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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.
Why hello there, Mr. 0352.
At least your MOS still exists. I was one of them SMAW guys, and now both my job and old unit have been deactivated. It makes me feel like even more of a dinosaur than I otherwise would when I talk to people about my time enlisted.
If I remember right the cable only runs for a fraction of that distance. The missile goes up long enough to let the operator see and lock the target, then goes to self guidance for the rest of the trip.
Can’t jam a missile getting a fucking telegraph.
This is such an obvious idea that it just shouldn’t work yet it does
Too many moving parts, replace the drone with a balloon.
I’ve been preparing for this moment my entire life
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
To be absolutely clear TOWs use copper wire.
If they wanted to be absolutely clear, they should definitely use optical fiber over copper
well played.
Gah
That is economic assistance to rebuild after the battle. Cash for copper, it’s got to be safer than robbing substations.
If you went with copper, sure you’ll be even more limited in range, but you could send power too, so it would be trade off.
Please be considerate and pick up your drones leavings. Let’s keep this battlefield clean
UNLEASH THE DRONE
Tethers can’t be jammed. Electronic warfare is a serious concern.
They most certainly can be.
And how would you go about jamming a tether?
After extensive testing under DoD contract, I found strawberry works best.
Only one man would dare give me the raspberry!
LONE STAR
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.
Mavic 3 is heavy. There are much lighter and much smaller drones that use less power. You wouldn’t need your tank-tethered drone to be fast.
It needs to be able to support its own weight plus weaponry plus ammo
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.
Pfft! Easy.
Biggest issue I see is the weight of the wire. The farther up, or farther away the drone gets, the more weight of cable it needs to carry, and the more likely it is that this cable gets snared on something.
This could be easily resolved by attaching more drones to the fiber at regular intervals to keep it supported.
What is this, a war thunder forum? Stop releasing the secrets!
Something I’ve wondered about myself is having a laser communication system on the drone and controller on mounts that always turn to point at eachother, so that jamming the signal isn’t doable because it’s highly directional. Probably want a repeater drone that flies at high altitude above trees and terrain to give it line of sight on all the other drones
Yeah I saw some drone swarm ideas like that, hard to know what got picked up but having some drones as repeaters giving hard to disrupt signals locally and communicating with base units via highly directional laser or microwave repeater drones is almost certainly something they have or are working on.
This comment section is getting way too credible
Optical fibre is fucking fragile as all hell. You aren’t going to see appreciable signal loss with an antenna with much better weight savings not have a spool of cable either on the armoured vehicle (minimal if on the vehicle) or the drone (undesirable). Not to mention the mechanical issues associated with the spooling.
Optical fiber is actually quite strong and flexible these days. Especially when bundled with a small kevlar strength member or when armored.
The strands are still glass though, and have a much wider maximum bend radius than something like CAT* cable.
Did you watch the video? He’s wrapping fiber optic cable over a 10mm mandrel with no problems and it’s causing no loss. The video is 10 years old at this point too, we’ve probably progressed further with technology.
Huh. I guess the company i worked for was cheap as shit and bought trash cable.
So, you still need the special connectors, still a cable. I mean, if you wanted a smart kite sure, that is an overpriced solution.
Connectors are not special, they are standard and cheap due to fiber optics used in telecoms in massive amounts.
Now I’m imagining a guy on top of a tank in battlefield conditions trying to do an emergency fuse repair on a fucked up pigtail while cleaning the glass with those fancy fiber wet wipes and ranting about how there’s too much dust.
A soldier would just pull a new one out of a disposable sealed bag
Optical fiber is really not very flexible. It doesn’t like sharp corners, it has pretty fast dropout, and if it gets banged against something it’ll break.
It’s good for infrastructure that doesn’t move, it’s not fantastic for controlling vehicles remotely. That’s why remote control submarines don’t use it and underwater is probably a more forgiving environment than in the air.
Biggest problem I see is that you are firing the case with the bullet. They don’t work very well that way, though taking a page out of aperture science’s playbook, it does give you 60% more bullet per bullet.
S A C L O S
Command & Conquer Generals did it first.
