Some of the drones that entered Poland the other day were made from styrofoam. The cost to intercept probably need to go close to 100$ because the drones that attack are going super cheap.

In Ukraine both sides don't even use anything exotic or high precision, the engines they use don't need to work for more than a few hours so the current ones are probably an overkill as they use hobbyist jet engines etc.

I have a feeling that these things can be scaled to mind blowing proportions. Engines are just bent metal, electronics are printed. Sure, these require advanced machining but they don't look much more complicated than crazy cheap devices that are sold for the price of a burger on TEMU or Alibaba.

If they optimize those things, it feels like they should be able to achieve continuous delivery like on strategy games where you pump units just as fast as they are destroyed.

Thousands of drones just sounds wrong. It should be something like 1000s a day, maybe an hour.

""" Microscopic invaders were more of the threat nowadays. Just to name one example, there was Red Death, a.k.a. the Seven Minute Special, a tiny aerodynamic capsule that burst open after impact and released a thousand or so corpuscle-size bodies, known colloquially as cookie-cutters, into the victim's bloodstream. [...]

Such inventions had spawned concern that people from Phyle A might surreptitiously introduce a few million lethal devices into the bodies of members of Phyle B, providing the technically sweetest possible twist on the trite, ancient dream of being able instantly to turn a whole society into gravy. [...]

What worked in the body could work elsewhere, which is why phyles had their own immune systems now. The impregnable-shield paradigm didn't work at the nano level; one needed to hack the mean free path. A well-defended clave was surrounded by an aerial buffer zone infested with immunocules—microscopic aerostats designed to seek and destroy invaders. [...]

It was always foggy in the Leased Territories, because all of the immunocules in the air served as nuclei for the condensation of water vapor. If you stared carefully into the fog and focused on a point inches in front of your nose, you could see it sparkling, like so many microscopic searchlights, as the immunocules swept space with lidar beams. [...] The sparkling of tiny lights was the evidence of microscopic dreadnoughts hunting each other implacably through the fog, like U-boats and destroyers in the black water of the North Atlantic. """

Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age