Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones

Re:Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones by Animats on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:14PM (#25308095)

There's been work in that area. Uneven blade spacing helps.[1] One of the US "stealth helicopters" sounds more like wind noise than the distinctive "thud thud thud" of most helicopters, according to one of those books by ex-special forces types.

Drones might benefit from that trick. But you pay a penalty in performance and energy consumption.

[1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/mh-...

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Re:Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones by KineticLensman on Friday December 04, 2020 @04:59PM (#25308724)

> Drones might benefit from that trick.

Well, you could make boutique drones exploiting state of the art tech that are so expensive you can only afford three of them. Or you could just buy load of cheap throwaway drones and swarm your targets with them.

Remember, lots of drones used as ISR assets had unencrypted video downlinks because the chance that the enemy could also see the downlinks was considered less bad than the cost of rolling out state of the art crypto across coalition forces

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Re:Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones by contingencies on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:23PM (#25309663)

chance that the enemy could also see the downlinks

You would think they would have highly directional signals by now.

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Re:Army computer models unveil secret to quieter small drones by elihu on Friday December 04, 2020 @06:38PM (#25309792)

Directional radio antennas tend to be rather large, and I'm not sure it's even feasible to get rid of side-lobes to the point where they're undetectable (or at least, with a signal too weak to interpret).

Directional optical links might be feasible, but probably a lot more expensive than a simple radio.

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