Steel Hornets

Steel Hornets is a Ukrainian maker of munitions for combat drones. It describes itself as a private producer of weapons systems for unmanned aircraft, and reporting has likened its direct-to-user model to an online retailer: small batches of drop bombs and FPV warheads ordered and shipped straight to operators. The munitions ship without explosive filling or detonator — the user adds standard military explosive and a fuze separately — which keeps them safe to handle and easy to send through the postal service. The project grew out of Ukraine’s volunteer drone scene, with the first ammunition handed to frontline units for combat testing in the spring of 2023.

The range runs from small and large bombs for quadcopters — from consumer-grade Mavics up to “Baba Yaga”-class heavy bombers — to a family of warheads for FPV kamikaze drones. It spans armour-piercing shaped charges, fragmentation munitions packed with steel balls, dual-purpose rounds that combine both effects, and incendiary devices that reporting says burn rather than detonate. Production leans on 3D printing and lightweight composites: plastic casings and fins are printed to fall straight and balanced without upsetting the drone’s flight, which the company credits for letting it iterate new designs in weeks and ship in small batches without retooling. Prices are unusually low — reporting cites figures from a few dollars for a fragmentation casing to roughly fourteen for a shaped-charge head.

A company spokesman has said its shaped charges have destroyed Russian armour, including T-90 tanks, when mounted on FPV drones, and that an 850-gram charge penetrated 180 mm of steel in testing; those figures come from the developer. The munitions were designed to be dropped and the drone reused, but operators have increasingly mounted them on one-way FPV drones for airburst strikes. Steel Hornets is distinct from the similarly named Wild Hornets , which builds the drones themselves rather than the warheads they carry.