The lower canister in the last of the three links, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/11/07/ukrain...

Difficult to judge scale, maybe the size of a drinks can or food can? Fiber is pretty thin.

Half a can of soda. The main electronics controller visible in the photo is likely 20x20 or 30x30mm, the standard for FPV style drones.

Previous article has pictures

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41143322

I was pretty shocked to find out that wire-guided missiles were(/are?) a thing. This seems easier than that.

Pretty sure they were in the thousand feet range, not multiple kilometers…

(Welp… 3 km range… though to me wire that long seems like it’d be easier than optical cable back in the 70s)

Wire guided is still the primary means of guiding torpedos from submarines, because it gives you an unjammable, un-interceptible, consistent communication interface, and in torpedoes the wire spools out for tens of kilometers.

If you want something really cool, look up old fashioned TV guidance. We built weapons that guided based a TV signal, and edge detection in that signal. In 1958.

basically like a cheapo SACLOS missle, i.e. the TOW missile, which have been using that (fiber) approach for decades now.