[ermir]

I've been thinking a lot about this setup, and it seems it's a major advantage if you can pull it off:

- The drone can send HD video with no interruptions through the fiber, shifting all the AI calculations to the backend, and you don't have to sacrifice your GPUs that you would otherwise add to the drone.

- The fiber drone can act as a radio relay, so you can have many other radio drones connected to it, making jamming much harder and also you can use it as a relay for ground forces as well.

- The fiber can potentially be replaced or augmented with copper, and you can then replace the battery with a transformer, and keep sending electricity from the base station. Such tethered drones already exist and can fly for hours, but maybe they have not been used in war before.

[psd1]

Power transmission is going to be lossy. If you want kilometre range, you'll need heavy cable.

[ermir]

A few things to consider:

- You don't have to worry too much about efficiency from the ground, since resources are plentiful unlike the sky where every gram counts. For example it would be completely fine to have a 20% efficiency from the ground to the sky (if we don't take into account the heating of the wire), for example spend 2kw to get 400w in the drone. Not ideal, but acceptable to many.

- Also, the efficiency can be greatly improved by using high voltage AC and a transformer on both ends. Very similar to how the power grid works, you can use thin cables to deliver a lot of power, I would not be surprised if 90% efficiency can be achieved. This field has been well researched, tethered drones can fly for hours, but the ranges that are useful in war (10+ km) are a novelty.