This is factually wrong. Most drone companies have tried in the consumer space before pivoting towards the military. The military has been more and more present since around 2019, and most Western drone companies have pivoted to the military since Ukraine. Not because it's more profitable, but really because they failed in the consumer space.

Also the military makes it easier for Western companies because DJI cannot compete (obviously). But I am absolutely convinced that DJI is better at making military drones ("micro aerial vehicles") than the West.

Either they are an exception to the rule, or we under-estimate the work needed to make proper copycats.

Maybe we are just realizing that it takes a lot of work to learn what's needed to "copy", as we are trying to copy DJI ourselves.

DJI is just extremely good. It feels like we have been trying to copy them for 10 years, but they are still moving faster than we can catch up. It feels like the gap is getting bigger, sometimes...

That's a pretty dishonest take. Those drones are incredibly complex.

Respectfully, that's ridiculous. The Silicon Valley has a long tradition of "move fast and break things".

No no no, this time, it's just that the Chinese companies are simply a lot better than the Western drone companies. Yes, there are many excuses to make ("it's cheaper for them"), but even without considering the price, the Western drones mostly feel like DJI 10 years ago.

The Parrot Anafi has been fairly nice for a few years now, but for some reason Parrot struggles to sell them (I suspect that US companies dismiss them because they are not from the US?). Skydio just announced a new drone that seems reasonable. Both quite a lot more expensive than DJI, so here is your excuse.

Apparently this hypothetical drone you're talking about has the evasion of a missile, and the stealth capabilities of the latest $Billion stealth aircraft, while 10,000 of them put together costs less than a single M1 Abrams tank.

It can also fly at speeds to evade our aimbot CIWS or aimbot CRAM defensive guns and carries enough of an explosive payload to damage an M1 Abrams.

Color me skeptical. I find it unlikely that you can make such a device for $1000ish.

No. That's not what I said. Quoting:

"outside of aerospace/military applications is that FT designs can get very expensive, very quickly. It can be hard to justify some of the design decisions one might have to make in the context of low cost commercial products. This is the main issue with drones."

In a commercial environment you have real financial boundaries. If the acceptable cost range for a drone is in the order of $100K, nobody is going to pay $500K for one. A drone with aircraft-grade certification and failure tolerance can easily cost that much; even more.

It isn't a matter of "too expensive to be worth undertaking" --a statement that can easily be twisted into something about not caring enough about human lives, etc. That isn't the point. At all.

Delivering a package costs X. Nobody is going to pay ten times X for the same delivery. Why? Because there are excellent deliver services that will do the job for X, if not less. And so, the financial equation regulating the acceptable cost range of a drone-based operation is related to what the market is willing to accept. This, in turn, determines what type of engineering one can apply to the drones.

It's simple, really. Commercial products are bound by constraints imposed by the market. If you are not willing to pay $75 for a cheeseburger, the burger-joint employees cannot make $50 per hour. It's impossible. It isn't necessarily a question of it not being worth it (paying them that much). Not at all. The market will not support it. You just can't do it.

> extrapolate it and compare it with the traffic and pollution studies.

Name one product. A single commercial or industrial product. Whose design safety requirements were determines and actually implemented by evaluating deaths due to pollution as a decision-making metric.

It's nice to talk about these things, and you might have a fantastic idea. Yet, once we descend to the realities of this world, well, as I said, good luck. Not going to happen. That's just not how things work. Perhaps they should. Not today. Not anytime soon.

Actually, my numbers aren’t off (and the companies aren’t lying in their marketing directly), it’s simply a misunderstanding over the units of scale.

For purposes of discussion, I’m going to focus on the payload numbers used in the link you provided, not manufacturer spec sheets as they vary a lot in terminology. I also own three of the drones listed in that link too, so what I’m saying isn’t hypothetical assumptions, but real world experience.

Let’s also use the DJI S1000 (but I’m happy to break it down for others too) for this discussion. The article claims a payload capacity of 7kg. This is actually a bit off flat out as the max takeoff weight is 11kg and the drone in question weighs 4.4kg. So our number is actually 6.6kg for payload. The biggest disconnect though is that the 4.4kg is just the airframe / motors / props / mcu, it doesn’t include the batteries (biggest impact) or some other needed electronics. Unlike with your average consumer drone, batteries are something you have wide control over in size, weight, and capacity. That said, unless you want to only fly a very short distance (think short walking range), you are still stuck with a heavy pack. On the low end, expect about 2kg, on the high end 3kg. That puts us under 4kg of payload now. If we want to see where it’s going (allowing us to be further away from this hypothetical bomb) or have more telemetry, we are going to be getting closer to the 3kg payload mark. Now let’s talk about price. These big drones are money pits. Sure, you see those $3-6k price tags advertised, but the part you don’t realize until you get into the field is that’s not a “flight ready” price. You are going to need batteries, radios, battery chargers, etc etc to actually be able to fly. For these big drones, you’ll spend >$500 just for one flight’s worth of batteries if done right. Shockingly, for a good battery charger, you’ll spend nearly a grand. For an appropriate radio, $500. You want remote video too? That’s another $1-2k, not including a gyro or camera. Heck, I spent pretty close to $1000 just on the carrying case for my S1000. Yes, a terrorist would likely cut a lot of corners, but it’s still going to be a lot more than the base sticker price you see advertised and my number of $10k is a fair median point for what it’d really cost on these bigger drones. Could you do it cheaper, yes, but my numbers are still in the right ballpark.

