13 ms·

Knowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if the fibre is jacketed/support

by zh3 2y ago

Knowing a little bit about this, a 12km spool of 0.125mm plastic fibre costs about $1k [0]. Limits the range still (especially if the fibre is jacketed/supported in anyway). They'll be back to barrage balloons next [1]. [0] https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=168 https://www.i-fiberoptics.com/fiber-detail.php?id=3630&sum=1... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon

hnuser123456 2y ago
.014 g/m or .014 kg/km or 0.14kg for 10km or 0.31 lbs
- samstave 2y ago
  Wow. Imagine just having a tether like this [whatever altitude] above your property - if you had multiple of these fibers, one could use them as guy-wires - to hold a balloon with solar powered cam and redundant fiber connections... These should be placed over mountains - remote cabins, ski resorts. Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver... EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
  - BJones12 2y ago
    > Whats the tensile strength? About 600 Kpsi. That works out to somewhere around 0.1 lb per strand.
    - samstave 2y ago
      Oh I was thinking that the thing was jacketed like... I just assumed wrong - youd still need to wrap it in superconductive carbon nanotubes to make it work. :-)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- petsfed 2y ago
  For context, the total mass of a standard M67 fragmentation grenade is ~400g, including a 180g of actual explosive. So this is like a third of the standard payload of the e.g. DJI drones dropping grenades onto foxholes. My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller boom >> incomplete boom mission.
- Qwertious 2y ago
  >.014 kg/km Just post it in grams, ugh. (14g/km) >or 0.14kg for 10km (or 140g for 10km)
Modified3019 2y ago
I’ve seen references to balloons are already being used by both sides a camera platforms, decoys, and high altitude mortar dropping weapons.
PaulHoule 2y ago
If the target costs a lot more than $1k than this might be a good deal.
- littlestymaar 2y ago
  There's no target worth less than $1k on a battlefield.
  - whatisthiseven 2y ago
    Ironically, the drones themselves are targets worth about $1k or less. Just fairly difficult to spot/shoot down.
    - stavros 2y ago
      How do you figure they're worth less than $1k? They cost $1k, they're worth as much as the thing they're about to take out.
      - sqeaky 2y ago
        This!! People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar. Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber. Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    If you have to rebuild everything you blow up like in the middle east, every target has a negative value (unless you are a Haliburton stockholder).
  - rasz 2y ago
datameta 2y ago
Fiber is problematic as far as LOS and obstacles are concerned. Most launch points are concealed, usually at the edge of a treeline. As far as I understand, fiber creates unnecessary risk for operators.
- upsuper 2y ago
  Not sure whether they are already doing this, but the fiber could simply connect to a relay rather than the operator themselves, that way the operator can still hide far from the connected system and use wireless outside jamming to control if that still makes sense.
  - arkh 2y ago
    Radio controlled drones carrier drones to which the kamikaze drones are linked by fiber. Move the carrier in low EW area then control the kamikazes in high EW areas using the carrier as a relay.
    - datameta 2y ago
      This would be the way. Essentially the system would be an air-to-ground TOW missile. I wonder how difficult it is to source fiber at the scale needed. However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue, though.
wongarsu 2y ago
That's pretty cheap. An unguided artillery shell is about $3000 each, plus the logistics of getting it there. Guided munition is in the 6 figure range. In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.
- dmix 2y ago
  I remember reading that Ukraine loses about 3-4 drones for every successful hit. Higher in EW heavy regions. Beyond EW the losses are because they can't find targets within battery time (these are always 1 way drones regardless), they miss, they get shot down, etc. Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
  - anovikov 2y ago
    If that was true, Russia would have been utterly defeated a long time ago. Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day, even if a successful hit meant just 1 infantryman killed or incapacitated, Russians will be at the negotiation table, at least, because no way they can sustain 1000 people per day in irrecoverable losses.
    - theblobawakens 2y ago
      Russia's professional army plus reservists was about 2.1M before the war. Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth. They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
      - racional 2y ago
        10000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war. As is 10 percent of annual GDP.
bawolff 2y ago
Does it have to be fiber optic? Surely the same principle would work with copper wire
- stavros 2y ago
  I assume copper will be many times heavier and resistance will make it useless at a much shorter distance. Plus, it's many times more expensive.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - m4rtink 2y ago
    The TOW missile is guided via electric signals over metal wires, but is much more expensive and less flexible (and probably has a very different flight profile) than drones and FPV drones. More modern wire guided missiles do use fiber optics (Spike, etc.).
- tomooot 2y ago
  I've converted a £10 trash tier quadcopter to run off of 30G wire. Only 5 meters range, and the weight and momentum of the wire cause extremely difficult to control oscillations, but it still flies (badly)! The transmission losses over such thin wires are massive but the way around that is to supply a higher voltage than is required, and include a linear regulator inside the quad to burn off excess voltage when current draw is low. I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
  - pbmonster 2y ago
    Sounds like you were supplying power. That's unnecessary in this case. Just leave the battery in. The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5 mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up. And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair. With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get GBits down that wire.
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon That Wikipedia page contains a link to a picture I've always found totally mind blowing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:NormandySupply_edit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:No... Insanity.
- metadat 2y ago
  What do you find mind-blowing about this pic?
  - tivert 2y ago
    > What do you find mind-blowing about this pic? Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean, just imagine all that activity.
    - M95D 2y ago
      Too expensive to ever see that again.
      - yard2010 2y ago
        Wait a few more years..
      - sqeaky 2y ago
        Nothing is too expensive when the alternative is death. We'll see it again as soon as two super powers are engaged in an active shooting war.
    - anovikov 2y ago
      All of these ships are tiny. These are not ships, just landing craft. This is by any measure not a big concentration of ships, armor, or anything. D-day landings were impressive in 1944 but today these won't be big at all. Today, similar amounts of cargo and people can be delivered by planes, not by boat.
DannyBee 2y ago
I mean, aliexpress sells the same spool for 289 bucks, so ... https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa4itemAdapt https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gateway... The fiber does not appear jacketed or supported. I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just staple it to the wall because it holds up fine. (I would never do this but ...) Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot more resilient than it used to be.
- zh3 2y ago
  Although the headling says it's 0.125mm the spec says it's 0.75mm. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gatewayAdapt=4itemAdapt#nav-specification https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gateway... The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful for this purpose.
ceejayoz 2y ago
> They'll be back to barrage balloons next. Already happened: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defend-against-ukrainian-drone-strikes-2024-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defen...

