Anyone in this thread familiar with Electronic Warfare? Specifically, the EW arms race between a guided missile's "eyes", and decoy signals created by things that don't want to get hit by said missiles? (Or, better yet, between large-scale MIRV missiles, that don't want their warheads to get hit by interceptor systems, and the sensors on those interceptor counter-missiles. In that case, you'd call these techniques ht…
Yeah, I watched Spider-Man:Far From Home as well. Seriously though, the pilots reported visual sighting as well. Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr is another.
I haven't; what was in the movie?
> Projecting a hologram is one thing, projecting one while flying at 800km/hr is another.
Like I was saying: short-throw laser projectors (or rather, in this case, long-throw projectors, but same diff, tech-wise.) Have a missile vanguard blow through the airspace first, making the air turbulent and perhaps "doping" it with some dyes so that the vapor-trail blends back into the sky. Then fly out your penaids, have them assume static positions around the diffractive "canvas", and then start throwing emissions at the "canvas." Reorient some lasers a tiny little bit, and now it looks like you've got something glowy accelerating at Mach 6 along your "canvas." But it's not a violation of the laws of physics—it's just light (and RF, and IR, and...)
But my real argument wasn't meant to be a constructive proof about what properties penaids should be able to have. My point was that, given the tech that's cheap enough for any nation on earth to put into each and every counter-missile, if certain nations (ahem) want to retain air supremacy, they're going to want to develop something that can fool that sensor tech. The result would be the EW equivalent of a "deepfake": a decoy that fools cameras better than our eyes, feeding AI more discriminant than our brains. What hope do we humans have of telling such a decoy apart from a real UFO?