3 ms·

Is there a fundamental difference between a drone and an anti-ship missile?

• jabl 3y ago
  In the sense that both are flying things loaded with explosives heading towards your ship, no there's no "fundamental" difference between them. In practice, there's a world of difference. Drones are cheap and slow, but can be a big threat in a saturation attack style scenario. Do you want to spend a $1M+ missile to shoot down a $5000 drone?. Do you even have enough missiles to shoot down a swarm of 100 drones? An anti-ship missile is much bigger and more expensive, but flies at around 300 m/s for a subsonic one, and up to 900 m/s for supersonic ones, giving much less time to shoot it down. And while the missile per se isn't armored, the warhead has a thick casing designed to penetrate deep into the ship before exploding, so hitting the missile with some shrapnel at short range isn't gonna help as the wreckage of the missile will still likely continue on a ballistic path and hit the ship. And the warhead is often big enough to cripple a warship with a single hit (well, maybe a carrier is big enough to keep on trucking).
  • kcb 3y ago
    The problem this brings up to me then is it's just a worse missile that we hope can be cheap while still being effective. But there's a lot of systems that this drone needs to still be at all effective. Miles of range, with a communication system, and guidance of some sort. Doesn't sound like $5000. The real winner is the swarm of highly effective missiles.