cruise missiles in the hands of a bad guy is a suicide drone and a suicide drone in the hands of a good guy is a guided missile
Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload.
Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.
Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.
Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.
Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.
You need to seriously upgrade your level of knowledge about what is available in terms of drones today.
The drone/guided missile divide is really about dividing a continuum which on one end has foam wings and raspberry pie equivalents wrapped in tin foil and on the other million dollar tomahawks. The distinction is the price tag and the capabilities really.
Otherwise both are long range guided munitions.
So no. But the Lyutyi (sp?), the FP-1 and the Nynja all qualify as drones (and there are many, many more, it's a veritable zoo) if you make that distinction, as do all of the sea-borne gear.
While you're alluding to high-end reapers/etc., the majority of drones in the Ukraine-Russia conflict have foam wings and low cost components.
Sure, it won't sink it, but operations may be disrupted, for hours to days.
- One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.
As has been demonstrated countless times in SINKEX training, it requires literal tons of deep penetrating explosives to severely damage a modern naval vessel. And even then they usually don't actually sink.
Nothing you can cheaply build in your garage will do meaningful damage to a large naval vessel. It will have neither the weight nor the penetration required.
Nothing/neither/cant when millions of dollars and hundreds of lives are on the line? 'Are you sure about that?' Defending against these types of threats is well worth considering.
There is a room called the combat information center, that's where the ship is run from during combat, and that is behind armor, even in modern warships.
Additionally ships are separated into semi independent zones, that can take control of the ship, and continue fighting even if the rest of the ship is on fire.
The real liabilities are the radars, and the rest of the sensors in surface combat ships and the airplanes on deck in the case of aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers in general are heavily armored compared to other modern warships and it takes a significant amount of firepower to even disable them much less sink them.
The reason designed-for-purpose anti-ship missiles/drones are so expensive is they are literally designed to be somewhat effective at executing exactly the scenario you are laying out, while not being naive about the defenses that military ships actually have. Anybody that understands the capability space knows that your scenario wouldn’t survive contact with real defenses.
You are making an argument from fiction. Do you take the “hackers breaking cryptography” trope from Hollywood at face value?
The difference is strategic. A mission kill is a repairable loss. It is an order of magnitude easier to fix a battleship than to build a new one.
Then launch a second wave of heavy anti-ship missiles (which you might have too few, due to their costs) to transform mission kills into really sunken ships.
Assuming the opponent will be dumb is .. dumb.
If they're small - like quadcopter size - then how did you get them in range of a ship more then 10 miles off shore?
If they're large, like back of a pickup sized (which is roughly a Shahed[1] - link for scale) then how did you transport and move them without being noticed and interdicted?
For comparison one of Russia's largest drone attacks on Ukraine, and thus in the world, happened recently and included about 1000 Shaheds over a distributed area.
You're talking about flying a 1000 of something into exactly one target which has CIWS designed to track and kill supersonic missiles at close range (and is likely in a flotilla with data linked fire control).
You might get lucky I guess but I absolutely wouldn't bet on it.
[1] https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/russias-new-jet-pow...
As the article says, the Ukrainians have effectively denied the Black Sea to the Russian navy through use of drones.
I mean yes thats true, but you also have to look at the capacity to renew what they are using to fight the war.
Iran appears to have a large supply of drones, enough to overwhelm US defences. Each drone is ~$50k and takes a few weeks to build, the anti-dorne missle (depending on what one it is) costs $4m and take longer.
If trump does decide to take Kharg island, then to stop the troops from being slamai sliced they'll need an efficient, cheap anti drone system, which I don't think the US has (apart from the Phalanx, but there arent enough of those)
To stop the drone threat, they'd have to clear roughly a 1500km circle. no small feat.
the bigger issue is that the goal if this war is poorly defined. It was supposedly to do a hit and run, and gain a captive client. Had they listened to any of the intelligence, rather than the ego, they would have known this would have happened. that has failed, now what, what do they need to achieve? There is no point committing troops if they are there for show. (there was no real point in this war either, well for the US at least.)
you don't need to damage it severely. Some holes in radar, on board aircrafts and missiles containers will reduce capability by 80%
Thanks to movies, people both seriously overestimate and underestimate the capabilities of highly engineered explosive devices, albeit in different dimensions. Generally speaking, sophisticated military targets are not susceptible to generic explosives. A drone with a hundred kilos of explosive will essentially bounce off a lot of targets. An enormous amount of engineering goes into designing an explosive device optimized to defeat that specific target. They use supercomputers to get this stuff right. Exotic engineered explosive devices are unreasonably capable.
TBH, once you realize the insane amount of engineering that goes into it, it kind of takes the fun out of it. A lot of high-leverage research goes into aspects an amateur would never think about.
This is in some ways a blessing. Amateurs with bad intentions almost always fail at the execution because it isn’t something you can learn by reading the Internet.
An older friend of mine at Boeing told me how when he was a teen, he had a teen friend who built a pipe bomb. They drove off to a field to set it off. It didn't explode, so his friend went to investigate. Then it went off, and my friend had the pleasure of driving his gutted friend to the hospital to die.