the good guys bomb is a guided missile, the bad guys bomb is a suicide drone

cruise missiles in the hands of a bad guy is a suicide drone and a suicide drone in the hands of a good guy is a guided missile

Cost, production capacity, radar cross section, speed, range, payload.

Drone means foam wings, plastic body, propellers, cheap camera, simple inertial navigation, maybe GPS, maybe 10-30 kilogram payload.

Guided missile means, metal airframe, jet engine, depending on targets thermal imaging or radar terminal guidance, radar altimeters, terrain imaging radars, 100 - 500 kilogram payload.

Remote guidance is a very hard problem, modern computers have made it much easier to solve.

Even an 80s missile, required hundred of thousands of dollars of equipment just for guidance. Now all you need is a simple computer, a cheap camera and a cheap accelerometer.

Drones are much easier to down than missiles, but they make it up in volume.

At the moment, cruise speed and manufacturing price.

Cost, I'd guess? There must be a reason why Russia and Ukraine are using more drones than missiles in their strikes. And while capabilities are somewhat different, if a ship carrying oil or LNG get hit by either one, it's going to have some consequences

- 2-4 orders of magnitude in cost.

- One of them I could reliably build a factory for in my garage.

Cheap as hell, doesn’t need a launchpad and can be launched from a pick up truck, super easy to make and can be scattered all over the country so there’s no central location to bomb to stop them, fly literally meters of the ground so they’re very hard to detect and you can make tens of thousands of them very quickly and very easily.

Cost.