Insecticide,
at the speed of light.

Everything on this page that quotes a drone cost derives it from this one calculation. The marginal flight-hour cost is what flying actually consumes — battery cycle depreciation, charging electricity and flight-dependent maintenance. Drone and equipment write-off are shown separately because airframes and electronics are capital assets whose hourly figure is an accounting allocation across expected utilisation, not physical wear per hour. Change any assumption and every dependent chart updates immediately.

Sim-calibrated: reproduces the published cost sweep exactly. 2.2 kg drone, 253 W mission average.

Who uses what: the pest-pressure cost chart and the cart comparison price the shooting drone at the fully allocated rate; the scouting calculator prices camera-only scouts at the ordinary rate (no laser allocation); battery-replacement claims use only the battery line. Cash-flow views should exclude the non-cash capital allocations — they are labelled separately above for exactly that reason.

Before a laser fires, scout drones photograph the whole field to map every beetle. They hop photo-tile to photo-tile — accelerate, coast, decelerate — under a fixed acceleration limit. This is the cost of that scan.

Add the laser (shooting) cost and the full operation runs $54/ha·season (scout $22 + shoot $31 at 400 beetles/ha), against a €54/ha chemical season.

More drones don't change the cost — only the speed. The total flight-work to photograph the field is fixed; extra drones just split it, cutting the wall-clock scan time. So fleet size is about meeting the 48 h patrol cadence (before the beetles can lay eggs) — 5 drones finishes with room to spare. The real cost levers are area per photo and acceleration.

The beam is a tight, lethal point on the beetle. A short distance past it, the beam has fanned out so much it can't harm an eye — here's where that line is.

The exposure isn't guessed — at 10 W a lethal hit needs about 50 ms of dwell to heat the beetle's head to 52 °C, and that's the exposure this eye-safety distance assumes. Turn the power up and the dwell — and the exposure per shot — drops.

That dwell comes from one deliberately basic model: the aim point is 1 mm³ of water heated 22→52 °C, so the absorbed energy is just m·c·ΔT ≈ 0.126 J. Only 25% of the beam couples in — the paper's measured cold-cuticle absorption at 1550 nm, held flat for the whole shot — so the beam must deliver ≈0.5 J. There is no heat-loss term, no charring uplift and no fudge factor: four constants and two divisions, so you can check it by hand.

The steering optics are sized to a 7.5 mm MEMS mirror — the mirror is the beam's exit aperture, so its size sets the divergence this eye-safe distance is derived from. That figure is the expected optic based on Mirrorcle's MEMS mirrors.

Notice the safe distance doesn't move when you change power — and that's real, not a stuck slider. A lethal shot delivers the same energy at any power (more power just fires faster, shortening the dwell), and at 1550 nm the eye's damage threshold is a fixed dose over these dwell times — so the two exactly cancel. Power sets speed and cost; eye-safety comes from the optics and geometry, not the power.

The dials that do move it: a bigger lens starts the beam wider, so it focuses harder and then fans out faster — the danger zone gets shorter. That's the main dial for making the system safe near people. A closer kill point (shorter focal distance) does the same.

The other way to kill pests with light is to drive a heavy laser rig through the field on a tractor. This calculator models that ground cart in full — machine, tractor, fuel, operators — and compares it against the drone, whose €/ha is taken directly from the drone cost-per-hectare model above (not recomputed here). Capex is included on both sides.

Field-scale agricultural lasers already exist — on the ground.

Pantec Biosolutions ↗The closest real-world insect-zapping cart — a tractor-mounted laser that targets pests directly. The nearest ground analogue to what the drone does.Carbon Robotics LaserWeeder ↗The commercial proof that field-scale laser AG works — a €1.1M tractor-pulled rig, aimed at weeds. Its economics anchor the cart cost below.

The cart isn't wrong — it's just heavy. Its cost is dominated by a six-figure machine plus a tractor, fuel and two operators grinding through the field at a few km/h. The drone carries none of that: no operator, negligible energy, and an airframe that is a rounding error next to a €200k–1.1M rig. Even before the drone's finer targeting, the economics alone favour flying.

The cheapest way to do a job is almost always the smallest tool that can actually do it — anything bigger is hauling mass, and cost, the work never asked for. A few-hundred-gram drone that flies to each beetle is that tool; a tonne of steel dragging a laser through the mud is not.

Flying autonomous BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) under EASA's PDRA-G03 pre-defined risk assessment — low-altitude agricultural ops in sparsely-populated areas — carries fixed compliance overhead. On a single hub that's a few euro per hectare; across a cooperative under one fleet-wide licence it collapses toward zero. This is regulatory cost only — it sits on top of the operating cost in the other calculators.

regulatory €/ha·year vs cluster size — docks in the cooperative

Compliance is a fixed cost, and fixed costs love scale. One SORA authorization per hub never gets cheaper per hectare. But a single fleet-wide LUC — one platform operator running many regional docks — spreads the same paperwork across the whole cooperative, so at 10 hubs the regulatory burden is €0.88/ha·yr and still falling. Above 2 hubs the LUC is the cheaper route.

The 3D simulator above is a full physics engine — powerful, but you have to trust it. This is its stripped-down counterpart, equations you can check on paper. Beetles invade from the edges, so each 1 m slice of perimeter has a depth line running D metres into the crop with x beetles evenly along it. The drone flies a serpentine — down a line, one metre across, back up the next — so there are exactly two hop lengths: D/x and 1 m. A hop is accelerate-then-brake at a tilt, so power × time gives the joules. Nothing is estimated.

What this deliberately leaves out: aerodynamic drag (justified — at ~1 m hops the peak speed is ~3 m/s and drag is well under 1% of hover power), translational lift, wind, climb and descent, battery sag, and the time to find the next beetle. The route is assumed to be a clean serpentine — down each depth line, one metre across, back up the next — so the two hop lengths are exact rather than estimated. Real beetles will not sit that tidily, but the arithmetic is then something you can redo on paper in a minute. It is a floor on the travel energy, not a mission plan.

The cost model above shows the drone undercuts chemical spraying. But removing chemistry from the field unlocks value beyond the input saving. Every euro below is tiered by evidence strength and carries a citation — the moats that resist a clean €/ha are listed, not summed, so the headline stays defensible.

Kept honest: the TPS blight value only applies to True-Potato-Seed growers. The compaction figure is the mainstream European estimate — some sources claim a far higher "compaction tax," which we don't bank. And a laser does not confer organic status (that needs the whole system chemical-free, with a ~30–50% yield penalty a laser can't remove) — so we count a modest residue-free premium, not a full organic markup.