No, guns are more expensive, but they are reusable. You can fire north of 10000 rounds with a gun. The individual rounds are very cheap in the dollar range.
A drone that carries and explosive and meets another drone and blows up is quite an expensive solution. You'd prefer a gun any day.
Guns are nowhere near as expensive as fixed wing drones. Here, for a sense of scale are some costs:
- bullet: cents
- Kalashnikov rifle: hundreds of dollars
- 500 pound unguided gravity bomb: a few thousand dollars
- 50 cal machine gun: 20k dollars
- 500 pound guided gravity bomb: 40k dollars
- Cessna 172 civilian plane: 400k dollars
- AIM-9X air-to-air missile: 400k dollars
- Houthi Samad drone: unknown, but probably hundreds of thousands of dollars
- Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone: depending on client and delivery package, between $1 million and $5 million
- Tomahawk missile: $9 million (wikipedia says $2 mil, but that's out of date; the latest DoD budget [1] shows the Pentagon will buy 60 Tomahawks in 2022 for $551 MM, see page 23)
