Fiber optic drones are changing combat operations | Hacker News Reader

Fiber optic drones are changing combat operations

youtube.com

52 pointsSwizec54 comments

March 2024, "Fiber optic drone control beats any RF jammer", 250 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143322

August 2024, commercial availability, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/20/russia...

  German company HIGHCAT is demonstrating its HMX fiber-optic drone in Ukraine this month. Now combat footage has emerged of what appears to be the first strikes by this type of weapon ... The controller can use an AI system heavier and more powerful than a drone could carry, taking advantage of high-resolution imagery to track and identify objects in real time. The cheap drone is expended but the expensive controller is reused for multiple strikes. Six months ago this technology was not even a rumor. Now it is on the open market and destroying targets.

Shenzhen speed ;)

Truly. The US is going to have to deregulate and speed up if it doesn't want to be left behind.

When the guy in charge tries to do that he kind of gets called a fascist, an idiot and a nazi...

That's not the reason why the guy in charge is being called a fascist, if you do believe so you ought to educate yourself instead because you do not understand what's happening, much less the criticism.

Your comment is proof of otherwise…

How so?

Is creation of an SEZ and causing a metro of 8 million people in about 40 years an exercise in government restraint/deregulation? The US has to make forward thinking, intentional decisions about the direction of the country, and so far it seems to be delegating direction to folks who mostly want their own enterprises to succeed.

Edit: 40 years not 4

Can you give me the example of one regulation that China doesn‘t have that make them more competitive?

Not sure if it is about regulations, companies are heavily regulated in their business scope and taxes (although taxes are low). It is more about internal competition maybe. Living in Shenzhen feels like a race to the bottom, involution[0] if you will. Unless you take part in the maelstrom, you are out. Practically this means to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 200 dollars a month. How to compete against that?

[0]https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/chinas-in...

The comments from the HN link from 1 year ago aged so badly. They were all skeptical that fiber optic control would become popular.

A lot of top comments from HN age badly or are just blatantly incorrect/false. People are captured in their own ideology which gets reinforced by the eco chamber effect here, and so refuse to acknowledge the possibility they might be wrong or that the real world is vastly different than the one in their eco chamber (like the fact that most of the world uses Windows).

Especially true for SW engineers and other privileged people (politicians are an even better example) who due to their high status and wealth assume that if they got a well paid job, then they must be super smart and right at any other topics or areas, and then end up shocked that their viewpoint gets demolished by the masses or by the end results down the line.

In a way it's like how democracy works: it doesn't matter what is right and what is wrong, the opinion that ends up denominating is what the the masses perceive as being right.

I would say not really. This pretty much only fits the exact use case for its specific niche need. E.g. operating in RF adverse/non-recoverable environments. Otherwise it's a waste. So technically it's still not "popular" in the sense of general popularity. You're not going to see your general drone pilot rushing to put fiber optic on thier drone. This also isn't a new concept. Its the same thing as wire-guided missiles that have been around since WWII.

I wonder what that "expensive controller" is, and why it can't be something like a jetson nano equivalent + yolo for <500$ at scale...

If flying and powering and destroying a Jetson at scale cheap enough?

I recommend reading these two recent reports by Shura Burtin, these go into some details about impact of drone warfare:

* https://meduza.io/en/feature/2025/03/27/please-don-t-use-my-... - less focused on the subject.

* https://meduza.io/feature/2025/03/25/terminator-veschiy-film - more focus on the subject (no English version yet, use Google Translate or something).

Fucking hell, these are some dire articles

Here is a photo of dozens of spent fiber optic lines hanging in trees in Ukraine. It’s interesting to see how quickly the FPV drone tech evolves.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DHZdHK_Ryyp/

The weird part is that they are also advertised on Instagram. More than once I have gotten an ad from an account showcasing these fiber optic drones and their R&D operation. And you can openly contact them for inquries.

Which brands?

I won't link them, but they are quite easy to find... Most of the accounts offering them are custom DIY drones. The fiber optic attachment spools seem to be mass produced though.

I wonder if you could have a mothership drone situation, where one drone sits high and out of range, and others fly out to their targets. Would prevent the cable getting caught on stuff and stop the cable leading back to the operator.

Cables would probably snap under their own weight, right? Laser communication might be a better bet for a mothership dropping guided drone "bombs".

OK, this is totally wild. I did not expect them to mean the drones are tethered to the base station by fiber.

