this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Actually I do think it would be difficult for cops to use fiberoptic cable for the stated reason of being a speed trap. Militaries don't usually clean up after themselves, but having miles of fiberoptic along the expressway is probably dangerous and definitely littering. Not to mention they would have to be constantly purchasing more fiberoptic just to read license plates.
Military use is expendable, domestic use needs to be reusable.
I think you're assuming the police would use the drones to kamikaze blow things up, leaving the fiber-optic behind.
In practical terms, drones can't respool their fiberoptic tether - in any dynamic environment, the fiber will at some point become entangled preventing it from being retracted. While there are prototype systems that use Power Over Fiber to keep a drone (and usually it's cable to prevent entangling) aloft indefinitely, all of those I'm aware of have an extremely limited weight capacity (far too little to support a decent optical setup) and aren't much of a concern.
Otherwise, a pursuit drone with an optical tether is a poor solution; it will leave fiber strewn behind it, the fiber is extremely vulnerable to accidental damage from something like a car or being wrapped around a sharp edge, has limited range and requires the base station to be static (so one could simply Hit Da Bricks their way out of a pursuit). There's also almost never a concern about wide area jamming in the civilian locales that these might be deployed in, so there's no real reason to use fiber instead of military style frequency-hopping radios.
That hypothetical microwave cannon would be an equal threat to both (if it exists), and if someone deploys a jammer to evade pursuit you can simply identify the epicenter of the disruption and follow them that way (something the FCC does regularly). And that's ignoring that there are AI-enhanced systems that can follow a target autonomously until the drone is able to reestablish a connection to the controller.
Honestly, birdshot and other drones are probably going to be the best counter to these systems.
I wish you made this comment a while ago, because at this point I'm done discussing this due to all the bad faith shenanigans I've been getting here, so I'm not even going to bother reading it purely due to exhaustion.
Have a good one.
Eeh, fair enough I suppose. Basically optical fiber is impractical for police use, but these drones are a great use case for frequency hopping radios like what's used in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, that means the most likely counter to these available to the average person is going to be shotguns and flying other drones into them.
My main irritation that spurred the comment you replied to is in response to "heheheh drone interception is so easy, I personally invented 500 techniques."
I'm not a drone expert. Maybe you are. But that person clearly is not.
Oh no for sure, that guy's talking nonsense. You can build a directed and relatively quite high power microwave antenna at home no problem - but building an n-tron (I'll be fucked if I can remember which type of '-tron' it is, I confess. Gravitron?) with enough power to take out a drone from more than a few meters away is well beyond what's feasible to construct by yourself at home.
I think you're assuming that fiberoptic isn't going to get caught on shit all the time.
Is there nothing to get caught on in Ukraine? Or are you just introducing an irrelevant point?
??? We're talking about the feasibility of using fiberoptic cables to control drones that can survey entire communities. How is that not relevant? Yes there are systems that can recover the cable. But there's lots of shit for it to get caught on in a town. Like I don't know what you're arguing for.
You seem to be asserting fiber optics are impractical for drone use. I point to the entire invasion of Ukraine in recent years.
Your move.
Flock drones are equipped with wireless modems (4 of them), because it's significantly more practical for the use case. Maybe that will change if people start jamming them. But then it will be up to municipalities to decide if it's worthwhile to use fiberoptic in their town.
Yep, we'll see how it goes.