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.
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 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.
Something I’ve wondered about myself if 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
/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
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