- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- noncredibledefense@sh.itjust.works
I posted this OC 8 months ago, today i see this in my YT feed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-p2srIRLI (Ukraine Counters Fibre-Optic Drones with Lasers That Fry the Cables)
does it destroy the actual glass cable, or does it get inside and travel along the optic path and burn out the transceiver? burning the glass to breaking point seems like it would take a heck of a lot of energy, so i assumed it was attacking the light sensors at each end of the line, but people keep saying it’s actually breaking the glass.
The actual power to cut the fibre would be a lot lower than you think.
Assuming a 100um thick fibre, ant heating a 5cm length, it’s a volume mass of around 10e-7kg. That would take about 1.5J (not kJ) to melt.
The catch is whether you can find an efficient enough laser, that outputs at a frequency the glass is opaque to.
And it needs to be accurate enough to focus on an unsecured clear cable in uncontrollable weather conditions for a long enough time. You’d need a lot more power than what the basic physics in an ideal scenario would suggest.
You would still have that issue when trying to inject commands into the fibre.
You also don’t need to target the fibre directly. Just sweep the area with enough focused power to burn one out.
Defocusing would be the biggest range limiter. You could likely get 100m+ with the right setup, and keep it drone mountable. Not ideal, but potentially viable.
thats a very good question, let me suggest 2 more options:
It injects laser into the fiber, coded identical to the command that would be used to detonate the drone.
It dosent need to fully burn thru the whole fiber, just melt it a tiny bit to increase fiber losses to a point where the connection fails