5 ms·

Quick, what's the difference between a suicide drone and a guided missile?

by somat 7mo ago

phil21 7mo ago
Cost.
baud147258 7mo ago
Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences
fhub 7mo ago
At the moment, cruise speed and manufacturing price.
colechristensen 7mo ago
- 2-4 orders of magnitude in cost. - One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.
- jandrewrogers 7mo ago
  And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone. As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink. Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
  - subw00f 7mo ago
    Oh I wish I had the money to test your theory. And a garage too.
    - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
      You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy. Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable. TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about. This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
      - WalterBright 7mo ago
        Amateurs who try to build their own explosives usually either fail to explode or explode killing the builder. An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
        colechristensen 7mo ago
        There's a selection process at work where smart people who know what they're doing don't try to assemble bombs in their garage for fun. If there's a legitimate reason like your country is fighting an existential war the kinds of people who can do things start doing things. But it's just rare having a person smart enough to be able to do it be stupid enough to try. (and the people who do are nutjob terrorists like Timothy McVeigh)
        7mo ago
  - snypher 7mo ago
    You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service? Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
    - kayodelycaon 7mo ago
      Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle. The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
      - don_esteban 7mo ago
        Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets. Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships. Assuming the opponent will be dumb is .. dumb.
    - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
      It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat. There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships. Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire. The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
      - 7mo ago
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
    It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.
  - andriy_koval 7mo ago
    > it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel you don't need to damage it severely. Some holes in radar, on board aircrafts and missiles containers will reduce capability by 80%
  - marcus_holmes 7mo ago
    This is no longer true. As the article says, the Ukrainians have effectively denied the Black Sea to the Russian navy through use of drones.
    - hax0ron3 7mo ago
      It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
      - KaiserPro 7mo ago
        > Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy. I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war. Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer. If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those) To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat. the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
throwawayffffas 7mo ago
Cost, production capacity, radar cross section, speed, range, payload. Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload. Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload. Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve. Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer. Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
- jacquesm 7mo ago
  > Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload. You need to seriously upgrade your level of knowledge about what is available in terms of drones today.
  - caminante 7mo ago
    I didn't take it as exhaustive. While you're alluding to high-end reapers/etc., the majority of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict have foam wings and low cost components.
    - jacquesm 7mo ago
      The ones that are decimating the russian oil industry are a bit more impressive than that. The foam wing ones are mostly Shaheds, the Ukrainian ones tend to be made of various plastics and/or fibreglass or composites for the more specialized stuff.
      - watwut 7mo ago
        Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.
dyauspitr 7mo ago
Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.
blitzar 7mo ago
the good guys bomb is a guided missile, the bad guys bomb is a suicide drone cruise missiles in the hands of a bad guy is a suicide drone and a suicide drone in the hands of a good guy is a guided missile
- m_mueller 7mo ago
  a guided missile would never be used against a civilian target! oh wait..
rustyhancock 7mo ago
It's a pretty fun categorization task but guided missile is too broad that could include rocket artillery! Let's say cruise missiles Vs suicide drone. The factors that make it a guided missile are presence of a rocket motor (or even turbine). Suicide drones like the ones were talking about use piston motors.
duped 7mo ago
Everyone is saying cost but I thought the defining factor was whether it can loiter

Quick, what's the difference between a suicide drone and a guided missile?

by somat 7mo ago

Quick, what's the difference between a suicide drone and a guided missile?

phil21 7mo ago

Cost.

baud147258 7mo ago

Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences

fhub 7mo ago

At the moment, cruise speed and manufacturing price.

colechristensen 7mo ago

- 2-4 orders of magnitude in cost. - One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.

