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Yeah, these are called tethered drones. They've been around for decades and have their own use cases, especially on moving vehicles or boats. There's nothing new about them.


The tethered are differnet and long in use in America for mass surveillance in cities [0].

[0]: https://www.unmannedsas.com/


These have explosives and a ten mile fiber optic cable. Little different.


The Ruhrstall X-4 [1] had five and a half kilometers of wire 80 years ago, along with a 20kg warhead and an acoustic proximity fuse.

1: Never deployed operationally Luftwaffe wunderwaffen, first tested in August 1944, wire-guided air-to-air missile.


Ten miles is pretty impressive, but TOW missiles are from the 70s.


Explosives are just a payload (like any other payload you can attach to a drone), either independent from the whole system or activated through a simple relay. You can see ArduPilot is the ground station, where you can easily customize such switches. The distance is only about the wire/fiber; obviously, fiber is lighter, hence the longer distance for the drone to carry.




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