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Interesting: why are they bad, and why are they so expensive? I would have thought it would be the one or the other. GPS guided drones, for example, are like u

Interesting: why are they bad, and why are they so expensive? I would have thought it would be the one or the other. GPS guided drones, for example, are like under a hundred bucks, so I don't get why a GPS guided shell should be literally a thousand times more expensive, and still not work.

the_biot 4y ago
The Russians have been jamming GPS frequencies routinely for years, and apparently pretty much continuously in the Ukraine war. Also consumer drones can carry almost no weight, certainly not anything genuinely heavy like a shell. And let's not forget their range -- even as lightweight as they are -- which is so limited as to make them useless as anything but toys.
- pasabagi 4y ago
  The thing the drones prove is that you can can solve the guidance problem cheaply and with commodity hardware. Obviously, an excalibur shell has like a rocket booster, and there are lots of things like jamming that could cause problems, but the thing that I'm really asking is, why doesn't somebody make a cheap (JDAM style) guidance kit for shells? It just seems to me to be manifestly technically feasible to produce such a kit for very little, even if you went out of your way to overcomplicate things, and if it was jammed, you could just have it drop down into 'dumb bomb' mode. (Personally, I feel the worse bang-for-buck the military gets, the better, because it means less people get blown up per dollar wasted on weapons[0], but I can't believe it's just institutional dysfunction that results in a 100,000 dollar shell that doesn't work half the time). [0]: imagine if the war in Iraq had been three orders of magnitude less expensive, for instance: it's entirely possible that the argument for expanding the conflict into Iran would have been viable then, to everybody's detriment.
horns4lyfe 4y ago
I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with them from n engineering perspective, but from a user perspective the guidance rarely worked correctly (a scary possibility with artillery) and the system the gun was retrofitted with just wouldn’t function a lot. As far as cost, if Raytheon was selling that gps guided drone to the government, you can bet it would cost orders of magnitude more than the consumer version. The military industrial complex is not a myth.

the_biot 4y ago

The Russians have been jamming GPS frequencies routinely for years, and apparently pretty much continuously in the Ukraine war. Also consumer drones can carry almost no weight, certainly not anything genuinely heavy like a shell. And let's not forget their range -- even as lightweight as they are -- which is so limited as to make them useless as anything but toys.

pasabagi 4y ago
The thing the drones prove is that you can can solve the guidance problem cheaply and with commodity hardware. Obviously, an excalibur shell has like a rocket booster, and there are lots of things like jamming that could cause problems, but the thing that I'm really asking is, why doesn't somebody make a cheap (JDAM style) guidance kit for shells? It just seems to me to be manifestly technically feasible to produce such a kit for very little, even if you went out of your way to overcomplicate things, and if it was jammed, you could just have it drop down into 'dumb bomb' mode. (Personally, I feel the worse bang-for-buck the military gets, the better, because it means less people get blown up per dollar wasted on weapons[0], but I can't believe it's just institutional dysfunction that results in a 100,000 dollar shell that doesn't work half the time). [0]: imagine if the war in Iraq had been three orders of magnitude less expensive, for instance: it's entirely possible that the argument for expanding the conflict into Iran would have been viable then, to everybody's detriment.

horns4lyfe 4y ago

I couldn’t tell you what’s wrong with them from n engineering perspective, but from a user perspective the guidance rarely worked correctly (a scary possibility with artillery) and the system the gun was retrofitted with just wouldn’t function a lot. As far as cost, if Raytheon was selling that gps guided drone to the government, you can bet it would cost orders of magnitude more than the consumer version. The military industrial complex is not a myth.