Japan is building cardboard suicide drones

pigpag

It's sad to see Japan completely ditch their "unconditional peace" brand after WWII.

ceejayoz

"This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we'll be lucky to live through it." - The Hunt for Red October

actionfromafar

They must have been tempted to write "Kamikaze drones". Anyway, interesting development, I wonder why it hasn't been popular to use cardboard so far. Maybe cardboard weighs more, cutting in to payload capability?

WillPostForFood

Misleading headline, not sure if the article is misleading because it is paywalled, but so far, these are drones used as targets for anti-drone practice.

Ayaan2004

Kamikaze was always Japanese either it planes in world war 2 or drones for world war 3

falcor84

> The AirKamuy 150 is a cheap pre-fab cardboard drone meant to die on the battlefield Oh, that makes more sense. I probably watched too many episodes of Futurama for my mind to immediately imagine drones used by people to commit suicide.

comrade1234

From the headline I was picturing flying futurama-style suicide booths.

cjs_ac

Australia has been making cardboard drones for military purposes for a while now: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-03/ukraine-war-australia... EDIT: The company that makes them first pitched them to the ADF in 2018: https://www.sypaq.com.au/news/sypaq-wins-for-the-cardboard-d...

excalibur

$2000 apiece for cardboard?!

geremiiah

One scary aspect of drones is that they can loiter around an area. Unlike shelling or traditional missiles, you can spam an enemy city with drones and they can remain operational and waiting, until people emerge from their bunkers. And soon enough (some psychopath is vibecoding it this very second for sure) drone control will be surrendered to some LLM based system to make the final life/death decision. Another chilling aspect of drone warfare is that you don't get to surrender. No prisoners are taken. You just get blown up even if you are clearly cornered, and helpless and in a traditional setting you'd have surrendered your weapon and became a POW.

Onavo

The airframe is the cheapest part of the drone though. You can make it out of Balsa wood and foam like traditional "model planes" and there won't be any major performance differences. Modern CAD is very good at simulating stress on the frame and as long as your engine's powerful enough, most materials should hold up fine at those scales for single use (anything smaller than than a Cessna basically).

traeregan

https://archive.is/5Pqg6

chvid

But where is battery, engine, controller board, camera, optic cable etc from?

analogpixel

Aren't they worried the cardboard will catch fire on impact and cause damage?

ck2

if another country towed a raft full of thousands of cheap drone off a US coast and launched them into the country we have absolutely no defense they could take out all water and power utilities on the entire east coast over 24 hours our million dollar missiles would be useless even if Whiskey-Pete was more than willing to use them over crowded cities North Korea, Russia, China, et al and considering we've depleted a decade's worth of weapons and half of the fleet is overseas, we're pretty darn vulnerable right now thanks to those in power I wonder how far away we are from "dirty drones" where they don't even need a bomb, just radioactive material or toxic chemicals as dust