Imagine a drone which outputs the signature of an attack helicopter to draw out that loitering drone and then destroy it, leaving the space open for an actual attack helicopter to swoop in and do its business.
The attack drone can just move and triangulate the sound, eliminating anything that’s trying to mimic a helicopter without outputting enough decibels.
Drones don't need to be small, and big doesn't always mean expensive.
Examples: the counter-drone outputs only a specific frequency (the anti-helo drone isn't running a whole sound analysis, just a narrow range). It outputs that at much lower decibels (the anti-helo-drone just thinks the helo is farther away). It outputs that sound in bursts and directionally (the anti-helo-drone is only listening in a specific place).
Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Sure all of these "hacks" will be countered by future versions of the anti-helo-drones, but that's kinda my whole point.
It doesn't matter if the decoy can match frequency if it can't match amplitude because it's trivial to triangulate the position and eliminate anything that's too quiet. Any helicopter that sounds "farther away" than its actual position is obviously a decoy. Measuring the time of flight on reflections eliminates directional speakers.
These aren't even hacks, this is something an Alexa smart home speaker is equipped to do today. Add a rudimentary radar and the decoy now has to have the same radar cross section as a big metal helicopter. Chaff isn't going to work when sensor fusion includes computer vision.
> Once found, the counter-drone dispatches a kill drone which can match the anti-helo drone's speed.
Once it's dispatched, how is it going to target and intercept a small drone with a tiny radar cross section that has thrust vectoring? That's a job for static CIWS/AA, not a cheap counter drone dispatched from a decoy.
My point is that attackers have the technological and cost advantage here, possibly forever. Civilian quadcopters can't easily take down a 150 knot helicopter now but the technology to make 200+ mph military drones is already here, it just hasn't been combined into a weapon yet. No imagination needed, it's practically inevitable.
Why? Sure you might be limited to that if you're using an Arduino but with an FPGA or even a cheap "edge AI" NPU you could do a very thorough analysis (even credit card sized image recognition modules with camera are <$50 now). Heck even a seeedstudio respeaker can do live voice identification and isolation, noise cancellation, and 16 direction source location/indication using 4 microphones!
Knights in armor didn't necessarily die out because of their vulnerability to guns; rather, professional pikemen and musketeers started making more economic sense.
A megaphone is pretty loud and doesn’t require kilowatts. Sure it’s directional, but it would be good enough in a sweep pattern to trigger sleeper drones. That would necessitate triangulation and counter-countermeasures.
Welcome to the arms race! Lockheed Martin is hiring!
on edit: ah, I understand a later comment better now, but I mean, detecting the waiting drone is probably going to involve that waiting drone doing lots of movement - not turning its camera to look at noise source.
Maybe helicopter moving should just have an increasing number of little anti-drones flying with it, increasing further the cost and complexity of helicopters.