Posted on 05/29/2025 2:14:48 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
On the battlefields of Ukraine, new sights emerge. Thread-like filaments of wire, extended across open fields. Netting rigged up between trees along key supply roads. Both are responses to a hard-to-detect weapon able to sneak into spaces previously thought safe, hi tech and low tech all at once.
At a secret workshop in Ukraine’s north-east, where about 20 people assemble hundreds of FPV (first person view) drones, there is a new design. Under the frame of the familiar quadcopter is a cylinder, the size of a forearm. Coiled up inside is fibre optic cable, 10km (6 miles) or even 20km long, to create a wired kamikaze drone.
Capt Yuriy Fedorenko, the commander of a specialist drone unit, the Achilles regiment, says fibre optic drones were an experimental response to battlefield jamming and rapidly took off late last year. With no radio connection, they cannot be jammed, are difficult to detect and able to fly in ways conventional FPV drones cannot.
“If pilots are experienced, they can fly these drones very low and between the trees in a forest or tree line. If you are flying with a regular drone, the trees block the signal unless you have a re-transmitter close,” he observes. Where tree lined supply roads were thought safer, fibre optic drones have been able to get through.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Old news for us that have been following
Both sides have them
Strikes now being recorded 30km from Russia positions from these drones
Hitting Ukrainian supply lines
So Russia has recently increased the range of theirs
This resembles the plot of “The Feeling of Power”, a short story by Isaac Asimov, first published in 1958. In the story, the Terrestrial Federation is at war with Deneb:
a war of computer against computer. Their computers forge an impenetrable shield of anti-missiles against our missiles, and ours forge one against theirs. If we advance the efficiency of our computers, so do they theirs, and for five years a precarious and profitless balance has existed.
In this society the skill of doing mathematics has been lost; computers do all computations. A minor technician, Myron Aub, rediscovers the ancient art of pencil-and-paper mathematics, which they term “graphitics”. This has a possibility of revolutionising the war since as well as leap-frogging the Denebian development of computers,
a missile with a man or two inside... would be lighter, more mobile, more intelligent... A man is much more dispensable than a computer.
The story is available on internet archives.
Not even with strawberries?
Same thing as TOW missile or wire guided torpedo.
Or sonobouys circa ‘70s.
https://archive.org/details/DTIC_ADA046171
You’re right, these types of drones have been out there for quite a while. You can see older videos of them on Twitter.
“Old news for us that have been following. Strikes now being recorded 30km from Russia positions from these drones
Hitting Ukrainian supply lines”
Looks like it took the Neocons 6 months to match the Russians in fiber optics - which is pretty good considering their history in this war.
I bet drone swarms could be a tangled mess, eh.
If it works with a TOW missile then it makes sense it would work for a drone.
All that fiber will increase the micro plastics, making this a threat to world-wide human survival, right?
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