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I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage. Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage
by jauntywundrkind 2y ago
I'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage.
Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. Its usage dots the sci books I've read over the years, but almost always for scary reasons.
Here's the Navy today announcing work on AirBorne System for Optical Relay and Broadcast (ABSORB), a (for now) low-cost prototype one-to-many (I maybe mis-inferring what multi-access means?) relayable free space system, https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-naval-communications/ https://defence-blog.com/us-navy-plans-to-revolutionize-nava...
- whatever1 2y agoBut smoke/cloud kills them.
- dreamcompiler 2y agoNot necessarily. Depends on the wavelength.
- lutherqueen 2y agoHow is better communication scary for military? The weapons themselves are
- FlyingBears 2y agoJam resistant comms are critical for drones, and other precision weapons and their infrastructure. Even if line of sight is interrupted modern drones can return to signal nowadays, relay information, and return to target with corrections. You may not need optical cable anymore
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoI expect drones will become fire-and-forget in two to three years. They won't be jammable because the pilot is in the drone.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoFire-and-forget drones already exist. They are called missiles.
- IncreasePosts 2y agoMissiles generally go from point A and then blow up point b. Are there any missiles that leave base, fly around for a bit trying to identify targets, and if they can't identify any targets then return home?
- pclmulqdq 2y agoI said that somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but the line between "drone" and "missile" seems to have gotten pretty blurry with the Ukraine war featuring FPV drones holding a hand grenade that are effectively a human-piloted missile. Some modern missiles can fly around to identify targets, but they can't return home. They can blow up harmlessly if nothing is a target, though. They can also dodge and weave the way FPV pilots do. Obviously, "drone" has a much more expansive mission profile than "missile."
- gloosx 2y agoMissle is a projectile, propelled by rocket motor. Drone is an aircraft vehicle, capable of transporting explosives or whatever. There is a fat line between drone and a missile, there are different in everything: control, speed, trajectory, weight, flying principles. I don't know how you can say they are even close. Just because both fly and do boom? Then you can say there is a thin line between cow launched from catapult and a missile.
- inkcapmushroom 2y agoA cow launched from a catapult is indeed a missile, if we want to be pedantic.
- robin_reala 2y ago
- ecshafer 2y agoShould the military not have internet? If laser based internet is better than satellite or microwave or wireless (I assume the military uses these three). Then isn't that good?
- geek_at 2y ago[flagged]
- r14c 2y agoThat's the interesting paradox of technological development. If it's out of the bag, then it's out of bag, but that cuts both ways. You can never control who will gain access to advancements. Even if you trust the custodians now, you don't know who they will be in the future, &c. Eventually you end up at a fork: either pursue and endless technological arms race or find some way to build lasting cooperative and peaceful relationships. As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend. Still a massive challenge, but presumably that's why empires eventually always fail. They don't know how to make friends.
- ashoeafoot 2y agoThere are no warrior cultures in space.
- LoganDark 2y ago> As they say, the surest way to destroy your enemy is to make them your friend. Defeat, not destroy. The best way to defeat an enemy is to make them your friend. Destroying someone would not be very friendly (unless they want to be destroyed).
- dzhiurgis 2y agoYou cannot control, but you can backdoor
- spwa4 2y agoI think you're too late. Pretty sure the military has line-of-sight free-space-optics to satellites since at least the second Iraq war. One can only wonder how small the "receivers" (routers, really) have gotten by now.
- rhubarbtree 2y agoCubesats carry laser comms if that's what you mean.
- echoangle 2y agoThose work in vacuum though so you need a bit less laser power. The atmosphere attenuates your signal if you’re doing ground to ground or ground to aircraft links so you probably need a bit more laser power. But I agree that that’s probably not the difficult thing about the whole system.
- umvi 2y ago> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming The most powerful weapons on earth already are immune to jamming. ICBMs use celestial navigation (pictures of the stars) to course-correct, which is a form of navigation you cannot jam.
- charliebwrites 2y agoDamn guess we have to blow up the stars …you know, for defense
- echoangle 2y agoOr create a lot of artificial ones to confuse the missile.
- rapind 2y agoSwarms to block the cameras maybe? At this point though, couldn’t you just blow up your own country and thus accelerate warming so much as to doom the rest of humanity in a dozen years? I might have read the wrong article on that though so don’t quote me.
- LoganDark 2y agoAperture Science would do it.
- charliebwrites 2y agoThey still owe me some cake
- quinndexter 2y agoI have terrible news regarding said cake.
- bsimpson 2y agoCan you imagine if someone just turned off the sky?
- sorokod 2y agoSomething similar was available since the previous century for ship to ship communications where there is a line of sight. Such communications can't be intercepted or triangulated.
- walrus01 2y agoFree space optics were attempted extensively in the ISP space 15, 20 years ago for FDD 1 Gbps links at short distances roof to roof in major metro areas, they're EXTREMELY vulnerable to falling over in rain/snow conditions, and path length limitations, compared to 71 to 86 GHz millimeter wave (using a 2000 MHz wide FDD channel going each way in a high/low split). I'm very skeptical.
- reaperducer 2y agoI'm low key afraid that this stuff is gonna get popular for .mil usage. They've probably had it for decades. Laser communication was being used by commercial TV stations in the U.S. in the 1990's. WNBC-TV in New York used a laser to transmit video from its Manhattan skyline camera in New Jersey back to 30 Rock. I have a vague notion that it didn't work great in all weather conditions, but it was a long time ago.
