I wonder what the % breakdown is for domestic vs imported drones for Ukraine?
I read recently that Ukraine was producing a lot of drones and ramping up production too, as well as using fibre-optic controlled drones to overcome electronic warfare/jamming.
You won't get any reliable numbers during wartime. I heard Ukrainian government recently mention they ordered a million.
Hundreds of small companies (around 10 employees each) in Ukraine are making and assembling drone's right now (according to journalists who filmed them in Ukraine last month). I counted at least two dozen companies in the Netherlands, probably a few hundred all over Europe. Besides the frame that holds the 4 or six rotors together all other parts are off the shelf, mostly ordered from Shenzen. You can CNC mill a carbon fiber or aluminum frame from a single plate on an x-y flatbed cnc.
I researched all this last night because I need $20K-$200k investment right now to start my own startup making unjammable autonomous kamikaze drones with 20K payload on top of 20km optical fiber spools unreeling. I think it is possible to make them lighter without fibers if you put a few thousand microprocessors in with a wafer scale integration for $500.
Of course you could just make cheap drones that kill every warm body in sight[4] indiscriminately. To disable a tank you need these fiber tethered drones with bigger payloads[3][5][6]. You cab see two fiber strands still in the air in a few frames of the video.
What you need is a Paul MacCready style development cycle for drones in the field. You need to be able to make 10 crashes per hour, fix the drone by replacing with off-the shelf components and try again. The programming should be live-coding like Squeak Smalltalk, no recompiling, just fix and run while you are using the software to edit itself [1] as Dan did in 1976[2] on this 5.88 mhz computer. We still code like this today but most programmers and managers ignore this in favor of terminals and simulated punch cards. Remember that it took humans 200.000 years to invent written language or agriculture, we just are not that smart.
hm... and why are the drones carrying the whole spool of the fiber instead of leaving the spool on the ground and unraveling it from there without the extra weight on the drone?
unraveling a stationairy ground based spool first tangles quickly if you lift two loops instead of one. Even if you had a dispencer hole you still snag loops under the dispenser that might get knots and snag the drone.
Second, you would now have to drag the whole fiber from the drone down to the ground, overcoming the kilometers resistance dragging all the cable over the ground and on top of all that extra force you also have to put tension on the spool at the start to unwind it.
If you unwind the spool hanging under the drone by a rotating shaft through the spool, you do not have any tension on the fiber (but for a few grams of its weight if you unspool to slowly) and the weight of the fiber in the air even helps unspool the fiber (although you want to prevent that by speeding up the unwinding)
this may sound like a stupid question... but why not use google maps, ground images, and run a basic cnn to obtain positioning? That wouldn't require you to have it dragging/ carrying a bunch of fragile nanowire... which seems... not right?
The fiber is to (1) prevent jamming the radio control of the motors and ammunition by an operator and (2) receive a higher resolution higher frame per second multiple camera stream and (3) to ensure the operator can't be traced and targeted by triangulating the wifi antenna of the operator and (4) to allow networking by plugging in the stationairy start of the fiber into a switch connected to full internet network with thousands of kilometers of fiber between the operator and the drone so (5) the operator can be different from the drone launcher and (6) have the drone be operated by a supercomputer or datacenter with more and more accurate video frame interpretation.
Its a difference of dragging a line and just laying it out as you go. A lot less resistance to just pay out the spool so there is no tension in the wire.
I read recently that Ukraine was producing a lot of drones and ramping up production too, as well as using fibre-optic controlled drones to overcome electronic warfare/jamming.