by zh3 2y ago

hnuser123456 2y ago

.014 g/m or .014 kg/km or 0.14kg for 10km or 0.31 lbs

samstave 2y ago
Wow. Imagine just having a tether like this [whatever altitude] above your property - if you had multiple of these fibers, one could use them as guy-wires - to hold a balloon with solar powered cam and redundant fiber connections... These should be placed over mountains - remote cabins, ski resorts. Whats the tensile strength? So if you do use them as a guy - and hit some heavy winds... Put high powered air-plane-warning LEDS... a cam, and a HAM-to-fiber transceiver... EDIT - Also, several strands of these as guys holding a solar cambloon in place would pose no substantial threat to Big Bird.
- BJones12 2y ago
  > Whats the tensile strength? About 600 Kpsi. That works out to somewhere around 0.1 lb per strand.
  - samstave 2y ago
    Oh I was thinking that the thing was jacketed like... I just assumed wrong - youd still need to wrap it in superconductive carbon nanotubes to make it work. :-)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
petsfed 2y ago
For context, the total mass of a standard M67 fragmentation grenade is ~400g, including a 180g of actual explosive. So this is like a third of the standard payload of the e.g. DJI drones dropping grenades onto foxholes. My initial expectation was that the cable would upset their mass budget, but honestly, that's pretty minor as these things go. Certainly, bigger boom > smaller boom, but smaller boom >> incomplete boom mission.
Qwertious 2y ago
>.014 kg/km Just post it in grams, ugh. (14g/km) >or 0.14kg for 10km (or 140g for 10km)

Modified3019 2y ago

I’ve seen references to balloons are already being used by both sides a camera platforms, decoys, and high altitude mortar dropping weapons.

PaulHoule 2y ago

If the target costs a lot more than $1k than this might be a good deal.

littlestymaar 2y ago
There's no target worth less than $1k on a battlefield.
- whatisthiseven 2y ago
  Ironically, the drones themselves are targets worth about $1k or less. Just fairly difficult to spot/shoot down.
  - stavros 2y ago
    How do you figure they're worth less than $1k? They cost $1k, they're worth as much as the thing they're about to take out.
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      This!! People keep trying to look at war economics as each side spending a dollar to cost the other a dollar. Really it is a countless series of wildly inequitable exchanges. Sometimes you waste a cruise missile on a single dude because that guy was a sniper and could cause tens of millions of dollars of damage. Sometimes you spend $1,000 on a single drone and take out a billion dollar parked strategic bomber. Trying to look at each Exchange in an economic context is ridiculous, not that someone doesn't need to look at economics. But looking at it at the scale of individual targets and price tags isn't the right way.
- willcipriano 2y ago
  If you have to rebuild everything you blow up like in the middle east, every target has a negative value (unless you are a Haliburton stockholder).
- rasz 2y ago

datameta 2y ago

Fiber is problematic as far as LOS and obstacles are concerned. Most launch points are concealed, usually at the edge of a treeline. As far as I understand, fiber creates unnecessary risk for operators.

upsuper 2y ago
Not sure whether they are already doing this, but the fiber could simply connect to a relay rather than the operator themselves, that way the operator can still hide far from the connected system and use wireless outside jamming to control if that still makes sense.
- arkh 2y ago
  Radio controlled drones carrier drones to which the kamikaze drones are linked by fiber. Move the carrier in low EW area then control the kamikazes in high EW areas using the carrier as a relay.
  - datameta 2y ago
    This would be the way. Essentially the system would be an air-to-ground TOW missile. I wonder how difficult it is to source fiber at the scale needed. However, a drone can take hits in non-critical areas whereas the fiber is even harder to hit but vulnerable to any caliber or shrapnel sent up. May not be a huge issue, though.

