Sundays or something?
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
jl6 · 1h ago
> cost less than 10% of the Russian systems destroyed
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
sgt101 · 40m ago
Size and range.
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
fpoling · 1h ago
Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that as NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
diggan · 12m ago
> Given that Russia produces around 100 heavy drones per day and plan to increase production multiple times NATO countries are essentially defenseless
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
rightbyte · 18m ago
> NATO countries are essentially defenseless against that
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
kevin_thibedeau · 14m ago
I heard it would take 24 hours...
somenameforme · 10m ago
He's referring to nukes. War between NATO and Russia is a non-starter because there's no viable way it doesn't almost immediately escalate to nukes, especially when all parties would be aware of this creating even more an incentive to be the first to try, and inevitably fail, at a preemptive nuclear strike to completely disable the opposing forces' nuclear options.
rightbyte · 7m ago
Ye there are so much romantic fantasies roaming around I don't recognize the 'Overton window' anymore.
poszlem · 1h ago
> "UK defence secretary John Healey has outlined new plans to send thousands of interceptor missiles to Ukraine every month, with the Ukrainian-developed UAV to be shared with the UK to help in the fight against Russia."
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
potato3732842 · 54m ago
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
pmarreck · 1h ago
> when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
weego · 33m ago
Someone elses war to upskill our own ability to wage war at a fraction of the cost? It's a weapons development dream for any Govt / R&D company
spookie · 35m ago
Hell, Poland asked Ukraine to provide some instructors to help them after the recent escalation of airspace violations they had.
varispeed · 51m ago
Ukraine is seen as backwards because they are open about fighting corruption, which is taboo in the West.
MangoToupe · 49m ago
> Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
lenerdenator · 42m ago
I'm not a tactician with any experience, just thinking this through at my keyboard, but I'm not even sure drone v. drone is the answer here.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
pjc50 · 39m ago
> Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
idiotsecant · 30m ago
pulsejets would certainly be cheap, but they'd have terrible fuel efficiency, which is one of the most important attributes for a drone - how long can you loiter and how far can you go?
idiotsecant · 32m ago
a bunch of shotguns or service rifles is not going to help.
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
lenerdenator · 29m ago
In that case, yeah, I could see aerial drones being a response.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
tim333 · 25m ago
I think they go up to like 5000 feet so within anti aircraft gun range but you'd need a lot of such guns to cover the long Ukraine border and they are not cheap. Drones may be more practical.
Radar directed anti-aircraft artillery with analogue computers for trajectory prediction, firing proximity fused shells, were extremely effective against V-1 bombs. Far more so than interceptor aircraft.
mytailorisrich · 30m ago
NATO has many times the industrial capacity Russia has. Fater 3 years of war Russia has adapted to war production but if NATO decides to do the same Russia will be outclassed quickly.
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
tim333 · 11m ago
Russia is already in a low level conflict with NATO even if it's just NATO countries supplying equipment to Ukraine and Russia trying to hack NATO politics.
crinkly · 37m ago
Best to strike production capability than pay for missiles to shoot them down.
pjc50 · 30m ago
There is still a taboo against a nuclear weapons state directly striking another nuclear weapons state, under its own flag.
FrustratedMonky · 1h ago
question "NATO will quickly run out of missiles to shot those drones."
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
pjc50 · 42m ago
The drones are rather large: https://osmp.ngo/collection/shahed-131-136-uavs-a-visual-gui... and have a flight ceiling of about 4000m. It is probably roughly comparable to WW2 aircraft, given that it's driven by a piston prop engine. That suggests the need for similar technology such as "flak" anti-aircraft shells. However, that requires line of sight and has limited accuracy, while not being all that cheap to deploy. So if these guided interceptors can be built cheaply, with a decent hit rate, they might end up being cheaper than conventional AAA.
sgt101 · 47m ago
One approach is directed energy, there are laser guns like the UK's dragonfire (there are many others out there too) however these have problems in dusty or foggy conditions for obvious reasons. There are also microwave effectors which are used to fry the electronics on drones. These take advantage of the advances in Gallium Nitride based power electronics (and other even more exotic materials).
amelius · 38m ago
These drones probably have US semiconductors in them. If only there was a backdoor ...
dboreham · 51m ago
Bullets have short range. So now you have to carpet the land with AA guns.
lenerdenator · 37m ago
It'd be interesting to see how short that range really is.
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.
