Russia has been moving to more use of jet drones, as Ukraine is having a lot of success with these interceptors. Hope they’ll innovate their way to a new inceptor for those, to protect their civilian infrastructure.
The weapons use saddens me. Ignoring that, this is interesting for electric aviation as a whole. One of my arguments about electric aviation is that burning fuel for propulsion has a lot of challenges, especially at altitude. Pushing the speed envelope for electric will lead to more and more novel ways of pushing things and once they get efficient, fast and, very importantly, high altitude, the amount of power you need drops considerably. The argument against electric aviation is always that (pick your favorite fuel x) has 100x the energy per gram. This is an apples to bananas comparison for many reasons but at a high level if you need far less energy to cover the same distance then that argument goes away in a hurry. Electric propulsion with aircraft redesigns taking advantage of it has a chance to do that. I'm really looking forward to hitting FL1000 and getting to my destination in an hour using electric propulsion.... eventually.
Interesting, that this form-factor was popularized by DIY builders. First one was dutch-built, sponsored by Red Bull after prototyping stage, to film Verstappen's full F1 lap (so semi-DIY, so to say), but then record was taken back and forth between two DIY builders — Ben Biggs in Australia and Luke Maximo and his father
Latest record by Ben Biggs was 626kph (389mph). Latest record by Luke Maximo was 655kph (408mph).
You can only go so fast with propellers, as the propeller tips approach speed of sound and then life gets complicated.
And old assumption, widely held until the soviet Bear bombers shattered the misconception that propellers must remain subsonic.
Not even close to the manhole cover speed record.
For those unaware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob
Most people agree that the manhole cover would have been vaporized during its atmospheric ascent portion of flight, but I still like to believe that somewhere out there in the void, a small blob of molten steel that survived the atmosphere is drifting in solar orbit.
Perhaps it's going even faster, and one day will zoom through someone else's stellar system. And they'll rack their brains over what this weird misshaped metallic radioactive object means, where it's coming and where it's going to.
How does this compare with a conventional interceptor drone?
There are amateurs chasing the speed record using similar designs too: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=world%27s%20fas...
Unit cost for a lot of these seems to be under ~$5K USD, not counting the value of engineering time.
How do you counter a swarm of these things coming from all directions?
This kind of weapon has interesting consequences for public speaking events by leaders. Or large industrial projects on the coast of Texas that use large tanks of compressed methane and LOX.
This seems like the kind of thing that you can send in the mail to another country in a special box that can open up when it senses that it has arrived at a destination so the drone can fly off to get into position for an attack by hiding itself in some nook on the roof of some nearby industrial building.
Put a small solar panel on it so that it can sit indefinitely, waiting for the signal to strike a target.
Or put a dozen or so of them on an unmanned surface vehicle like the Ukrainians did and send them out to a juicy port target.
The biggest threat that a weapon like this poses isn't just from the initial destructive capacity, it comes from the possible difficulty in attributing the source of the attack.
How do you respond to this kind of weapon you don't know who used it against you?
> How do you counter a swarm of these things coming from all directions?
Throw drones back at them. Shoot them with bullets. Anti-drone tech has been advancing as well, albeit mostly outside the U.S.
This has already happened, the Ukrainans loaded some regular trucks with drones and sent them deep into Russia
I’ve been worried about the same thing, but I’m more worried about it being used as a mechanism for deploying chemical weapons.
>> send in the mail to another country in a special box that can open up when it senses that it has arrived at a destination
They are called letter bombs. Ted Kaczynski did much damage with them. Needless to say, direct mail from Kyiv to moscow is not straightforward these days. And sending secret explosives through third country mail services is frowned upon by postal workers. Fedex even charges a premium when shipping killbots overnight.
But why?? We have had rocket powered anti-aircraft interceptor drones that go at mach 3 since 1955.
Cost, your average stinger cost 38000 dollars in the 80s. I am guessing here but they are aiming at a price of probably under 10000 dollars.
Now why doesn't anyone take a rocket and stick the drone guidance on it? Again I am only guessing here, the drone guidance components probably can't cope with 2-3 mach. At 1000 meters per second with a 60 fps camera you advance 16.6 meters per frame, add to that the latency of whatever guidance system you have. You are looking at 20-30 meters offset between frames.
Better guidance probably balloons the cost to the 10s of thousands of dollars.
Oh and probably loiter time, the rocket is you shoot and it's gone. The interceptor may have enough battery to fly around for a few minutes looking for the next one if its target is downed by something else. Plus you can probably recover these if they miss. This is all very speculative though.
Anyone can build this style of interceptor with commercial off the shelf parts for a a few thousand dollars. It's also reusable. A rocket for the same budget will be unguided and single use. Not useable as an interceptor.
Maneuverability and cost. Why this specific stunt? Marketing, presumably.
Maneuverability not so much modern AA missiles can pull over 60gs. That capability costs 100s of thousands of dollars though.
Speed is only part of the story, but probably the part that can sell the capability of drones today.
How good are they at intercepting another maneuverable aircraft either autonomously or FPV? At what speed is the drone starting to be limited by the human pilot relying on a camera feed?
Speed is really important because at these speeds they can probably intercept drones flying with low cost jet engines. So it adds a huge capability.
But it can’t be the thing that mattered first and foremost because then a 20c bullet would win against any drone. But a bullet is not great at intercepting small moving targets. Which is why I asked how good are they at intercepting at those speeds especially FPV mode.
No speed is the most important factor. You have a very limited window to get the munition on target. An in Ukrainians case Geran drones drones don't maneuver much, if at all.
Speed obviously isn’t the dominating factor given interceptor drones exist in a world with rockets.
< No speed is the most important factor
Bullets (Or rockets. Or shells with proximity fuses) go much faster so obviously speed isn't the most important factor.
These are anti-aircraft interceptors, intercepting sound like a critical part of the job.
> drones don't maneuver much, if at all.
Yeah, drones didn't fly at 700km/h much if at all either. So can an interceptor drone traveling at 700km/h reliably maneuver to intercept an enemy drone? How well can it do it when a human is piloting?
Did nobody read the article? It's quite clear.
"Quantum Systems Group reckons it has broken the flight speed record for an electric drone."
still 100 mph less than piston-powered airplane speed record. Or 150 less than Tu95. Drones should be able to go that fast too
Maybe, but the budget for an interceptor drone is much much smaller. Unless it fails at its job an interceptor drone is only going to be used once.
Yeah, big 'ol asterisks in this "world air speed record". This is for electric-powered flight, and is equivalent to 57% of Mach-1.
It's a pretty big deal in the Ukraine war. Russia has been using cheap drones to attack Ukraine, which initially only had very expensive SAM systems to intercept. Ukraine then introduced cheap electric drone interceptors which have been working well.
Russia's response was to increase the speed of its drones. As long as Ukraine can match that speed increase with the interceptors, it will still be able to intercept drones cheaply.
> will still be able to intercept drones cheaply
But likely not at the scale required to make a real dent. This is the problem with the "this new weapon will win the Russia-Ukraine war" mantra we've heard so often (Javelin, HIMARS, F-16, etc). Lots of very capable weapons have entered the fight, but at limited scale compared to Russia's enormous manpower and manufacturing advantage.