[M T]

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.

[M T]

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.