It is so much worse. Like I watched a legitimate YT war strategist going through the viability timeline on robot dogs on the battlefield. We are already at that stage where a bigger player will be able to field tens of thousands of robot dogs.

Like it is not talked about enough, but Russia has a total GDP that is lower than just the US state of Texas. Texas is third to California and New York. So all of Russia and Ukraine are piddly in terms of total capacity. That is the sad part. Like, if people really wanted to end the war, stomping Russia should be very easy but no one is really funding that solution. They would rather Russia bleed its manpower ahead of China taking Taiwan and ending its civil war.

Robot dogs are limited by battery life and therefore range. Their real purpose is to draw fire and reveal the position of enemies. Drones are ineffective at triangulating the positions of fired munitions due to noise and the computational power required in combination with a 9 axis position sensor. That is the primary purpose of robot dogs. They are primarily for drawing fire for the drones to then attack.

When one looks at the cheap sensors available for microcontrollers now, like millimeter wave sensors, things get even more scary. Like you know how your WiFi goes through walls. Yeah, same thing but directional motion sensing. Like it can easily detect and differentiate me from my cats and trigger only when I make a gesture like waving my whole arm or entering a specific room...from a sensor in another room a few walls away... for less than $20... Now picture a mine triggered by that... Or a robotic high caliber gun shooting through walls.

I dont think i'd rather have drones dropping these shells than artillery. This is a hack solution to their no arty problems.

Shells don't work without no barrel.

I had thought recoilless rifle, so long as you don't need the tube to come back after you could probably 3d print around a sleeve and dump it after a couple uses regardless. Use like pelletized manpad transport cases for the printer filament and you'd have a pretty steady supply of low recoil relatively easily aimable rockets of a sort with huge huge stockpiles of ammo from countries who let's say have fewer political qualms.

i think it's done because that's what they had on hand. engineer would recognize that shell is built to survive getting shot out of barrel, while drone dropped something doesn't have such constraint. this would allow for lighter shell in the same volume, or bigger and more destructive package with the same mass

or maybe some of shells were defective, idk