MangoToupe · 51m ago
Geran-2's are far too large to be taken out with shotguns. Furthermore, you'd have to anticipate where they would want to strike. Drones, missiles, or lasers are likely the only way to stop them.
tim333 · 1h ago
Probably a step forward to deal with the hundreds of shahed drones that Russia is sending to Ukraine and now it seems occasionally Poland. I'm curious what design they are going for. There is one possibility here https://youtu.be/Otyn_tXP0Uo
In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.
I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.
If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.
Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.
Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]
What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]
It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. """
Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age
So the description in the article is so ambiguous that it covers the full range from "insignificantly small" to "implausibly large".
Under these circumstances, if the UK is sending thousands of small FPVs it would be insignificant.
One wonders how they have managed that, or how they know.
> While Healey didn’t elaborate on the cost of the interceptor drone, the Center for Strategic and International Studies put the estimated cost of a Shahed at $35,000
The Shaheds are large petrol driven things with ~2000 km range and 20 kg warheads. The interceptors are probably battery powered with a fraction of the weight and range.
This kind of thing https://thedefender.media/en/2025/08/dyki-shershni-showcased...
>Sting interceptor hits 315 km/h, shoots down over 200 Shaheds and Gerberas
>Sting costs about $2,500
Not sure what design the UK will make.
Strike drones have to be able to carry a fairly large warhead (or are only good at hitting people and not things) and they have to fly quite a long way to get at things like reserve assets and logistics. So they are quite big, with quite a lot of fuel etc. Big things tend to cost more. In this case I can imagine that an interceptor that has a range of 10k and is 5% of the size of the strike drone would be able to knock it down and would be able to do so well away from its target.
Dunno how anyone can "know" unless they "know" and then they are not talking. But, it seems plausible that something with 10% of the range and 5% of the mass would cost 10% or less.
Any country needs to stockpile interceptor drones and have production facilities to quickly ramp up production.
But given that NATO is both increasing and planning to increase the defenses more, they're essentially equal then? I'm not sure what point there is of discussing potentially future actions of Russia without considering the potentially future actions of others, like NATO will be the same tomorrow as today?
I think the plan is that the war is over in 10 minutes ... so why care.
The UK isn’t just being generous, it’s paying for access to Ukrainian drone know-how. Too many in the West still cling to the fantasy that Ukraine is some backward state, when in fact it’s become one of the world’s top drone powers.
Practice makes perfect.
There's some guy in Damascus who knows more about the real world use of the TOW than the people who built it.
It's amazing what you can do when your choices are, in essence, "be destroyed" or "become an expert"
These are not exclusive concepts. I've seen too many videos of men being literally kidnapped off the street ("busification") to have sweet thoughts about the state.
Depending on how low they are flying and how large they are, you could conceivably set up anti-drone defenses using service rifles or shotguns wired up to a detection and fire control system. I know that someone in Thailand did exactly that with a bunch of M16A1s.
Of course, if they're larger and higher up, you could possibly use more traditional AAA artillery.
Both of those routes use things that are already "cheap" and in the supply chain.
It's a real problem that "drone" gets used for things that can fit in your hand, all the way up to the same size as single-seater aircraft. These seem to be aimed at the latter. The Shahed is more of a slow cruise missile with wings, or the WW2 V1 pulsejet "flying bombs"
(we've not seen the return of the pulsejet, have we? "V1 with modern guidance" seems like it might fit a niche)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136
This is what people talk about when they say 'drones' in this context - basically a remote-guided 100 lb bomb flying in a 400lb chassis at 115 mph thousands of meters up.
It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.
I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.
>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...
and ammo is about $600/round apparently
These are war game scenarios, though, as in reality it is highly improbable that Russia would start a conflict with NATO because they know they cannot compete. This doesn't mean NATO should not keep its game up, of course.
Is there not cheaper auto-shotgun type devices around? To spray the sky. It doesn't take an entire missile or even bullet to damage a drone does it?
A lot of assumptions about range were based on the idea of a soldier shooting at another soldier, more-or-less at a horizontal level. You had to design a bullet to accurately hit a target and disperse kinetic energy into biological tissue.
Now, you're aiming at something made of non-biological materials of varying size, but they're usually lightweight and have little in the way of redundant flight systems. There's a real chance that if you send up enough small arms fire, you could hit a drone at up to a mile in the sky and cause it enough damage to be unable to complete its mission.
Helicopters are known to be vulnerable to small arms fire. I don't see why an even smaller drone would be any different.