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yread 2 hours ago

still 100 mph less than piston-powered airplane speed record. Or 150 less than Tu95. Drones should be able to go that fast too

tormeh 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

daveguy 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, big 'ol asterisks in this "world air speed record". This is for electric-powered flight, and is equivalent to 57% of Mach-1.

laughing_man 33 minutes ago | parent [-]

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.

ARandomerDude 25 minutes ago | parent [-]

> 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.