LUCAS is a US long-range one-way attack drone derived from the Iranian Shahed-136 and designed to deliver affordable mass through coordinated, expendable strike formations.
Ukraine's "buzz bomb" — a deliberately crude, dirt-cheap pulsejet missile built by volunteers to be fired in salvos and mixed with decoys, forcing Russia to spend million-dollar interceptors on a $3,000 target. The loudness is the point.
A startup's bet that hypersonics can be cheap. Castelion — founded by ex-SpaceX engineers — is building Blackbeard, a Mach 5+ strike missile aimed at ~$300k a round and 500 a year, applying the drone war's "affordable mass" logic to a weapon legacy primes sell for $40M.