Comment by rmah

4 years ago

Even cruise missiles are horribly expensive for conventional munitions payloads. Cruise missiles were developed to deliver nukes.

An unguided 1000kg "dumb" bomb costs $2,000. A "smart bomb" costs $20,000 to $100,000. A cruise missile costs $1mil to $2mil.

In the scope of any protracted real war, sending out lots of cruise missiles is horribly inefficient. Much much cheaper to send out a few planes to drop 100's of tons of dumb or smart bombs. IOW, you can deliver 10x to 100x more boom if you just use planes and bombs. 1000x more if you use long range artillery. But then, the pilots or soldiers are at risk-- and that is a political calculation.

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rmah

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chasd00  4 years ago

about cruise missiles, wasn't there one of those DARPA contests to see if a guy in the garage could produce a cruise missile? IIRC it got quite scary and was cancelled or something. Being in the drone and high power rocketry hobby i have absolutely no doubt there's enough knowledge and electronics availability for a guy in their garage to come up with something that delivers 50lbs to a precise gps coordinate a few hundred miles away for less than $10k. Once you do that, it's easy to scale up to 500lbs

  • openasocket  4 years ago

    I'm skeptical you could hit that sort of range for anywhere near $10K. Forget the electronics, you need an engine powerful enough to lift a few hundred pounds for that distance. Unless you want it detected immediately by early warning radar you need it to fly at a low altitude, like a hundred feet or less. Unless you want it to take forever and be susceptible to infantry with small arms it needs to be traveling fast, in the hundreds of miles an hour. That's simply not possible with an electric system with today's technology, and a rocket engine won't provide the endurance or efficiency you need. That leaves a jet engine or pistol engine. Plus, flying at that speed and altitude means you need an effective autopilot system that uses terrain-following radar. You'll also need some nice guidance packages that allow the shooter to set multiple waypoints, so the missile doesn't have to just fly a direct course. And a 50 lb payload of high explosive just isn't that helpful. There aren't a ton of targets where you only need 50lb of explosives to defeat them, that are also going to stay in the same exact GPS position long enough for your missile to travel a few hundred miles. So you'll want a different terminal guidance method, either some sort of radar sensor or infrared.

    I don't think you could get an engine capable of getting you hundreds of miles at that speed and altitude, much less the sensors and guidance system.

    • R0b0t1  4 years ago

      A lot of the cost in defense contracts is paying for guaranteed domestic supply in the event of a war. If you buy COTS parts and outsource your machining I see $10k as very achievable, the majority of that being metal and explosives. The electronics are nearly trivial, but some of the IR tracking is embargoed and hard to get outside the US.

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  • RobertMiller  4 years ago

    > wasn't there one of those DARPA contests to see if a guy in the garage could produce a cruise missile? IIRC it got quite scary and was cancelled or something.

    This sounds similar to the Nth Country Experiment, conducted by the US in the 1960s. The idea was to see if three freshly minted physics PhDs could design a working nuclear weapon using only publicly available information. In less than 3 years, the three succeeded in creating a credible design for an implosion-style bomb.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_Country_Experiment