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Comment by rcme | Hacker News Reader

But they’re so cheap that you can overrun your opponents defense. Who cares if they’re slow? You can shoot down any individual drone, but you can’t shoot them all down.

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Cheaper than a bullet? Seems unlikely.

And if the attacker's drone swarm is that implausibly cheap, then the defender just puts up their own implausibly cheap defensive drone swarm to counter them. Checkmate.

How can you take down a drone with a single bullet? It’s not trivially easy to shoot them down. Also, a “defensive” drone swarm would need more advanced tracking and targeting capabilities, so it would be more expensive. Look at Israel’s Iron Dome. A single interception costs $100,000-$150,000. The rockets being intercepted cost less than $1,000. If Israel was more evenly matched, it would be cost prohibitive to intercept all of the rockets.

The US just announced that it is buying off-the-shelf anti-drone systems for Ukraine that operate chain guns in single-shot mode. Drones are slow so they can use VT rounds instead of the CIWS spray-and-track method.

https://eos-aus.com/defence/counter-drone-systems/slinger/

It's interesting to dig deeper into the vague mention of "special ammunition". According to [1], the Slinger uses Northup Grumman's M230LF Bushmaster 30mm cannon and [2] suggests that the anti-drone ammunition is the recently developed XM1211 HEP (High Explosive Proximity) round which was designed for the M230LF. Finding about the creation of XM1211 rounds is stunning because it means that an effective radar proximity fuse is being stuffed into a tiny 30 mm diameter projectile with enough room left over for adequate explosive to generate a cloud of shrapnel. That's stuff that would have been considered sci-fi a few decades ago.

[1] https://www.australiandefence.com.au/defence/land/more-on-eo...

[2] https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/army-xm1211-high-exp...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam $100 per shot. Israel starts to deploy it this year

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