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How would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv p
by walrus01 1y ago
How would they charge? The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.
- hackernewds 1y agothey don't need to be constantly flying. as long as work is not done, there isn't much energy being burned. and most of the energy burned is not with the rotors
- walrus01 1y agoIf you mean something that is put in place with a full charge and just uses PV to trickle charge keep itself awake and alive, sure. I was thinking a scenario where something is dropped off, flies 10-15 minutes and lands somewhere to await a target. It would need many days to charge before it could fly again for ten minutes.
- mcphage 1y ago> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot. Isn’t that the answer to your question, then?
- walrus01 1y agoKind of, but it seems such things would be obvious and exposed to being easily located if just sitting around idle in sunlight collecting charge. Not exactly like a landmine.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoA drone sitting on a roof where no one ever goes isn't exactly obvious
- dotancohen 1y agoWill militaries or civilian operators soon operate fleets of drones that scan rooftops and other exposed sunny locations for charging drones?
- ben_w 1y agoEven if they do, can still be camouflaged as e.g. a bunch of leaves, or other detritus.
- dotancohen 1y agoSounds like an arms race to me. In any case, the solar cells should still be visible.
- spwa4 1y ago(solar cells can be non-reflective black, the reflectivity is just to double-dip the suns rays)
- dotancohen 1y agoI had no idea, thank you! Such cells would be half as efficient I suppose, so would need to be twice as large and probably at least twice as heavy. I wonder how that might affect design and payload constraints as it scales.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoOr you just wait twice as long, which seems fine for sleeper drones parked on a rooftop waiting for the target to come in range.
- mcphage 1y agoHow many drones would it take to do that? We’re talking potentially thousands of square miles. The resources required to scan all those areas—and scan them often enough to catch all the drones slowly working their way through—would be monumental.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- strtok 1y agoFind an outdoor wall socket?
- namrog84 1y agoWhat about those drones that charge via power lines?
- jeremyjacob 1y agoFor the curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-uekD6VTIQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-uekD6VTIQ
- eszed 1y ago> sits still for a week Why would that be an issue? Planners have to think further ahead, but the threat is only marginally decreased.
- BurningFrog 1y agoYou can have other drones swap in fully charged batteries when needed.
- ldom22 1y agoSo called “vampire drones” have the capacity to identify electrical transmission lines and leech off them
- rcruzeiro 1y agoThis is still speculative tech, no?
- rbanffy 1y agoI bet it won't by next month or so.
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y agoI remember seeing a demo. It doesn’t honestly seem very hard.
- rcruzeiro 1y agoI don’t think induction alone would cut it. Having the drone make contact and step down hundreds of kilovolts seem pretty hard to me. Plus the EM interference on the drones systems would be a challenge under the best circumstances.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoDrop a charging pad on a roof somewhere
- beefnugs 1y agopower lines are AC, same tech as wireless phone charging, you just need to coil wires properly
- ben_w 1y ago> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft. Drones aren't limited to quadcopters. > Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot. So do that? Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more. But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations. A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.
- rbanffy 1y ago> A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there. As someone in the IRA once told Margaret Thatcher, "We only need to be lucky once. You need to be lucky every time".