In that case, yeah, I could see aerial drones being a response.

It's not an altogether different concept from the V1 Buzz Bomb. Those were easy enough to blow out of the sky if you were in a WWII prop fighter.

I wonder how effective heavy machine guns would be against one. What's its service ceiling? It's running on a gasoline motor so it can't be that high.

I think they go up to like 5000 feet so within anti aircraft gun range but you'd need a lot of such guns to cover the long Ukraine border and they are not cheap. Drones may be more practical.

>the Skyranger, a twin radar-guided 30mm gun turret made by Rheinmetall, making this the natural choice for the German Army. The gun system costs around $12 million https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2025/09/10/why-so...

and ammo is about $600/round apparently.

EDIT:

They used to go 5000 ft or so. Now " fly between 2,000 to 5,000 meters to evade small arms fire, while the high-altitude reconnaissance drone Shahed 147 can reach 18,288 meters (60,000 feet). "

The answer is simple, but not easy - you own the ground they launch from. Range is limited, so you need to add more of it between you and them. Otherwise the problem is inherently an asymmetric one - drones cost 100k. Solutions cost much more than that. You can't win on a cost basis. You have to win on a strategic basis.

Radar directed anti-aircraft artillery with analogue computers for trajectory prediction, firing proximity fused shells, were extremely effective against V-1 bombs. Far more so than interceptor aircraft.