Are they stupid?
r*ddit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-guided_missile
It’s been a thing for 80 years.
The longest range wire-guided missiles in current use are limited to about 8 km (5.0 mi).
This blows my mind.
Yom Kippur was mentioned in the article. Some documentary mentioned the hundreds of trails of wire you could find on the battlefield. Not related but related idea were missiles streaming carbon fibers to short out electrical stations during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Missiles would be cooler if they didn’t kill.
I’ve read the same thing about the trails of wire all over the place in the Falklands also.
Also as someone who fired Javelins and TOWs in the Marine Corps, missiles are just fucking cool. I was always jealous of the SMAW guys tho bc they had a bigger kaboom on the firing side of things. Although that’s technically rocket I guess, but still cool.
Too many moving parts, replace the drone with a balloon.
Why would they have a tether on the drone? Seems to me you’d get more range if it was unleashed.
Leash laws
/cred to bypass signal jamming I guess. Wire-guided missiles work like this with miles of fiber optic line. I just can’t imagine the logistics of such a cable working on a drone. Truly noncredible
If they wanted to be absolutely clear, they should definitely use optical fiber over copper
Actually, everyone assumes that it is signal going through the fiber, but there are power over fiber systems available, and can deliver several Watts of power. Your drone would not need battery and can stay forever in the air. The same fiber can be used for signal transmission too, so it becomes more resilient to electronics warfare.
Power over fiber exists, but you need a seriously big unit to deliver anything over 15 watts. 15 watts does not lift a drone, and it really doesn’t make it go as fast as a tank.
15 watts could certainly lift a drone, a 15 watt drone probably couldn’t lift a 15 watt fiber power receiver though. Really the fiber is just silly. Use a laser or regular wires
DJI Mavic 3 (a modest camera drone) has a 74Wh battery with a claimed flight time of 46 minutes. That means it needs 48W.
High speed racing drones, like the kind you might want to make into a kamakazie drone, will take a lot more than that.
Ukraine actually did find a few Russian drones connected by an incredibly long thin tether. Since jamming drones’ control channels is a massive issue on both sides and it would be nice just not to have to worry about it, it does make some level of sense. As far as I’m aware from public sources, the ultimate conclusion after not very many experiments was that it’s way too much of a pain in the ass to be worthwhile.
Just to be disgustingly credible for a moment, I imagine that the biggest practical issue with tethering a drone to, say, a tank, is that as soon as someone spots the drone (which is floating in the air with zero ability to camouflage itself) they have now spotted that you have a tank somewhere very close by. Close enough that just dropping an artillery barrage on the whole area probably isn’t a waste. With good enough optics you could probably even follow the cable in order to get an exact location on the operator, and then introduce them to Mr Missile.
