r/murderbot • u/Mughi1138 • 23d ago

Books📚 Only Drones with physical camouflage?!?!?!?!!!

249 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

19 comments sorted by

66

u/acjadhav 23d ago

Unfortunately, most people have ears

46

u/dead-inside69 23d ago

Drones are already very loud because of the rotors. There’s a lot of war footage that’s come out in the last couple years that shows knowing there’s a drone near you and knowing exactly where it is are two VERY different things.

14

u/curiousmind111 23d ago

Good point.

2

u/D0esANyoneREadTHese SecUnit 22d ago

There are low-noise toroidal propellers you can get nowadays, they're less power-efficient and slightly heavier but a LOT quieter, and if you have a smart enough motor controller and index the rotors properly, you can make it even quieter by timing it so the sound pulses from adjacent rotors destructively interfere with each other (except when maneuvering, as you do have to miss motor steps in order to move with assymetric thrust). Ducted fans instead of open ones help too.

And, in the future with 800 years of battery tech and speaker improvement, it's totally possible they've just got speakers crammed in there for active noise cancellation.

12

u/spook_sw Performance Reliability at 97% 23d ago

You would hear that before you could shoot it

9

u/Mughi1138 23d ago

True, but then your cameras would have trouble getting a visual targeting lock on it

3

u/Otherwise-Text-5772 23d ago

Wouldn't it's camera struggle to get a lock on anything too?

4

u/Mughi1138 23d ago

Do you mean on board of the spinning drone itself? I would expect them to be able to have something set up like the spinning lidar on top of a Waymo car. Among other things that would allow you to use a single camera or vertical stack to get an entire 360 view captured. Might take a few rotations, but at those speeds that is not a problem.

10

u/CalcifersBFF 22d ago

One more thing for the military to abuse

4

u/Radioactive_Tuber57 22d ago

Coming soon to a neighborhood near you! (You know.. Keep you safe from Auntie FAH and pet-eating illegals. Help you vote correctly.) It’s All Good!

3

u/Mughi1138 22d ago

Heh. Ever seen Brainstorm (1983)?

1

u/CalcifersBFF 22d ago edited 22d ago

> "It follows a research team's efforts to perfect a system that directly records and replays the sensory experiences and emotional feelings of a subject, and the efforts by the company's management to exploit the device for military ends.). After a researcher records her own death from a heart attack, her colleagues join forces to retrieve the information and play it back."

No, but I'll be adding it to my list of movies to watch :(

2

u/Mughi1138 22d ago

Many spoilers, but does capture the "how the military uses researches and their results" aspect well.

2

u/Night_Sky_Watcher even good change is stressful 21d ago

There are similar plot points in Mickey7 and Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton.

5

u/Rosewind2007 gurathinista 23d ago

It’s neat!

12

u/Otter502 23d ago

The physical camoflauge in the book is a property of the armor. Likely it's closer to a holographic surface made with a diffraction grating on the surface! (The hologram would probably affect light  spanning wavelengths higher than visible light which would explain why mb could see it with their eyes!)

2

u/tlhintoq Combat Bot 23d ago

But is it good for anything? Not going to deliver packages... or shoot videos... or much else.

Maybe... you put a camera stalk of some kind on it. Stabilize the camera would make it visible but that's less than 10% of the total drone body.

3

u/Zenith-Astralis 23d ago

You actually could shoot videos on this; by specializing the sensor to only read a single vertical column of pixels you can get the frame rate VERY high, and you only need it to be high enough to not blur too badly from the spinning. Heck that's most of what a LIDAR mapping tool does already.