Japan’s minister of defense Shinjirō Koizumi recently announced that the island country had begun deploying easily-replaceable combat drones made almost entirely of corrugated cardboard. Developed by Japanese arms manufacturer AirKamuy, the AirKamuy 150 drone is a fixed-wing craft constructed out of the same stuff as Amazon boxes, designed to be spat out of an assembly line en masse.
According to a post by Koizumi on X-formerly-Twitter, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force is already using the drones as “targets,” though whether for Japanese military target practice or as some type of decoy isn’t entirely clear.
According to Tom’s Hardware, the flying shoeboxes cost between $2,000 to $2,500 per piece, which are bargain bin prices compared to the already low-cost Shahed drone deployed by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps that cost anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 apiece.
Each drone is also foldable, and can be fully assembled out-of-the-box in around five minutes, an AirKamuy employee told NHK World-Japan. Despite sporting a basic propulsion system held up by cardboard, they boast a flight-time of 80 minutes, and an impressive top-speed of around 62 miles per hour.
This makes complete sense tbh. Most hobby model planes are like lightweight balsa wood. There’s no reason cardboard can’t work.
Albert Einstein’s “World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones” quote is true. It’s just that they’ll be drones made of sticks and stones.
Clicks and Drones
oh no, they are smart about it :(
This feels like these probably have incredibly limited use cases
I’m talking defeated by the rain, American style type shit
I’ve seen hobbyists make RC planes from Coroplast (corrugated plastic, like for political yard signs). I’d think that would be better than cardboard.
political yard signs
I’m imagining sneaky republicans stealing democratic signs en masse and then using them to make “suicide drones” to attack people at dem political events outside. And when local GOP gets asked out it they say it was a false flag the dems did with their own lawn signs.
STEP AWAY FROM THE LATHE
Don’t worry. The dems will tell everybody to vote harderrr andtherkj asfkj kl;ajf klj ;lakjf kjhidfgu ndjfmdggdddddddd
Sorry. I had a fit of laughter at the end.
Would be easy to spray them with a hydrophobic coating though right
Fuckin chemicals
There’s always chemicals
Or wax
Wax is a chemical!
No, it comes from the earth. Earth can’t be chemicals.
Everything is chemicals
It’s the one thing I retained from chemistry 101
Is numbers chemicals? No, I don’t think so.
Today I learned that uranium isn’t a chemical

Learn to Build With Cardboard! STRONG, Waterproof and Free. Learn to quadcopter/drone.
this is classified Japanese intelligence you fool
You can make a cardboard Gundam

You can make a cardboard Gundam, I’m making a cardboard Toyota Hilux.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Operation Paper TigerThinking quickly Dave assembles a drone out of a bomb, some tape and a duck
Dang that’s pretty cool. $2k a pop. Shaheds are like $7k.
Anyways another $200,000,000,000 to building aircraft carriers
Old habits die hard I see
Can i get one? Just for fun and profit
Great, killer shoeboxes.
I didn’t know Nintendo was making drones now
I wonder if you could make an even lighter airframe with thin ABS plastic…
I think that would just the the Gossamer Condor
Could do injection moulding with recycled plastics, hmm
This isn’t new, during the Russia-Ukraine war, there was an Australian (?) group that was promoting their cardboard drone for Ukraine. Haven’t heard anything from these cardboard drones since.
They all died
no profit to be made with cardboard drones ig
Depends on the utility. If they’re decoy or target drones then Russia also has Geraniums made from polystyrene. And Cardboard cant carry much for its density so warheads won’t be as big. For antipersonnel that’s not an issue i spose.
BUT! It’s novel, it leverages local manufacturing/supply chains, and has some potential advantage over similar conceptual alternarives. This is Dialectically the closest we’ll see to a western alternative to a Shahed, not the crappy derivative the US tried to produce at much lower capacity and cost.
I think the true purpose of the shahed copies were to hit sensitive targets outside of the current conflict zone to stoke blame on Iran and widen the conflict




