wongarsu 2y ago

That's pretty cheap. An unguided artillery shell is about $3000 each, plus the logistics of getting it there. Guided munition is in the 6 figure range. In these drone attacks Ukraine seems to now routinely sacrifice multiple drones to take out one target. If it's just about cost, $1k per drone to make it more likely to succeed is a great deal.

dmix 2y ago
I remember reading that Ukraine loses about 3-4 drones for every successful hit. Higher in EW heavy regions. Beyond EW the losses are because they can't find targets within battery time (these are always 1 way drones regardless), they miss, they get shot down, etc. Eliminating EW loses of the other drones per target could make it worth it by itself.
- anovikov 2y ago
  If that was true, Russia would have been utterly defeated a long time ago. Ukraine uses about 4000 drones per day, even if a successful hit meant just 1 infantryman killed or incapacitated, Russians will be at the negotiation table, at least, because no way they can sustain 1000 people per day in irrecoverable losses.
  - theblobawakens 2y ago
    Russia's professional army plus reservists was about 2.1M before the war. Add 2-300K volunteers who signed up since to replace professional soldiers departing, out of patriotism or because pay was increased 3-4x. Even with all that, Russia still won't have drafted anybody in the pool of about 20M ex-conscripts who went through basic military service in their youth. They can absolutely sustain that and much more from a purely military point of view. Of course, if you involve public opinion in these matters, 1'000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war.
    - racional 2y ago
      10000 a day is indeed a bit much for what is not a defensive war. As is 10 percent of annual GDP.

bawolff 2y ago

Does it have to be fiber optic? Surely the same principle would work with copper wire

stavros 2y ago
I assume copper will be many times heavier and resistance will make it useless at a much shorter distance. Plus, it's many times more expensive.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- m4rtink 2y ago
  The TOW missile is guided via electric signals over metal wires, but is much more expensive and less flexible (and probably has a very different flight profile) than drones and FPV drones. More modern wire guided missiles do use fiber optics (Spike, etc.).
tomooot 2y ago
I've converted a £10 trash tier quadcopter to run off of 30G wire. Only 5 meters range, and the weight and momentum of the wire cause extremely difficult to control oscillations, but it still flies (badly)! The transmission losses over such thin wires are massive but the way around that is to supply a higher voltage than is required, and include a linear regulator inside the quad to burn off excess voltage when current draw is low. I specced the wire purely based on the weight reduction I got from stripping out the cameras, battery, and then replacing the main body with a 3D printed skeleton, as the original battery contributed more rigidity than I had realised.
- pbmonster 2y ago
  Sounds like you were supplying power. That's unnecessary in this case. Just leave the battery in. The question is if you can reliably push video down a 5 mile pair of copper wires and send control inputs back up. And the answer is yes, even for an unshielded twisted pair. With the right encoding and enough voltage, you can get GBits down that wire.

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon That Wikipedia page contains a link to a picture I've always found totally mind blowing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:NormandySupply_edit.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_balloon#/media/File:No... Insanity.

metadat 2y ago
What do you find mind-blowing about this pic?
- tivert 2y ago
  > What do you find mind-blowing about this pic? Not the OP, but the massive concentration of naval ships (literally to the horizon), beach landing, and the (to modern eyes) surreal presence of barrage balloons all together in one picture is pretty mind blowing. I mean, just imagine all that activity.
  - M95D 2y ago
    Too expensive to ever see that again.
    - yard2010 2y ago
      Wait a few more years..
    - sqeaky 2y ago
      Nothing is too expensive when the alternative is death. We'll see it again as soon as two super powers are engaged in an active shooting war.
  - anovikov 2y ago
    All of these ships are tiny. These are not ships, just landing craft. This is by any measure not a big concentration of ships, armor, or anything. D-day landings were impressive in 1944 but today these won't be big at all. Today, similar amounts of cargo and people can be delivered by planes, not by boat.

DannyBee 2y ago

I mean, aliexpress sells the same spool for 289 bucks, so ... https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gatewayAdapt=glo2usa4itemAdapt https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256805873589421.html?gateway... The fiber does not appear jacketed or supported. I'm not horribly surprised - even for real installs in the US you are starting to see them take bare G.657B3 fiber and just staple it to the wall because it holds up fine. (I would never do this but ...) Obviously not the same exact use case but bare fiber is a lot more resilient than it used to be.

zh3 2y ago
Although the headling says it's 0.125mm the spec says it's 0.75mm. https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gatewayAdapt=4itemAdapt#nav-specification https://www.aliexpress.us/item/1005006059904173.html?gateway... The smaller sizes are more expensive (as are much larger), it seems like 0.75 is around the cheapest per metre. However it's a lot heavier (0.75/0.125)^2 = 36 times) so less useful for this purpose.

ceejayoz 2y ago

> They'll be back to barrage balloons next. Already happened: https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defend-against-ukrainian-drone-strikes-2024-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-use-wwii-tactic-defen...