[Goose]

I haven't made it through all of Goose's posts on drones, so maybe he covered this.

The points raised about radio range of a drone from a ground based antenna would seem to be easily.overcome with a repeater drone (a tag team of them) flying high above the operator on the ground, communicating to the operator with a fiber.  Potentially, they could even have copper, and get power over the wire (I don't know that the benefit of the power overcomes the negative of the weight of the wire)  (Actually, instead of "repeater", it is more like a remote antenna.)

Mostly, they would be dark, receiving video from the attacking/recon drones and delivering it to the operator  Only when commands need to be given would they transmit. (I don't know whether the piloting commands are continuous or not)

Of course a problem would be that as an emitter such a repeater drone would be vulnerable to some sort of HARM device.  But, if you have a swarm of 20 of them, they only need a duty cycle of 5% and could be continuously changing positions.

That is covered in the documents. The Russians do this all the time with a repeater-hunter-killer stack, often simplified to make the hunter also be the repeater. Ukraine counters by using an anti-drone drone to destroy the repeater. Lots of moving parts in this approach, so adding and managing multiple repeaters is probably too hard. Using "aerostat-like" tethered repeaters has not caught on in Ukraine. I am guessing they are too easy meat for anti-drone drones because they can't evade. It would indeed work though.

[Goose]

I haven't made it through all of Goose's posts on drones, so maybe he covered this.

The points raised about radio range of a drone from a ground based antenna would seem to be easily.overcome with a repeater drone (a tag team of them) flying high above the operator on the ground, communicating to the operator with a fiber.  Potentially, they could even have copper, and get power over the wire (I don't know that the benefit of the power overcomes the negative of the weight of the wire)  (Actually, instead of "repeater", it is more like a remote antenna.)

Mostly, they would be dark, receiving video from the attacking/recon drones and delivering it to the operator  Only when commands need to be given would they transmit. (I don't know whether the piloting commands are continuous or not)

Of course a problem would be that as an emitter such a repeater drone would be vulnerable to some sort of HARM device.  But, if you have a swarm of 20 of them, they only need a duty cycle of 5% and could be continuously changing positions.

That is covered in the documents. The Russians do this all the time with a repeater-hunter-killer stack, often simplified to make the hunter also be the repeater. Ukraine counters by using an anti-drone drone to destroy the repeater. Lots of moving parts in this approach, so adding and managing multiple repeaters is probably too hard. Using "aerostat-like" tethered repeaters has not caught on in Ukraine. I am guessing they are too easy meat for anti-drone drones because they can't evade. It would indeed work though.