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>I think you either added an extra zero or were looking at the hyped prototypes

I thought I was clear where I was looking - here, you may check for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HESA_Shahed_136.

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> Its range has been estimated to be anywhere from between 970–1,500 km (600–930 mi) to as much as 2,000–2,500 km (1,200–1,600 mi).

You presented the absolute maximum estimate as if it were the conventionally accepted value. That's incredibly misleading.

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I assume that smuggling drones into the US is easier than it was for Ukraine to smuggle them into Russia.
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Its harder. 20% of Russians(my estimate) have connections to Ukraine (relatives, friends, or were born there) and could be Ukrainian agents, there are lots of land routes how you can smuggle stuff. Things are not as well connected between Iran and US.
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These people are used to executing civilians when they are the police. That's how IRGC, hamas and hezbollah work. You won't see much action from people like that when they can't just shoot anyone that they don't like.
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> And where exactly are you planning to operate that trawler out of? Or are you going to send it across the Atlantic on its own

China operates fishing fleets all around the globe but Iran is not known for this so Iranian fishing vessel in western Atlantics will rise suspicions. An ordinary cargo vessel heading to the Central America on other hand may sail unnoticed.

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How to identify a vessel as Iranian though? They can just register it in a Caribbean country and give it a less suspicious name.
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2500 km is a realistic range of you follow the war in Ukraine. Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines.
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> Kyiv is frequently attacked with Shahed drones and it is far from frontlines. reply

It's a couple of hundred miles from the frontlines in Kharkiv, and the Russian border to the North is even closer.

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Shaheds are launched not from the frontline (to avoid a launch site being attacked) but I would agree that a typical attack distance is around 500 km (which is much less than the range stated in wikipedia). Still this unlikely the max range of this drone and there is a tradeoff - one can increase range by reducing the war head mass.
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The genius of the Shahid drone is that the fuel is the warhead. Look at Shahid attacks - mostly FA damage, very little HE damage. They are for killing people and destruction of soft infrastructure by fire, not destruction of hardened infrastructure by explosion.

The fuel tank is heavily segmented, so they are difficult to shoot down. When shot, they lose fuel but continue to the target. They get to the target with less fuel, but still get there. The HE them detonates the remaining fuel load.

A Shahid could do a 2500km mission, and arrive with a very small fuel load. That will be effective against targets that already have enough fuel to burn there, such as apartment buildings, petroleum energy infrastructure, office buildings, etc. Less so against places with little flammable material concentration such as hospitals, military installations (other than fuel and munitions depots), roads and runways, etc.

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Kyiv is pretty close to the Russian border to its north, even Moscow itself is less than 1000km away.

I think the furthest hits Ukraine has been able to achieve with drones were on a refinery about 1300km from Ukraine controlled land.

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It's surprisingly difficult to find ships if they don't want to be found. Iran has been able to maintain it's shadow fleet for decades for a reason. It'd be more difficult to get a boat that close to the USA for sure, but not impossible. What is more likely are attacks by the various Iranian terrorist organisatons that have been showing up especially in the UK [1, 2].

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/four-arrested-on-suspicion-of-syp...

[2] https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-890851

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