With standard electric motor quads, the range is very definitely an issue.
But you could create a long-range gas powered plane, with Ardupilot and a GPS receiver, and get pretty long range with that. Here is one that crossed the Atlantic on less than 3 quarts of gas.
You could easily design a slightly larger model, stick a Nvidia Jetson nano on the front with a camera, and have a go at it. With economies of scale, you could do the whole thing for less than $1000 USD per unit. Cheap.
Individually, the planes are dumb, stupid and slow. But launch enough of them, and some might get through.
For a 10 to 15kg gas-powered model aircraft, a simple 4m launch rail is sufficient. For launch assist, that could be a spring or catapult system, or a small solid rocket motor. Can easily be mounted on a truck or small boat.
Something like this should be sufficient (peak thrust 131N):
Larger motors are available for not much more money.
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No one is going to try to take out a carrier in the middle of the ocean, but there isn't much need to do that either.
Carriers are primarly used to attack land-based targets these days. So either they have to stay waaaay off-shore and rely on tankers to refuel planes for combat sorties (which reduces the cadence) or they will get within (for example) 500NM of land. Low and slow gas-powered drones can achieve this now.
> So the ISR drones will see the launch site or platform and it will get hit by missiles
The "launch site" is any spot of land near the coast accessible by a truck.
The ISR satellites pick up launches by ballistic missiles that rise up high in the atmosphere, which have a very large IR signature. The sats are not going to pick up a gas-powered small aircraft, even if you use a small solid rocket for launch assist.
Also, you're going to want to re-think the economics of this, if you're using a $100K USD missile to destroy a $10K pickup truck on a regular basis. Nevermind the cost (like the aircraft hours) needed to get the missile on-target. Nevermind that the enemy can field 10 times the number of trucks that you have aircraft, at 100 times less cost.
Yes I understand it’s a hard problem but swarms of drones that threaten the USA, will be fought with swarms of American drones right? You can launch drones from the carriers searching for potential launch points etc.
Commercial satellite picked up an f15 banking in Gaza recently, so the ability to imagine and scan in near real-time the land and sea around carrier strike groups and other valuable assets and locations seems likely.
Other way to think about the costs are a 1 million dollar missile that takes out a $5000 rocket that’s being used to threaten billions of dollars of ships, thousands of lives, a potential ecological disaster if one sinks, and the ships are defending or “liberating” billions or trillions of dollars in resources and shipping.
But you could create a long-range gas powered plane, with Ardupilot and a GPS receiver, and get pretty long range with that. Here is one that crossed the Atlantic on less than 3 quarts of gas.
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/model-plane-f...
You could easily design a slightly larger model, stick a Nvidia Jetson nano on the front with a camera, and have a go at it. With economies of scale, you could do the whole thing for less than $1000 USD per unit. Cheap.
Individually, the planes are dumb, stupid and slow. But launch enough of them, and some might get through.