Near real time fpv drones anywhere on the planet, free of jamming due to starlink is the real game changing capability. What would any military pay for that? Plenty I wager.
Wait a moment. How exactly is Starship supposed to usefully deliver a pile of FPV drones to a hostile area?
Starship itself is highly engineered to survive reentry and can even land anywhere that an appropriately flat surface is available. It will conveniently toast anything hanging out on the landing zone. But it is extremely far from stealthy, it seems likely to be extremely vulnerable both before and after landing (a hole in a cryogenic fuel tank = big boom), and I don’t think any of the design mission profiles involve Starship’s second stage, minus most of its fuel and minus the first stage, taking off again from Earth. And the value proposition isn’t there if you don’t get to reuse it.
A common cheap FPV drone dropped from orbit or from a suborbital ballistic trajectory is a small meteor, not a weapon.
ISTM it would be a better bet to equip an F-35 or a larger UAV to drop a pile of small drones.
Not sure how you made that leap because that would be absurd. The point was that fpv drones enabled with starlink render icbms, mervs, rods from god, etc unnecessary and uneconomical.
Starship itself is highly engineered to survive reentry and can even land anywhere that an appropriately flat surface is available. It will conveniently toast anything hanging out on the landing zone. But it is extremely far from stealthy, it seems likely to be extremely vulnerable both before and after landing (a hole in a cryogenic fuel tank = big boom), and I don’t think any of the design mission profiles involve Starship’s second stage, minus most of its fuel and minus the first stage, taking off again from Earth. And the value proposition isn’t there if you don’t get to reuse it.
A common cheap FPV drone dropped from orbit or from a suborbital ballistic trajectory is a small meteor, not a weapon.
ISTM it would be a better bet to equip an F-35 or a larger UAV to drop a pile of small drones.