- cogman10 2y agoLOS communications has been around for a long time now in the form of microwave towers. [1] But further, jamming is still doable, just not with a portable electronic device. Stir up some dust and all the sudden coms are down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_transmission
- miohtama 2y agoI was doing communications in military. For temporary networks, we used microwave links and they requires line of sight. The reason to use direct link is that missiles can be easily targeted to any radio source you can hear and take down the network.
- cogman10 2y agoYeah, I was aware of this because of work with telecommunications in rural locations. Nobody is burying a cable over a mountain, that's too expensive and too much work. So instead, they'll setup microwave towers. Being on a mountain has the benefit that you are already in elevated locations that are easy to shoot a phone signal across the range.
- XorNot 2y agoIt's worth noting that free space laser comms would also have this problem though: the atmosphere has dust, and any IR detector will see bloom and reflection of dust from a laser which will draw a straight line right back to the emitter.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoShoot a laser pointer at the receiver and there's a good chance you have jammed the thing.
- slt2021 2y agohow do you detect/find the receiver? thats seems to be a problem
- pclmulqdq 2y agoThere's already military usage of similar devices. I wouldn't be surprised if Taara has a supplier that also supplies several militaries.
- krisoft 2y ago> Line of sight free space optics can be immune to many many forms of jamming. I’m a bit of two minds about this. Obviously jamming resistant high bandwidth communication enables some scarry possibilities. But the lack of it is what drives and will drive militaries around the world to put more and more autonomy into weapons. It doesn’t matter what kind of treaties we write on paper to prohibit technologies. During a war if your drones/loitering munition are less effective than those of your enemies because your control signals are jammed you will give in and make your weapons find their target without that control signal. That leads to an arm race of ever more sophisticated autonomous weapons. That is scarry for many reasons, and probably a worse outcome for all of us. On the other hand if communication is possible that puts a leash on this dynamic and ensurers that a human mind can remain in the loop. So… maybe being better at jamming resistant communication is actually better for humankind?
- BurningFrog 2y agoI got seriously terrified by reading a PKD SF story at 15 about the few surviving humans hiding from war drones still hunting people long after the war had ended.
- stevenwoo 2y agoSecond Variety, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety I've commented this before but it is closer to Terminator than the Harlan Ellison story IMO.
- BurningFrog 2y agoYeah, that was the one. Really burned itself into my mind. The movie was OK, but you can only get shocked once.
- stevenwoo 2y agoSimilar but reverse, I felt unfortunate to have read the novelette after watching Terminator because part way in the story I thought - this is almost all of the AI/self replicating autonomous robot points of the Terminator movie just without the time travel. The movie addition of time travel adds a bit of hope to an otherwise totally bleak story resolution.
- cameldrv 2y agoThis is something the U.S. military has been working on for some time. I know of at least one project that's very advanced: https://www.ga-asi.com/multi-mission-payloads/lac12-pod https://www.ga-asi.com/multi-mission-payloads/lac12-pod
- nine_k 2y agoLaser light can be dispersed or bent by atmosphere and whatever is suspended in it, like smoke or drizzle. Also, it needs precise targeting. I can assume that laser links work wonderfully in outer space. On land or sea, I can imagine using tactical smoke generators to disrupt laser links and visual navigation, giving an advantage to to systems that use e.g. microwaves for "vision", and radio channels for communication. Also, why are you afraid of this development?
- m463 2y agoWait until military people put the receiver on their chest. Then all the military dramas will flip from "sniper acquired target" to "communication with friendlies reestablished"
- HPsquared 2y agoSounds like a nice way to do IFF. Optical transponder. Only responds on a valid challenge received.
- fc417fc802 2y ago> Only responds on a valid challenge received. Perhaps I misunderstand but that sounds like a scary failure mode.
- yieldcrv 2y agotraders have done this across cities for a long time
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eptcyka 2y agoWhat specifically are you worried about? Better comms will always help people, be it to flourish more in peace or more efficiently killing one another. Most inventions in the 20th century either came from the military or ended up being used by the military.
- gherkinnn 2y agoAt the same time, fibre-optic drones have being successfully fielded by Russia and now increasingly by Ukraine. Immune to jamming with a minimum range of 10km. There is no way these technologies won't be at least trialled for mil use, not when electronic warfare is employed to this degree. https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-drones/ https://thedefensepost.com/2025/01/08/ukraine-fiber-optic-dr...
- looofooo0 2y agoThere is also some very recent advances to laser communication, which explains the increased interest: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-023-01201-7
- bozhark 2y agoLine of sight is not immune to jamming, in fact it’s susceptible to more. Physically.
- pyinstallwoes 2y agoGiven any tech, assume the military already has it. In fact, assume any tech that is public is approved by military for public use.
- baq 2y agoWhy afraid? It's obvious it'll be used, nothing to be afraid, more like expect it to. Mount a base station on an AWACS and you've got the whole theatre covered. Clouds are an issue, obviously.
- mtud 2y agoThe U.S. Naval Research Lab (NRL) has been deploying this tech - free space optics (FSO) - for about a decade. https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=5550 https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=555...
- tootie 2y agoHasn't this been possible with microwaves for a long time? I remember site-to-site microwave Internet between tall buildings being used commercially in the 1990s
- FuriouslyAdrift 2y agoMilitaries have been using point to point laser or microwave for things for decades. They've also used coiled fiber optics (and still do) for missles, etc. It's really easy to blast an area with high power disruptive radiation (EFI, RFI, laser, etc.) to deny comms, though.