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Ukraine's drones are already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away.[0][1] They're also using drones that trail a fibre optic over several kilometres to avoid jamming.[2]

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/03/12/... [1] https://www.csis.org/analysis/ukraines-future-vision-and-cur... [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...




> already partly automated because of the jamming environment: they can visually lock the drone onto a target from up to 10km away

This capability is basically a reinvention of the walleye television bomb, which locked onto targets using edge detection on a signal from an internal television camera. 1960s technology.


Dang what does a drone carriable several kilometer fiber spool look like?


The lower canister in the last of the three links, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

Difficult to judge scale, maybe the size of a drinks can or food can? Fiber is pretty thin.


Half a can of soda. The main electronics controller visible in the photo is likely 20x20 or 30x30mm, the standard for FPV style drones.



I was pretty shocked to find out that wire-guided missiles were(/are?) a thing. This seems easier than that.


Wire guided is still the primary means of guiding torpedos from submarines, because it gives you an unjammable, un-interceptible, consistent communication interface, and in torpedoes the wire spools out for tens of kilometers.

If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.


Pretty sure they were in the thousand feet range, not multiple kilometers…


(Welp… 3 km range… though to me wire that long seems like it’d be easier than optical cable back in the 70s)


basically like a cheapo SACLOS missle, i.e. the TOW missile, which have been using that (fiber) approach for decades now.




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