Less than $20 million each - assuming build capacity and plans ...
High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites Are Ready for Launch (2023)
Editor's note: [ ... ] Airbus contacted Proceedings to note that the 2016 pricing estimates were correct at the time but that the company will be releasing new, lower estimates soon.
After an astounding 64 days aloft and a travelling a total more than 30,000nm, a British-built solar-powered UAV crashed just hours before it was due to break the ultimate world endurance record.
The aircraft was the British-built solar-powered Airbus Zephyr UAV – one of a new breed of HAPS (high altitude, pseudo-satellites) – a new category of UAVs that are aiming for zero-emission, ultra-long- endurance flight as a kind of terrestrial satellite – able to loiter in the stratosphere for weeks or months at a time to monitor borders, watch shipping, relay communications or conduct atmospheric science.
Not viable for a non-superpower to create and deploy a successful hostile drone, and imagination is cheaper than reality anyway.
Aside from the hostile drone command and launch being found and destroyed, the drone itself would either be shot down by a missile or disabled by a direct energy weapon.
If the drone were to fault on it's own and was designed to float, it will be expensive to retreive it. Cheaper at scale to launch the sensors into orbit or deploy bouys.
interceptors are much shorter range than attack/scouting drones because they need to go a lot faster and be more manuverable than the target they are intercepting. Cameras are cheap and really light compared to ordinance, and ziplime was able to make a fleet of fairly cheap drones with 200 mile range (as a private company a decade ago). Cheap drones definitely can maintain targeting of a carrier within a couple hundred miles of the coast (and if you can get to 5-600 miles you keep most carrier based aircraft out of range of your shores)
And not just search it - you have to get it to the sector as well.