The British also employed a belt of radar-guided flak guns to shoot them down.
I don't hear any comparisons with the V1s, so my idea must be stupid, but I'm not seeing the flaw in it.
If you want to scramble manned fighters (even WW2-style ones!) every time cheap drones are launched then the pure material cost per intercept might be acceptable (no guarantee here: you need more fuel and your ammunition is potentially more expensive than the drones payload, too), but the pilot wage/training costs alone ruins your entire balance as soon as there is any risk of losing the interceptors (either from human error/crashes or the drone operator being sneaky).
Big problem with stationary AA is probably coverage (need too many sites) and flak artillery is not gonna work out like in the past because the drones can fly much lower and ruin your range that way.
> you need more fuel
Not much of a problem.
> and your ammunition is potentially more expensive than the drones payload
I'd say it's on par. A few rounds into a slow moving target moving in straight line would be easy to hit.
> the pilot wage/training costs alone ruins your entire balance as soon as there is any risk of losing the interceptors (either from human error/crashes or the drone operator being sneaky).
The US somehow managed to train an enormous number of competent pilots in WW2. I doubt there would be any shortage of men eager to fly them and "turkey shoot" the drones down. And there'd be a lot of mechanics falling all over themselves to build those machines!
In WW2, the US lost ~15000 airmen just in training accidents to crew the ~300k planes it built. I'm sure we could get that rate down substantially with modern simulators and safety investments (=> also not free), but human lives simply got comparatively more expensive (and competent pilots were not that cheap back then either).
The attacker, meanwhile, is certainly gonna lose less men building and controlling the drones, and he can afford at least 10 attack drones for every interceptor you build.
If you did something like this on a larger scale, a big concern would also be that your manned interceptor aircraft simply become targets themselves, so the "low-risk turkey shooting" could quickly degrade.
I do expect (non-suicide?) interceptor drones as countermeasure at some point (specifically against the "cruise missile with props" style of attack drones, less so in the FPV weight class), and those could be conceptually quite similar to old prop fighters.
Being slow moving as they are, they are quite vulnerable to countermeasures after they have been detected. I expected a-10s, helicopter gunships guarding critical infra, but have not heard of anything like that in the news.
