Probably just a  silly thought, but I couldn't resist to ask. 

What if there was a super agile, stealthy UAV carrying only an internal gun to intercept other aircraft and UAVs?

I was thinking that ordinary fighters are big, expensive to buy and operate. Missiles don't come cheap either. 

So how about a UAV with the following characteristics:

More agile than a fighter, let's say 15g or more. 

No internal weapons, therefore smaller, no external weapons and stealthier. 

Supercruise would be nice. 

Armed with a 20-30mm gun. 

Would it be able to come close enough to its target? Then would it's super agility allow it to avoid enemy missiles, and get into a shooting position to hit it's target? If possible the cost of shooting down aircrafts would drop quite a lot. 

With that kind of performance, it would probably be easy enough to jam the comms and cause a mission kill.

They're actually working on things quite similar to what you're talking about.

Also, the whole jamming comms for mission kill thing isn't really an issue at this point unless people choose to let it be. 

The capability exists to allow full autonomy with bounded actions. Whether it's being done or not, I don't know but it could be done.

If people are doing it though they very likely wouldn't admit to it.

You are absolutelly right at every point. Indeed, only COVID restrictions has delayed uses of such capabilities by malignant third parties

Sakpan74Gr said:

So how about a UAV with the following characteristics: More agile than a fighter, let's say 15g or more.  No internal weapons, therefore smaller, no external weapons and stealthier.  Supercruise would be nice.  Armed with a 20-30mm gun.  Would it be able to come close enough to its target? Then would it's super agility allow it to avoid enemy missiles, and get into a shooting position to hit it's target? If possible the cost of shooting down aircrafts would drop quite a lot. 

I imagine a missile would be cheaper then a complete, supersonic stealth drone with autocannon. 

IE using ground based or air launched, extended range missiles at enemy aircraft, would likely be cheaper then fielding an equivalent number of super drones.

I could see autonomous drones being used for border defense, programed to shoot down any aircraft without the correct 'friend or foe' recognition signal. But I imagine they would be armed with missiles. 

An AC has an effective range of 1-2km; a basic missile brings the range to 35km, with some having ranges of 100km+.

I suspect the aircraft design required to launch a small missile is less then designing it for the recoil/weight/feeding/targeting of an AC.

So it would probably be cheaper to just make a 'super drone' that launches small missiles, which while less ranged then a typical Jet launched missile would still have far better range and hit probability to an AC.

Maybe some sort of AA Stinger or Mistral carrier? 

That sounds interesting. 

I was thinking of a flying RMK30, that recoilless autocanon tested on the Wiesel. Or if that's too big an "RMK20-25". I was thinking that it would appear out of nowhere, fire a burst and move on to the next target, flying rings around them, with a low operating cost. 

Sakpan74Gr said:

Maybe some sort of AA Stinger or Mistral carrier?  That sounds interesting.  I was thinking of a flying RMK30, that recoilless autocanon tested on the Wiesel. Or if that's too big an "RMK20-25". I was thinking that it would appear out of nowhere, fire a burst and move on to the next target, flying rings around them, with a low operating cost.

A bigger issue would be how these cheap drones are going to be able to detect incoming aircraft. 

Compact radars that can detect aircraft, especially stealthy aircraft, are generally not cheap. 

And a groundbased radar that can detect aircraft should already be firing its ground based AA missiles at those aircraft, not vectoring in drones. 

Really I think the cheap drone role is air to ground offense, not air to air defense.