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by orthoxerox 17 days ago
You can fit a Jetson Orin Nano on a winged drone. It has plenty enough power to run a vision model.
2 comments

Not just winged drone, we have had jetson on far more smaller 7in multirotors, plus other boards for network etc.
Given that the drone is going on a one way trip, I imagine you'd want to use the cheapest hardware possible which would mean using the dumbest model you can get away with.
Depends on the value of the target. Costs Ukraine $918 to kill a Russian soldier[1] but if you’re using a fully offline automated swarm to destroy a petro system worth billions then what’s a few GPUs strapped to each one to run local models.

[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...

Wait till you learn how much missiles cost.
Your drone needs to be cheaper than what you're killing, so if your target profile is 50k+ USD and up, a $10000 even is fine (not that it would need to be even 10k).
Your oversimplification bakes in too many assumptions.

The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.

What matters most is the intangible military value of the item.

In too many situations people think simplistically about dollars, when what matters is invisible or intangible values. The hyperfocus on money is especially egregious among people that don't have much.

> The relative financial cost to the enemy is almost irrelevant if they are much wealthier than you are.

The cost is often proportional to the cost and complexity of making the item.

Yes I oversimplified, but it helps to put into context the cost delta of a patriot and a mini shahed.

Logistics, logistics logistics. Diversity of manufacturing location and suppliers.

Right now for example the US has 1-2 suppliers (and sometimes it's just another sub company) for critical weapon parts.

That's obviously not the only metric. The cheaper the drones are, and the less resources they need the more of them you can produce as a result. This is why cheaper weapons that can be produced at scale tend to be most effective.