Tethered but .. not constrained by that tether. Like annoying dogs in the dog-park whose owners feel free to real out the fishing line and never reel it in.

Better to find a postwar fibre optic than a postwar mine, I guess

What’s the old adage, is it “I don’t know how WW3 will end, but WW4 will end with rock paper scissors”?

Right now, my money’s on scissors.

I am reminded of a poetic moment from a former US army person who told me of sunlight glinting off the trail of wires left behind after practice launches of wire guided MANPAD type systems. He said they were like spider silk in the dawn.

...flight of the valkyries playing in his wired earbuds...

Those were probably anti-tank missiles such as the BGM-71 TOW. I don't think there are any MANPADS that use wire guidance: all of the modern ones are IR.

Thank you for the acronym correction.

https://i.imgur.com/JTfpiXV.jpeg

I think this is fibres littering trees in Kursk.

> He said they were like spider silk in the dawn.

Russian FPV operators have already lost their life due to this precise effect and the fact they operated from the same building multiple times.

Doesn’t this have the added benefit of the operator not broadcasting their position? So anti jamming but also anti-pilot getting shelled/counter droned? Or is tracing the drone operators not so common?

Other than the fiber optic cable leading directly back to the controller?

Controller could just be a PC with a VPN connection to anywhere.

The fiber will only link to the launchpad, the pilot can be anywhere.

But isn’t the connection to the launchpad also wired? Out of latency considerations?

Does it matter if the other party has drones too and knows where everyone is?

This is not so simple, drones everywhere mean anti-drone drones with shotguns, too. It’s like Total Annihilation, you must outproduce the enemy or you’ll get swarmed. We’re witnessing doctrine rewriting events here.

There have already been russian operators killed this way -- they re-used the same launch spot and in the morning sun the fiber optics are clearly visible from air -- their position was identified and then shelled.

tracing the drone operators just by a single optical fiber might be difficult but tracing their logistic is not.

I'm surprised this works as well as they're describing! There's a single comment about risk that the fiber could become tangled or broken, but they show the drones going through dense forest. I would think that becoming tangled or snagged would rapidly become a serious issue.

The reel is on the drone. If the reel was at base, the risk would be catches limiting forward motion of the drone. But the drone is paying out fibre behind it, the risk is that mechanism fails, but thats a risk either way.

Why would it get tangled? The reel is on the drone side, so it just unrolls freely as the drone moves forward.

IRL is messy. Iv seen a compilation of russian fiber drone fails vid recently. Sharp turns, excessive acceleration, but mostly flying near tree branches and other dynamic objects - wind gust yanking on already laid fiber.

Comes down to pilot quality, with time even fetal alcohol syndrome victims will learn how to operate them reliably.

> Iv seen a compilation of russian fiber drone fails vid recently.

One anxiety of mine is being teased by an FPV drone -- with fiber optics it's much easier to defend against as a foot soldier -- if you can loop once around a tree and find the fiber optics cable, you can easily snap it and bye bye drone.

Also, given the pilot has to be more conservative with his maneuvers, shotguns will be more effective because the target is easier to lead.

Way to lead the enemy to operator HQ. They don't even need to follow it just triangulate paths like good ol radio.

pretty difficult to follow 10km of unspooled cable over broken terrain when you've just had an FPV drone explode on your position

Couple of dumb thoughts:

- Can another drone grab the fiber and walk back to your base?

- Can you use the fiber to a master drone which acts as a repeater/controller for normal RF drones? Yes you can still jam them, but with the tx/rx closer to the action you need a more effective jammer.

- How much power can these types of fiber optic cable carry? A couple watts max? Yes I know that's not what the intent is I'm just curious if you could use it that way.

- On the one hand glass isn't the worst thing we could be dumping into the environment but damn that sounds like some wicked splinters... Sure, war is never kind to the environment. Just saying...

fiber optic is glass and doesn't conduct electricity...

Power over fiber is absolutely a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-over-fiber

> Can another drone grab the fiber and walk back to your base?

Can not grab, it will get caught by branch trees and debris. The launch site is not where operators are located, most often it is well hidden, somewhat protected and hundreds of meters away.

> Can you use the fiber to a master drone which acts as a repeater/controller for normal RF drones?

Battery is the bottleneck, master drone has to stay long enough in the air for all drone to hit their targets.

> How much power can these types of fiber optic cable carry?

can't use it that way.

I wonder if the stream's encrypted or if you could just patch in and send it back to the sender

Reply on news.ycombinator.com