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Ok, I'll bite, what is a 'fibre-optic' drone?
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this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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askchapo
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Pic of the drum that holds the spool. It literally just unspools km after km of hair thin optical fiber as it flies around. The added weight does limit range.
Kinda crazy you can fit 20km of wire in a container that size but I'm always surprised when i cut 4 heads of cabbage and it's enough to feed 50 people, volume be crazy
You can feed so many people with this mfer, especially in a soup
just dont hold them in closed space later
They're apparently seeing 50/60km fiber spools on the frontline in Ukraine now.
When the technician installed our fibre optic connection he showed us the actual glass part of the cable and it is miniscule
It's so funny because when I was in university there were multiple courses dedicated to electromagnetic warfare, specifically around taking down drones or assuming control over them using man in the middle attacks.
All to be countered by this simple, yet intuitive solution
mfs reinvented the kite
But wouldn't it get stuck in a tree or something? I suppose you have to operate it from high ground?
Since the cable unspools from the drone, getting it tangled isn't really an issue, unless you somehow loop the drone around and get the cable caught up in the rotors.
Oooohhh ok now I get it. Thanks!
Also, there are usually three kinds of drones. Monitor or overwatch drones, drop drones, and missile or suicide drones. Overwatch drones go up, do a set pattern, identify targets for the suicide drones or drop drones to hit. None of them require advanced flight knowledge or the kind of maneuvers that would be tangled in the trees.
The Ukrainians have a squad that is notorious for being able to get suicide drones inside very small windows on buildings, but this kind of high intensity maneuvering is pretty easily countered with cheap netting. The fact of the matter is that setting up an electronic jamming perimeter with netting prevents most drone attacks, but the issue is that setting these up while pushing out is extremely dangerous, as you are extremely vulnerable to wired drop drones.
And even if your front line is protected from drones, the 8km of open road to your logistics base aren't! :)
Why not have the spool on the ground to make the drones lighter?
Spooling from the drone prevents movement restriction due to entanglement.
EDIT: also, the drone may not need to support the weight of the spool but it does have to pull the KMs long fiber optic line behind it.
Why not have a spool on both ends?
Split the difference, spool in the middle
Spool remotely
Now you need to engineer Your fiber optic line to have enough tensile strength to support the entire spool.
I'll let the boffins sort that out, I'm the ideas guy
50ft out your line snags on a branch and now the entire spool on your controller is useless!
The entire length of the fiber would have to be dragged along with the drone if you did it that way. With the spool on the drone, the unspooled fiber falls to the ground and is stationary.