daft weapon #1803 was RE: [GZG] [HIST] Military Hackers

On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Thomas Barclay wrote: 
> Fiber optic is good stuff for land line comms - can't be screwed up 
> by EM, can't be picked up by EM inteferometry, hard to detect when 
> buried, high data rate, tough cable. Now if only it was super 
> flexible.... (and some is... just costly). But I can see mass use of 
> this in the future.

ok, here's the deal: a cargo shell fired from a regular 205mm or
whatever
howitzer, which bursts in the air and unspools millions of optical
fibres (thinner and much, much tougher than current ones) over the area
between your local FLOT and your artillery. grunts on the front lines
just
pick up a handful of fibres, and shine a signal beam down them. the 
signals guy with the battery looks out for glowing fibre tips (ie ones
with grunts on the other end) and jacks them into his transceiver. this
sends a signal light back; the grunts see this and jack into their
transceiver. thus, a circuit is established. if it breaks, find another
fibre and repeat. with practice, and with all the battery ends collected
in one place, this should be quite quick.

or, for 'artillery', substitute 'command post', 'signals node', etc.

Tom