Ukraine Scales Up Mass Production of STING Drones to Counter Russian Shahed Attacks
Ukraine has scaled up mass production of the domestically developed STING interceptor drone, rolling the program into serial manufacture and supplying front-line units in large quantities, the developer group “Wild Wasps” said.
The Gaze reports this, referring to Militarnyi.
The manufacturer said the assembly line, launched four months ago, now produces “thousands” of STING units each month, a dramatic ramp-up that the team credits with helping operators destroy more than 1,000 Shahed- and Geran-type attack drones since serial production began. According to the developers, almost half of those kills occurred in October alone.
“Serial production has changed the equation,” a Wild Wasps spokesperson said. “STING was designed to be cheap, simple and easy to produce at scale – and now it’s arriving in numbers our defenders need.” The project, they added, was built with “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of investment and more than a year of development.
Designed as a straight-forward quadcopter interceptor, STING requires no catapult and can launch from any flat surface. The system deploys in under 15 minutes, rapidly climbs, locks on via an onboard camera and engages targets at an advertised range of up to 25 kilometres.
It is compatible with any FPV station but achieves best results when paired with a ground control station and the proprietary digital TV system. Developers say the simplified design and modular components make the drone inexpensive to manufacture and maintain, enabling a steady flow from factory to front-line units.
“We focused on manufacturability from day one,” the team said, noting that night-time sorties frequently see dozens – and sometimes hundreds – of incoming loitering munitions engaged by STINGs.
To support operators, the Wild Wasps group has opened the Night Hornets training centre, where they deliver an intensive operator course lasting up to three days. While training remains important, the company emphasized that the primary achievement is industrial: turning a fielded prototype into a mass-produced defensive asset.
As The Gaze reported earlier, Ukraine is challenging global giant DJI by creating its own “sky fighters” to replace Chinese Mavic drones.