Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.
Consider though that if a defense contractor were able to reduce the noise of a helicopter enough to matter militarily, the Pentagon would have poured many billions into that contractor, especially during the Vietnam War during which helicopters were relied on very extensively. Also, the main constraint on the use of civilian helicopters is probably complaints about the noise. And the fans at the front of engines of airliners is responsible for producing most of the thrust on the airliner, and there have been large economic incentives to make those quiet (to eliminate the copious restrictions on airliners designed to limit noise) and although airliners have gotten quieter, they remain quite loud, loud enough to detect and triangulate with arrays of microphones many many miles away. (The reason the are called “fans” and not “propellers” is merely the number of blades.)
Remotely-piloted gliders or glide bombs of course don’t have much of a noise signature, which is why I have tried to be careful in my comments to restrict the scope of my statements to multirotor helicopter-style drones.
Yeah I agree that the physics favors the autoturrets over the drones. I don’t think there will be silent drones and even if they are, visual identification will probably work well enough anyway. (There will totally be fixed-wing drones that turn off their propellers and glide silently towards the target btw...)
But even if you have a perfect autoturret, it can probably only take out, like, 10 drones before one gets through and kills it. So your autoturrets can’t cost more than 10x the cost of a drone… so, like, $10k. Also, even if you have a $5k autoturret that can reliably take out 10 drones before they close the distance, the drones are way more mobile and so can concentrate force, retreat, etc. and thus will have a huge role to play even if they generally stay away from autoturret-defended areas & even if every vehicle has an autoturret on it.
So I think drones are well worth investing in on the current margins, even if we assume that autoturret tech will advance by leaps and bounds and achieve perfection in the next few years. Which is a very generous assumption.