The stack wasn’t very aerodynamic

Monday, March 3rd, 2025

A Ukrainian Unmanned Systems Forces official recently explained that fiber-optic FPVs are already in their third generation, after just a few months:

Any FPV drone has three critical components in addition to its basic airframe, motors and propellers: a warhead, a battery and a voluminous container for a spool of thin fiber-optic cable that might be 13 miles long.

The very first generation of Ukrainian FPV drone stacked each element — the warhead, battery and spool — on top of each other in an awkward pile. It should go without saying that the stack wasn’t very aerodynamic. “We oppose three-story drones as they have low energy efficiency,” the USF official admitted.

The next two drone generations combined elements. One stuffed the warhead inside the spool. The other stuffed the battery inside the spool. Both of these combos are more aerodynamic than the triple-stack drone, but the battery-inside version is more modular: it’s easier to swap in different warhead types, such as shaped-charge warheads optimized for penetrating vehicle armor.

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Jim: Phileas Frogg: “No, just start at Wikipedia, move onto google, try archive or project Gutenberg, and finally, just buy a book from Amazon on the cheap.” In other words, what, if anything, is “the marrow of college”?
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Isegoria

The stack wasn’t very aerodynamic

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