Cardboard Drones kill more MIGs than any 5th Gen Fighter

Move over, fifth-generation fighters, The NEXT Gen cardboard Chair Force is here, soaring high and conquering the skies!

Earlier this month, Australian cardboard drones have made headlines recently with their astonishing strike on the Russian Kursk airfield.

These ingenious flat-packable drones managed to zoom a whopping 170km into Russia, sneaking past those Russian Air Defences without breaking a sweat, and took out a reported 5 aircraft, several missile systems and damaging an S300 Radar.

Several radar and air defence experts have commented that the use of cardboard as ‘genius’ due to the lower reflectivity of the materials, which simply means that radar waves don’t reflect back to the base station like they would for the same aircraft made of metal. This would apparently make the drones look like a bird to a traditional air defence system, designed to detect multi-million dollar aircraft and missiles. Several veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts were reported’y commenting “It’s nothing new - asymmetry - that’s exactly what the insurgents did to us - they used a Ten dollar solution to a million dollar problem!”

The striking development has left traditional defense contractors puzzled. Executives are said to be holding emergency meetings to determine how to price a million-dollar cardboard drone “Maybe we cite the rising cost of materials due to inflation?”. The drone comes with an instruction manual and a sticker that reads "some assembly required.”

Who needs fancy, high-tech fighter jets when you can have a million undetectable cardboard drones for the same price?

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For the Tech Nerds!

If you’ve made it this far you now get the detailed tech info you’ve probably been waiting for.

These drones are made by Australian company Sypaq, who have been reportedly delivering around 100 drones a month to the Ukraine.

They’re not exactly cardboard, more of a plastic/cardboard composite and they come in a pallet of 12.

Based on some of the pictures we've seen online, the flight control systems (FCS) seem to be CUBE pilot (Orange) pictured above. This system is based around an ARM-architecture STM chipset, allowing lower power consumption and a modular architecture for connecting multiple different sensors, telemetry (C2), cameras and much more. The Cube pilot FCS are able to be carried inside the simple (laser cut) plywood cradle, which is designed to take simple or military spec flight control systems.

The above picture also shows the propulsion system looking like a standard electric DC motor, along with several LIPO batteries.

Figure: Radar waves are absorbed by cardboard, and reflected by metal or hard materials

The above picture shows a basic representation of how the drone avoids detection by air defence radars. These radars are generally designed to detect only large scale, metallic, fast moving objects like fighter aircraft, missiles and large group 2 or 3 UAS.

Most radars work by sending a signal out and using the reflected waves to generate a rough outline of an object based on waves that are emitted and 'bounced back' to the radar received. The radar then uses a process called Time Difference of Arrival (TDOA) and a library of 'known signals' to determine what the object might be, how big, how far, and how fast its moving, and then what direction it's moving as well. BUT, this relies on the object being made of stiff materials like metal that reflect the radar waves consistently. The shape of an object also matters, and if you're interested in this stuff, check out this cool video that explains how the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter used its shape for stealth. We'll talk more about that in other articles, but this is why stealth fighters have seriously complex, expensive coatings much like a 'skin' that are designed to absorb radar waves.

This is basically how the SYPAQ cardboard drones evaded the Russian radar - because they're entirely made of soft, semi-porous material and therefore the radar waves are either not reflected uniformly, or are absorbed and essentially pass through.

The internal components like the Flight Controller, batteries and motors DO reflect radar waves though, so the drones aren't completely invisible; however, they will show up as such a small track that they are sometimes automatically 'filtered out' by software to reduce the amount of clutter on a User Interface.

This is why newer sensor systems and radars are being used to detect drones in the emerging field of Counter-Uncrewed Aerial Systems. These systems use a combination of specialised bird-radars, RF, electro-optics and many other sensors to detect and identify smaller drones.