Are the drones actually dragging around cable? Oh! Are these from guided anti-material munitions? That would make sense! I thought someone was laying fiber optics for some reason.

I wonder what the environmental impact of this is. This can't be glass, right? Plastic?

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Are the drones actually dragging around cable?

Not quite, they spool them off from the drone as they go, so they don't have to deal with any drag across the ground.

This can’t be glass, right? Plastic?

As far as I know they are using standard telecom fiber, so it's silica glass, partially doped to make the refractive index between core and cladding different

[–] sxan@midwest.social 3 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

I'm finding that technology has changed a lot since I last looked into this, but glass fiber was not known for its flexibility. For guided rockets, I can see that wouldn't be much of an issue, but for the maneuvers those drones make it seems fiber would not have some downsides. Do you mean the winged drones?

[–] Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

It's been a while but in this very comm someone posted pictures of a quadcopter drone with a 41.4 km drum. I'll try to dig it up.

Here's one https://sopuli.xyz/post/21919901, it was a hexacopter, not quad.

And in my search I also came across these links:

And finally here is even a demo video:

https://sopuli.xyz/post/18922497

It seems fiber works fine even on manoeuvrable drones.

[–] sxan@midwest.social 1 points 8 hours ago

That's crazy! Thanks for the links, it's fascinating. Fiber technology has really passed me by.

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