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Comment by spyder | Hacker News Reader

hm... and why are the drones carrying the whole spool of the fiber instead of leaving the spool on the ground and unraveling it from there without the extra weight on the drone?

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unraveling a stationairy ground based spool first tangles quickly if you lift two loops instead of one. Even if you had a dispencer hole you still snag loops under the dispenser that might get knots and snag the drone. Second, you would now have to drag the whole fiber from the drone down to the ground, overcoming the kilometers resistance dragging all the cable over the ground and on top of all that extra force you also have to put tension on the spool at the start to unwind it.

If you unwind the spool hanging under the drone by a rotating shaft through the spool, you do not have any tension on the fiber (but for a few grams of its weight if you unspool to slowly) and the weight of the fiber in the air even helps unspool the fiber (although you want to prevent that by speeding up the unwinding)

this may sound like a stupid question... but why not use google maps, ground images, and run a basic cnn to obtain positioning? That wouldn't require you to have it dragging/ carrying a bunch of fragile nanowire... which seems... not right?

The fiber is to (1) prevent jamming the radio control of the motors and ammunition by an operator and (2) receive a higher resolution higher frame per second multiple camera stream and (3) to ensure the operator can't be traced and targeted by triangulating the wifi antenna of the operator and (4) to allow networking by plugging in the stationairy start of the fiber into a switch connected to full internet network with thousands of kilometers of fiber between the operator and the drone so (5) the operator can be different from the drone launcher and (6) have the drone be operated by a supercomputer or datacenter with more and more accurate video frame interpretation.

Its a difference of dragging a line and just laying it out as you go. A lot less resistance to just pay out the spool so there is no tension in the wire.

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