Off the shelf Chinese drones is somewhat vague, we can just say DJI. Their full drone and dock system for the previous generation goes for around $20k. DJI iterates on this space on a yearly cadence and have just come out with the Dock 3.
54 minute flight time (47 min hover) for fully unmanned operations.
If you're talking about fpv racing where tiny drones fly around 140+ mph, then yeah DJI isn't in that space.
That hardly seems like it would take the US 10 years to replicate on a war footing aside from the price.
I mean if we’re talking dollar to dollar comparison, the US will likely never be able to produce something as cheaply as China
(unless China drastically increases their average standard of living).
There’s a really weird phenomenon too with drones. I’ve used Chinese (non-drone) software for work a bunch in the past and it’s been almost universally awful. On the drone side, especially DJI, they’ve flipped this script completely. Every non-DJI drone I’ve flown has had miserable UX in comparison to DJI. Mission Planner (open source, as seen in the Ukraine attack videos) is super powerful but also looks like ass and functions similarly. QGC is a bit better, especially the vendor-customized versions (BSD licensed) but the vendors almost always neuter great features that are otherwise available in the open source version and at the same time modify things so that you can’t talk to the aircraft using the OSS version. The commercial offerings I’ve used are no better.
Sure, we need to be working on being able to build the hardware components in North America, and I’ve seen a bunch of people jump on that in the last year. But wow is the software ever bad and I haven’t really seen anyone working to improve that.
54 minute flight time (47 min hover) for fully unmanned operations.
If you're talking about fpv racing where tiny drones fly around 140+ mph, then yeah DJI isn't in that space.