jandrewrogers 7mo ago
And one of them can't scratch the paint on a modern naval vessel. Anti-ship warheads alone weigh more than an entire Shahed-136 drone. As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink. Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
- subw00f 7mo ago
  Oh I wish I had the money to test your theory. And a garage too.
  - jandrewrogers 7mo ago
    You can if you live in the US! It isn’t particularly expensive either, high explosives are industrial chemistry. A few dollars per kilo. Maybe a little bit more if you want something fancy. Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable. TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about. This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
    - WalterBright 7mo ago
      Amateurs who try to build their own explosives usually either fail to explode or explode killing the builder. An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.
      - colechristensen 7mo ago
        There's a selection process at work where smart people who know what they're doing don't try to assemble bombs in their garage for fun. If there's a legitimate reason like your country is fighting an existential war the kinds of people who can do things start doing things. But it's just rare having a person smart enough to be able to do it be stupid enough to try. (and the people who do are nutjob terrorists like Timothy McVeigh)
        7mo ago
- snypher 7mo ago
  You might need to consider lateral options. What if someone flew 1,000 drones at the windows on the bridge? How many BBs can hit that fancy radar before it is out of service? Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
  - kayodelycaon 7mo ago
    Yup. There’s the concept of “mission kill”. It’s very difficult to sink a battleship with 5” guns. Use them to blast off all the range finders, radars, and secondary battery and that ship will be headed home after the battle. The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
    - don_esteban 7mo ago
      Of course, you can use boatloads of cheap drones to kill the radars and CIWS, destroy the planes on deck and other juicy targets. Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships. Assuming the opponent will be dumb is .. dumb.
  - throwawayffffas 7mo ago
    It's the radars really for destroyers. The bridge is not actually where the ship is run during combat. There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships. Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire. The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
    - 7mo ago
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- throwawayffffas 7mo ago
  It takes a surprisingly small warhead to destroy a 100 million dollar radar array. A mission kill requires much less damage than actually sinking a ship. Take out an Arleigh Burkes radars and it's a 2 billion dollar container ship.
- andriy_koval 7mo ago
  > it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel you don't need to damage it severely. Some holes in radar, on board aircrafts and missiles containers will reduce capability by 80%
- marcus_holmes 7mo ago
  This is no longer true. As the article says, the Ukrainians have effectively denied the Black Sea to the Russian navy through use of drones.
  - hax0ron3 7mo ago
    It's more like, through the combined use of drones, sea-drones, and anti-ship missiles, backed by the productive might and surveillance capability of NATO, against a weak Russian navy. Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy.
    - KaiserPro 7mo ago
      > Iran has much weaker capabilities and is fighting a much stronger enemy. I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war. Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer. If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those) To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat. the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)

throwawayffffas 7mo ago

Cost, production capacity, radar cross section, speed, range, payload. Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload. Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload. Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve. Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer. Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.

jacquesm 7mo ago
> Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload. You need to seriously upgrade your level of knowledge about what is available in terms of drones today.
- caminante 7mo ago
  I didn't take it as exhaustive. While you're alluding to high-end reapers/etc., the majority of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict have foam wings and low cost components.
  - jacquesm 7mo ago
    The ones that are decimating the russian oil industry are a bit more impressive than that. The foam wing ones are mostly Shaheds, the Ukrainian ones tend to be made of various plastics and/or fibreglass or composites for the more specialized stuff.
    - watwut 7mo ago
      Imo foam wings and low cost components is very impressive. Low cost easy production is an actual tangible benefit. If it destroys the target and is easy cheap to make, it is a better arm.

dyauspitr 7mo ago

Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.

blitzar 7mo ago

the good guys bomb is a guided missile, the bad guys bomb is a suicide drone cruise missiles in the hands of a bad guy is a suicide drone and a suicide drone in the hands of a good guy is a guided missile

m_mueller 7mo ago
a guided missile would never be used against a civilian target! oh wait..

rustyhancock 7mo ago

It's a pretty fun categorization task but guided missile is too broad that could include rocket artillery! Let's say cruise missiles Vs suicide drone. The factors that make it a guided missile are presence of a rocket motor (or even turbine). Suicide drones like the ones were talking about use piston motors.

duped 7mo ago

Everyone is saying cost but I thought the defining factor was whether it can loiter