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Wouldn't the fiber lead directly back to the pilot, though? You'd have to constantly be moving locations, otherwise they could just follow the wire.
Edit: I know, I know, the more I've thought about it--and despite them actually proving it's possible to do as mentioned in the article--it's just not very practical to do in many situations. As one commenter mentioned below, after seeing pictures of some trees, numerous drones create a web among trees/bushes/etc. So tracing lines when drones are launched from multiple locations would be extremely difficult and they could even set up ambushed at certain points if they saw enemy scouts doing it.
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.
Would you rather have had wire drones over your TOWs?
Or just knee replacements
Already had the back replacement thank you very much lol
Edit: sorry to answer your question. Nope, ill take the missile. A drone coming at you is slow (in relation to a missile) and doesnt have a lot of explosives, other enemies will think they have a chance. You see a missile take someone out, I promise you, that you wont stick around to see it again.
I'm guessing the wired break down quickly?
Naw, that shit was super strong. If you caught your boot and pulled it would slice clean into your boot. But it was fragile enough to be cut with scissors. A little thicker than a strand of hair.
Lol, I doubt it. I'm guessing 1,000-2,000 years.
What kind of comms do the wires allow? Sending guidance and simultaneously receiving video?
What was the physicality of wires back then (and do you know what they are today)? Would it feel like walking into a spider's web, or how sturdy were/are those wires?
How often would a write break, and would that mean total loss of control or is there some form of fall-back?
Curious minds want to know! Thank you.
People who play War Thunder want to know lol you can actually find cut outs that show the internals online. The TOW has been around for awhile.
But the wires were for X and Y navigation. Theres an IR beacon that flashes out the back of the missile. The camera sees the beacon and when you move the controls the missile will follow. Theres a Russian T90 tank that has a defense system that spoofs the beacon. Looks like headlights, called the Shtora-1 check it out.
Wire was made out of the thinnest, strongest metal I've ever seen. It would cut your boot if you snagged it and pulled, but it could be cut with scissors.
If you lost a wire the missile would go erratic and would lose control depending on which wire was lost. Really depened on what youre trying to shoot over if you broke a wire. Can't shoot over buildings.
My favorite fact though, it flys above the tank! Search YouTube for a slow mo and you'll see what i mean. Explodes from above.
Well, since we've got you:
What would be the minimum reasonable distance to use a TOW (with accompanying operator control) vs something unguided (either the TOW or otherwise)?
Ooo minimum? Dont recall that exactly but I do remember the mechanism that arms the missile is activated by G force. Missile has to fly for a bit before it arms.
Second part of your question is pretty loaded. Theres tons of unguided systems that have wildly different arming mechanisms.
Really what you care about is stand off distance. Can I hit my enemy with my missile before they can get into range to shoot me?
From the article :
It's real long, like miles of fairly small transparent cable.
Could have controller-> radio -> base station-> fibre —> drone
You won't be able to just follow the wire, it's millimeter thin and extremely light. And drone operators need to constantly move anyway.
It'll be hard to spot but easy to follow. But the drone and the wire don't need to go in a straight line. Anything could be waiting on the route between the operator and the drone.
I don't know about "easy to follow." Have you ever followed 6 miles of transparent fishing line through an active warzone to see what was at the other end? That seems to approximate the difficulty.
Oh oh oh! I've actually done this! I was a TOW gunner that had to try and find 3000 meters of wire from a training range after I was done shooting. It fucking sucked and took hours lmao ain't no fucking way you're doing that AND getting shot at.
It's probably not required if not using RF.
Not just that but the pilot can be on the other side of the world from wherever the fiber leads out.
Most likely the fiber is coming out of a bunker that just has some switches and a TACLANE or something similar. Doesn't take much infra...you need that, some sort of low-latency network connection, and room for drones to take off.
Once it's set up, the site can be unmanned. Hell they can rig it to blow itself up after the mission is complete, so that nothing can be recovered from the infra if it's found.
For that matter, most of the drones flight path could be pre- programmed...the pilot only there as a contingency. Doing that, one operator could control several drones simultaneously.
If they're up to 20 km it could take you a while and they're very small and difficult to see, possibly going through difficult terrain.
Plus, by the time you find the end, the crew can have moved on.
You could also exploit that to ambush the people trying to follow the cable farther into enemy territory.
Also, assuming the Ops are closer than the max length of the cable, you can fly it in circles or backtracks to make tracing it that much harder.
Perhaps they just pull it back real fast 😆
I was thinking the same thing! If it’s a super small cable (1mm diameter) couldn’t they have some sort of auto winch that pulled the line back after detonation? I’m not an engineer, so I’d obviously defer to an expert on this.
Primary issues I can see with retrieval are tangling/kinking and re-spooling/splicing. The fibers are insanely thin and the drones are flying in between trees, not exactly a smooth path for retrieval.
I saw a picture a few weeks ago of a field in Ukraine, taken from amongst an adjacent patch of trees, and it just looks like spiderwebs. Dozens and dozens of fine spider web strands, each one delivering a drone into the meat grinder. Terrible, beautiful, and such a fucking waste.
What are all those glass fibers going to do to an area after the war ends? That stuff won't decompose.
Fibre glass is essentially silica fibres with a trace amount of metal to make the fibre glass act the way it does. Guess what sand is also made of, silica with trace amounts of impurities. So when they break down it'll just be sand in the end. Not 'decomposable' but quite friendly to the environment still.
You've obviously never embedded a piece of fibre optic cable in your skin. It's very sharp and will break off inside. It's not exactly life threatening, but it hurts like a bitch and can be really hard to find and remove.
I've stabbed myself with fibre optic and I do agree, it's not nice, a lot better than unexploded ordanance though so I didn't think of the injury implications.
Yes, that is obvious. I'm not worried about chemical contamination. Physical contamination and injury is the problem. I'm much more worried about civilians interacting with an environment saturated with these things. A kid is riding a dirt bike through the woods one day and gets garroted on an invisible glass wire dangling between two trees.
Ahh I wasn't really thinking of the injury implications. In terms of after war cleanup and decades on effects to civilians I didn't think it was a problem. At least clean up efforts would be simple enough with just a good pair of gloves and side cutters.
In an interesting tangent, that's actually a thing in brazil. If I remember, there are laws in place that make it illegal to operate a motorcycle without a wire cutter on it.
To be fair it's much better than unexploded bombs and mines.
I doubt the wire would be strong enough to not snap in that case.
Same can be said for the landmines that the Russian are hiding in Ukrainian soil
I live in an area where fires are frequent and aerial cables plentiful.
Once in a while, a crew comes around and picks up all the broken cable. But considering these are mostly glass, non insulated cables, I'd risk it just becomes another inert part of the soil.
Hopefully, there will be a retrieval plan, after all the madness ends.
It's also not going to explode so probably less of an issue on the whole than all the UXO there...
Couldn't they just make it standard practice to reel in the wire after detonation? Sure, it could snap, but that would still be only partial direction information.
I assume there are ways of doible backing in some unexpected direction first before flying out of one thicket into another and maybe then to the enemy? I am just guessing what is practical though