Latest record by Ben Biggs was 626kph (389mph). Latest record by Luke Maximo was 655kph (408mph).
Most people agree that the manhole cover would have been vaporized during its atmospheric ascent portion of flight, but I still like to believe that somewhere out there in the void, a small blob of molten steel that survived the atmosphere is drifting in solar orbit.
Unit cost for a lot of these seems to be under ~$5K USD, not counting the value of engineering time.
How do you counter a swarm of these things coming from all directions?
This kind of weapon has interesting consequences for public speaking events by leaders. Or large industrial projects on the coast of Texas that use large tanks of compressed methane and LOX.
This seems like the kind of thing that you can send in the mail to another country in a special box that can open up when it senses that it has arrived at a destination so the drone can fly off to get into position for an attack by hiding itself in some nook on the roof of some nearby industrial building.
Put a small solar panel on it so that it can sit indefinitely, waiting for the signal to strike a target.
Or put a dozen or so of them on an unmanned surface vehicle like the Ukrainians did and send them out to a juicy port target.
The biggest threat that a weapon like this poses isn't just from the initial destructive capacity, it comes from the possible difficulty in attributing the source of the attack.
How do you respond to this kind of weapon you don't know who used it against you?
Throw drones back at them. Shoot them with bullets. Anti-drone tech has been advancing as well, albeit mostly outside the U.S.
They are called letter bombs. Ted Kaczynski did much damage with them. Needless to say, direct mail from Kyiv to moscow is not straightforward these days. And sending secret explosives through third country mail services is frowned upon by postal workers. Fedex even charges a premium when shipping killbots overnight.
Now why doesn't anyone take a rocket and stick the drone guidance on it? Again I am only guessing here, the drone guidance components probably can't cope with 2-3 mach. At 1000 meters per second with a 60 fps camera you advance 16.6 meters per frame, add to that the latency of whatever guidance system you have. You are looking at 20-30 meters offset between frames.
Better guidance probably balloons the cost to the 10s of thousands of dollars.
How good are they at intercepting another maneuverable aircraft either autonomously or FPV? At what speed is the drone starting to be limited by the human pilot relying on a camera feed?
Bullets go much faster so obviously speed isn't the most important factor. These are anti-aircraft interceptors, intercepting sound like a critical part of the job.
> drones don't maneuver much, if at all.
Yeah, drones didn't fly at 700km/h much if at all either. So can an interceptor drone travelling at 700km/h reliably maneuver to intercept an enemy drone?
"Quantum Systems Group reckons it has broken the flight speed record for an electric drone."
Russia's response was to increase the speed of its drones. As long as Ukraine can match that speed increase with the interceptors, it will still be able to intercept drones cheaply.
But likely not at the scale required to make a real dent. This is the problem with the "this new weapon will win the Russia-Ukraine war" mantra we've heard so often (Javelin, HIMARS, F-16, etc). Lots of very capable weapons have entered the fight, but at limited scale compared to Russia's enormous manpower and manufacturing advantage.