Anduril announces Roadrunner, jet-powered VTOL drone

why not just detach the warhead and save the drone?

Too complicated.

My understanding is that you have an defensive area with ~20 of the hangers scattered around.

  1. !!Incoming threat!!
  2. LAUNCH ALL THE DRONES,
  3. One intercepts,
  4. Other loiter a while in case of additional threats,
  5. Remaining drones return to base.

Get the operational advantage of having many vehicles in the air, all controllable by one operator, but you recover those not used.

Depending on what's being targetted, sacrificing even 5% of your reliability of hitting the target would be a bad tradeoff.

The detachment mechanism adds significant complexity, weight and costs.

And the result is much less accurate, and the warhead is smaller. Instead of actively flying the warhead as close to the target as possible, the drone now needs to calculate the optimal detachment point and hope the warhead ends up at the right place for an intercept. This detachment point needs to be at least several seconds before intercept to give the drone enough time to get out of the blast radius, so if the target is actively evading, any hope of hitting it is basically zero.

As long as the drone is cheap enough, this is the superior solution for the widest range of viable targets.

Maybe if you are going up against lots of really simple drones with zero evasion capabilities and no armour, it might make sense to to even simpler and swap the warhead module out for a what is essentially a large single-shot shotgun, but that's going to have significantly less power.

I guess this is the best scenario for this as far as I can tell, but as another commenter mentioned, how is this better than standard small missiles such as a normal "Iron Dome" style system?

Having them "in the air" waiting doesn't seem to be that big of a help when your missile launcher can have the rocket in the air about as fast after an intercept command is issued. And small missiles are and will continue to get cheaper.

Maybe the price calculation gets better for guaranteeing an intercept? Since either you assume Drone/Missile #1 is going to hit or you fire more just in case that first one misses, because waiting to see if you have a hit before firing another is not an option, and given enough delay and fast communication you could have the second drone abort and fly back after a confirmed intercept.

further you'd want to inspect them all after recovery, fix breakages, and refuel them. or as you say, just sabot one out into the sky and have it chase or die.

According to a Bloomberg piece another commenter posted:

> A future version of the Roadrunner will be able to land even after destroying a target, Luckey says.

I learnt that tactic from that well known documentary, Stargate Atlantis.

Either I'm reading too much into it, or Anduril might be having troubles making and operating weapons at its own discretion. It might be regulatorily easier to install small explosives on an otherwise inert drone than simply buying and inserting a time fused Hydra rocket onto an Anduril-made tube.

What I've read says that this is a modular system, likely some variants will launch small air to air missles, and others use large shotgun shells to take out drones.