By 2025 the second kind of dogfight had quietly begun — one in which neither aircraft carried a pilot, and the cheapest interceptor in history was a 3D-printed quadcopter the colour of a wasp.
Ukraine's Sting interceptor, built by the volunteer-funded Wild Hornets group, is a 3D-printed, bullet-shaped quadcopter that flies at three hundred and forty-three kilometres an hour. At roughly twenty-one hundred dollars each, Stings have shot down over three thousand Russian Shahed and Geran-type drones in their first seven months of service, and now reportedly hit their target at an eighty-to-ninety per cent rate. In April of 2026, using a remote-control system built for the purpose, a pilot called Hulk shot down two Shaheds while operating from five hundred kilometres away. Wild Hornets has demonstrated control links from two thousand.
A larger drone carries smaller FPVs partway to a target. Ukraine's Gogol-M, fielded by Brave1 in May of 2025, ferries two AI-piloted FPVs up to three hundred kilometres and returns to base for re-use, at roughly ten thousand dollars per mission against three to five million for a cruise missile. Vyriy Drone's twin-engine Veresen carries two FPVs into deep enemy territory. Russia has reverse-engineered the concept with its Molniya carriers, extending FPV range to about forty kilometres behind Ukrainian lines.
The architecture is now layered. Big drones carry small drones. Small drones intercept other small drones. The category "aircraft" has fragmented into a family of interlocking specialisations, each cheap enough to lose and each replacing some function once performed by a manned platform.