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.
This kind of idea is between genius and stupid.
It’s a cheap an easy solution to a lot of problem, and it sounds like the kind of proposal an intern would do
It’s neither, they’re spare wire reels for older tow missiles which were wired for the same reason.
TIL thanks,
I heard about wired torpedo but didn’t know it was also a thing for missiles
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!”
Kids these days relying on wireless everything and don’t realize the security and reliability of a wired connection.
This has been going on for a few months now. Why is this a “new threat” ?
There have even already been battlefield videos where you see tons of fibre optic in the air.
that is a newer threat
What does that look like? Can’t imagine what tons of fiber in the air looks like, do you have a video you can share with the rest of the class
On the scale of human warfare, “a few months” is pretty new. Frankly, its fairly new on the timescale of the Ukraine war at this point.
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.
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)?
Could have controller-> radio -> base station-> fibre —> drone
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.
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.
It’s real long, like miles of fairly small transparent cable.
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.
And drone operators need to constantly move anyway.
It’s probably not required if not using RF.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Same can be said for the landmines that the Russian are hiding in Ukrainian soil
It’s also not going to explode so probably less of an issue on the whole than all the UXO there…
- wire spool is located on the drone itself not the other way around
- You can’t pull it back it’s all tangled up
- Wires are very hard to see
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
Huh, I remember one of the few draw backs of fiber optic cables being that you had to be very careful with them, because bending them could easily cause them to crack and no longer work. I’m guessing that must no longer be an issue!
The fiber we use at our datacenter is quite flexible but still gets damaged if you bend it too far. To roll it like they describe you would still want to have a fairly large drum (probably like 3-4 inches in diameter) which would make it pretty bulky for a small drone.
They literally describe it as “the size of a forearm” so that about tracks with 3-4 inches diameter.
“Secret workshop”? Why are they talking openly to the press then?
Because the secret is where it is, not that it exists.
Why talk about it at all though? What military benefits from telling the press about its newest weapons?
The tech itself isn’t secret, both sides use it. With Russia being ahead apparently. From the article:
A video from a Russian military Telegram channel from last month demonstrates their ominous capability. A fibre optic drone, the nose of the yellow cylinder housing the coil clearly visible, flies with precision a few centimetres from the ground, to strike a Ukrainian howitzer concealed in a barn, a location clearly previously considered safe.
But as Fedorenko acknowledges, it is Russia that, at least for now, “is well ahead of us” – largely because Moscow has had greater access to fibre optic cabling, with Ukraine scrambling to catch up.
Y’all answering “what” to a “why” question.
Knowing how fragile fibre cable is especially when bent at weird angles (which is prone to happen in flight), this doesn’t sound like the most genius idea. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
If it was that bad, they wouldn’t be using it. Consider that the same is true for regular munitions. They’re meant to be disposable, so if they have a few duds, it’s probably not the end of the world.
There are some turning radius limitations but otherwise these drones are doing just fine from both sides. We don’t have to wait and see anything.
Madyar has been running these for a while and it looks like Code 9.2 Achilles also.
Fibre cable is a lot stronger and more flexible than you’d think. The old days of very fragile cable are gone. You can use it and treat it in pretty much the same way you’d treat copper CAT6 cable in terms of bend radius.
kind of terrifying that they are stringing hundreds of kilometers of it between trees if it’s at all strong!
