Forgive my skepticism, but I seem to recall pulse jets have almost no throttle ability (hence the dead stick landing) and pretty poor fuel efficiency (v low compression / pressure ratio).

Then there's the sound and IR signature.

So maybe for a garage workshop cruise missile, not so much for mainstream use ...

Ukraine is going through ~200 quadrotor drones an hour in "Garage workshop miniature cruise missile" applications. Anything that has the potential to make dramatically cheaper mass-produced weapons is in play now that we have almost-free precision guidance.

If you can get $2000 of cardboard, foam, and plumbing parts to launch a 50kg warhead at a target 100km away in ten minutes, you can do the same for $2,000,000 and 1000 targets; Long-range anti-air rockets are almost useless for this because they cost more than $2,000,000 per, and even short-range ones cost more than $100,000.

This reminds me of this interview I watched 20 or 30 years ago. It was a guy (Canadian maybe?) who was developing a super cheap powered hang glider (for lack of better words) with machine guns on it. The idea was to make something so cheap, you can overwhelm fighter jets.

I remember that interview, the guy's name is Bob Diemert and his aircraft was the Defender. The NFB made a documentary:

https://blog.nfb.ca/blog/2009/07/27/how-to-fighter-airplane-...

Here's an article:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/famed-aviator-rememb...

Wouldn't a horde of that be prone to a preprogrammed airburst shell?

I'm still waiting for coilgun artillery to take off.

No need for charges to fire, rail itself can be relatively unprecise, as long as the shell head can glide bomb the flight trajectory to target.

Rest of the shell body could be a small distribution charge and some vacuum compressed peeble.

Or just do away with traditional artillery altogether and electrically gun up small gun cotton glider drones, that circle above target areas until they receive a drop and kill order.

Imagine fpv drone, it flies recording the input from a deterministic start point. Now you record the operator input. Not only can you replay that input, shielding a bird from em, you can correct in a simulation and repeat fire that on repeat.

After the success in Ukraine, there will be a burgeoning market in low cost cruise missiles. This may for the bill.

It's also a funny story because this is the most popular garage pulse jet design, but it's not really a good design other than the fact it reliably makes thrust and the most godawful noise in the world. It's so inefficient you can see videos of these things literally melting themselves into spaghetti, so I don't know if you're going to get more than a single flight, even if nobody shoots it down.

I suspect somebody is just trying to get their nose in the defense trough.

seems like a headline from 1944.

Funny, I've been having an idea of building a pulsejet drone specifically to address drone shortages in Ukraine recently.

Guess the ideas of this sort are literally in the air these days.