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> Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure. It's really not, the Ukrainia
by walrus01 1y ago
> Likewise, a drone factory is as vulnerable to drone attack as any other big, static, expensive piece of defense infrastructure.
It's really not, the Ukrainians have geographically distributed assembly and testing, QC of quadcopters in the ten to fifteen inch propeller size class in many random and hard to find locations. A shitload of them can be assembled by a team of ten people working in a 2000 sq ft workshop in an apartment building basement.
Large drone factories like something that can crank out shahed 136 size uav? Or like what the US mil calls a group 3 uav? Or group 4 sized? Sure, agreed, different thing.
I agree with a lot of the points the author makes in this article but I question if they've ever assembled a 12" prop size quadcopter (large enough to carry a good sized amount of munition on a 10-15 minute one way trip) from components. It's something easy to distribute as a cottage industry.
- ajuc 1y agoMost of the work is in making electronics, batteries and engines. All requires typical long supply chains and big factories. Assembly is a very small part of the job. Currently there's no shortage of the components, but we could imagine a strict trade controls of the components, some cold war deglobalization scenario or even a WW3. Without CPUs there's no drones.
- walrus01 1y agoFinding and bombing the factory that turns out stm32h7 microcontrollers for hobby grade uav running betaflight seems like it would have a lot of unintended consequences.
- ajuc 1y agoWars and wide-spread terrosism tend to have unintended consequences, yes.
- tonyhart7 1y ago"a strict trade controls of the components" how can you restrict such manufacturing tho??? I mean you literally cant block off an entire chinnese industry can you?
- ajuc 1y agoYou can drone-bomb the factory and ban ASML from sending the next set of matrices to rebuilt it. That's just one scenario, there's others. The supply chains are REALLY long and touch basically every important country on Earth and quite a few unimportant ones.
- tonyhart7 1y agoYeah that mean they can't, you act like Western did not do that to russia already
- ajuc 1y agoIf West did it for real that would include decoupling, end of globalization and economic decline of China with all the turmoil on financial markets and in global corporations that would entail. What West did was slapping russia on hands (but not too hard cause it's inconvenient).
- intended 1y agoI believe the author agrees with this, since a few sentences later they state: > But drone technology is too cheap, too modular, and with too many useful civilian applications for the big players to control their manufacture. >What would you restrict, if you wanted to prevent any other actor from building drones? Batteries? Rotors? 3D printers? $17 Raspberry Pis? Theres definitely a recognition of how cheap and easy it is.
- ponector 1y agoEven better, there is a program where everyone can buy components, assemble the FPV drone at home and send to the special QC unit. There it is tested and sent to the frontline.
- qiine 1y agowow, this is crazy