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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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