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I agree with your later point to another person, I don’t think this venue is encouraging a healthy discussion. You come off as someone intelligent, just not personally experienced in this field. As such, I’d be more than happy to continue the discussion offline. Shoot me an email if interested, info in my profile.

Some companies do...like Tesla, SpaceX, and Netflix. Their iteration rate is amazing.

>No no no, this time, it's just that the Chinese companies are simply a lot better than the Western drone companies. Yes, there are many excuses to make ("it's cheaper for them"), but even without considering the price, the Western drones mostly feel like DJI 10 years ago.

You haven't explained why? Move fast and break things mean to iterate fast, that includes finding way to cut the cost, improve specs, and just make the overall product better.

>The Parrot Anafi has been fairly nice for a few years now, but for some reason Parrot struggles to sell them (I suspect that US companies dismiss them because they are not from the US?). Skydio just announced a new drone that seems reasonable. Both quite a lot more expensive than DJI, so here is your excuse.

Is it or is it not competitive what what DJI is selling on the market? These drones are a innovation smorgasbord in so many different fields: cameras, weight, embedded electronics, avionics, and not to mention their software is good enough to not make people dismiss all the other things and go elsewhere. The fact they can offer all of that at a lower price point is (in my opinion) a sign of things to come in other industries: electric cars, space travel, renewable energy.

Prices like this for military equipment are deceptive. They're not $40mil a pop. They're the product of an $8 billion project. The build price is probably less than $100k... or at least it would be if a military contractor wasn't absolutely creaming it.

Currently the allure of drones is that they are very cheap and can perform some missions as well as their big expensive brothers.

If you make a drone that is equally capable as a modern crewed jet, you bear most of the cost anyway. You’ll save something by excluding the pilot, but have to pay for extra (stealth) communication, infrastructure etc.

Maybe we’ll go away from that, have many types of cheap drones that are specialised and disposable. That’s not the case now.

Bear in mind our perception is skewed by the fact that the last N wars were all fought against at least one country far behind in military technology. But NATO et al are really prepping against a war against an equal. Having a cheap plastic drone with a bomb attached at the bottom won’t do.

I think you're 100% right here.

It may seem absurd, but something that can take out a main battle tank would be well worth $20,000. An M1A2 Abrams costs $24 million. The latest model Russian T-90 is around $4 million. A Chinese Type 99 is around $2.5 million. The asymmetry is clear.

Some of that $20,000 is making sure it works reliably under any conceivable weather conditions, after it's been stuck in a storage container at +50 C/-30C for weeks or months, etc.

On the other hand, if you're just doing reconnaissance, maybe you'd rather send a swarm of 20 $1,000 drones instead (in an attempt to overwhelm the enemy's countermeasures).

They are more like 3-4 classes ahead, yes. The gap keeps increasing, it's quite amazing.

Or was that not your point?

s/Aircraft/Drone/. Now it's cheap.

Everything is cheaper in Turkey.

They can produce a lower quality drone for 1/10th the price. Bayraktar = $5M, Reaper = $32M.

Of course there's a market!

I doubt the US could produce a drone the quality of Bayraktar for $5M domestically. It's just too expensive here.

The Turks aren't succeeding because they're building better drones. They're succeeding because the market for drones is disposable, and so the quality doesn't need to be as high - in many cases it's better to have a lower price.

China didn't succeed because they can make better T-shirts than the US. They succeeded because they made cheaper T-shirts.

Don't confuse the two.

Huh? I don't understand your point, as they DO sell to consumers, and are the best known drone brand as it is.

In technology, hell no.

Admittedly, Skydio had this pretty good VSLAM a few years ago. Still their drone was pretty useless in most use-cases where you would have taken a DJI. In many situations you don't really need more than "sense-and-avoid". Don't under-estimate DJI. The day VSLAM is important, they may have it much faster than you think.

It's a common mistake in the West to think that "we are better at technology than China". In the drone industry, we are years behind. And because of the technology, not because of the production cost.

> I've never been so wrong.

Well they have been struggling like the rest of the Western drone industry, it's not exactly a serious competitor to DJI. I would say that back in the days, Parrot was more successful than Skydio ever was. Since then I would think that the Anafi competes with Skydio (again they don't have the Skydio VSLAM, but who most use-cases don't need that).

Why risk a decent piece of equipment attriting the enemy's static defences when you can slam a $100 RPG into a tank or APC worth >1 million with a $300 FPV drone.

The cost benefit analysis is off the charts for that. I would be keeping most of my good stuff for an offensive.

Western missiles have been designed for generations assuming they're aimed at something expensive you want to break, or to break something next to something sensitive you'd rather not. We have the technology to create swarms of well-enough aimed small rockets. There simply wasn't a niche until now.

Quadcopters are not far from having all of these qualities either.