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Rhythm and fighting game players have known this for decades now

I N P U T L A G

Damn straight.

The only news here are the ukrainians using them. Russia has had them for years by this point.

Wire guided missiles have been in use since WWII.

Markus Reisner has a pretty good explanation of how they're deployed in one of his videos.

They have much shorter range so they basically set them up as ambushes. The wired drone gets hidden somewhere at a choke point. An other operator flies a recon drone at long range. When they report that a good target has come into range the wired drone takes off and hits the target.

There were some actual torpedoes that used miles-long wire to control

How? If you think they're going to successfully follow a filament thinner than human hair over 6 miles I'd love to know

Drop off this drone with a different drone. Then fly it out wherever the other drones couldn't get to.

Already exist.

"Carrier has arrived."

I build some (they aren't in Ukrainian hands yet, but will be - if they want them, because they're advancing super fast and could be many steps ahead). There is no "might", they work.

10 kilometers of fiber weighs 1.5 kg, less if you buy fancier kinds of fiber. A drone with 10-inch props lifts this without problems. You can bend the fiber around a pencil and only experience degraded signal. Only a 90-degree bend will make it snap. In the war zone, landscapes after some battles already resemble "attack of the spiders" movies.

In peace time, the challenge is finding a farmer who allows using their field to test this. Promising to reel everything in and pay for damaged crops goes a long way, though. But sea is an even better idea - easier to reel it back.

P.S.

I am quite grateful to an Ukrainian radio amateur, Serhii "Flash" Beskrestnov. He published info about the early Russian models that were found crashed, and made a big deal about it, as one should. People listened to him and took him seriously, and started developing them ASAP.

At first I imagined the drone dragging its cable and that seemed terrible, but then I realized they’re carrying a spool and they let cable out as they go. That’s actually brilliant and absolutely could work. 12 miles of cable. Only thing is it adds weight so you can’t deliver as much explosive payload.

They do work. They've been using them to blow up tanks.

Drone manufacturer: "We're having trouble with our drones getting jammed, any ideas?"

Intern: "I always use CAT6 for my pc"

Drone manufacturer: "You goddamn genius!"

It's neither, they're spare wire reels for older tow missiles which were wired for the same reason.

It's real long, like miles of fairly small transparent cable.

From the article :

There are examples of drone operators from earlier this year being able to trace the cables back to the positions from where they were launched and target the enemy crews. But if this technique was a successful one, fibre optic drones would have disappeared as soon as they appeared on the battlefield, when – from presidents to workshops – all the talk is of increasing numbers.

This is not new tech. We have been using wires like this in the battlefield since the 70's. I was a TOW gunner and shot plenty of missiles that have a wire like this drone. Except, ya know it's a missile and it moves significantly faster. TOW stands for Tube launched Opitically Wire guided missile.

Ask away if you wanna know anything about em.