Drat this working for a living all to heck.

For the wires, the trick is to do the same as wire-guided torpedoes or wire-guided missiles: you have a reel of wire on the drone rotating and expelling wire at the exact same speed as the object. The drone isn't pulling the wire through the air, it's dropping wire behind it to drift gently down to the ground. There's no tension on the wire, and no forces acting on it other than gravity and air resistance. If two drones cross paths, you'll just have two wires lying across each other on the ground.