https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-guided_missile
It's been a thing for 80 years.
The longest range wire-guided missiles in current use are limited to about 8 km (5.0 mi).
This blows my mind.
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.
Missiles would be cooler if they didn't kill.
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.
Can't jam a missile getting a fucking telegraph.
This is such an obvious idea that it just shouldn't work yet it does
Too many moving parts, replace the drone with a balloon.
I've been preparing for this moment my entire life
Why would they have a tether on the drone? Seems to me you'd get more range if it was unleashed.
Leash laws
/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
UNLEASH THE DRONE
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.
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.
Pfft! Easy.
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.
This could be easily resolved by attaching more drones to the fiber at regular intervals to keep it supported.
What is this, a war thunder forum? Stop releasing the secrets!
This comment section is getting way too credible
Something I've wondered about myself is 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.
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.
Optical fiber is actually quite strong and flexible these days. Especially when bundled with a small kevlar strength member or when armored.
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 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.
S A C L O S
Command & Conquer Generals did it first.
