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I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and
by amluto 6mo ago
I would guess that a military version would be a hybrid: electric motors as in all the e-VTOL prototypes, enough battery power to comfortably take off, land and maneuver in combat conditions, and a small hydrocarbon-fueled engine to recharge the battery while cruising.
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoWhat problem would a hybrid solve for military? Military doesn't care about emissions and this doesn't offer resilience like fully electric does (recharge anywhere, reliability).
- nradov 6mo agoThe military cares a lot about range, signature reduction, and especially fuel efficiency. Reducing fuel usage reduces the logistical train necessary to sustain units in the field. https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/01/22/army-tries-out-next-gen-hybrid-tactical-vehicle-prototype-in-germany/ https://www.defensenews.com/land/2025/01/22/army-tries-out-n...
- dzhiurgis 6mo agoHow is it going to reduce fuel consumption by nearly doubling the weight?
- dghlsakjg 6mo agoDragging a trailer full of fuel seems easier than dragging a large generator and a trailer full of fuel.
- nradov 6mo agoHuh? The regular engine doubles as a generator.
- dghlsakjg 6mo agoOh, you’re talking about a hybrid system. I thought you meant all electric like the aircraft from the article. My mistake. That’s a ton of weight penalty (the most consequential tradeoff in aircraft design) so the design gains of being able put motors in weird places has to be significant. Once we have higher density batteries it becomes compelling since you can store power for bursty operations like VTOL while using an ICE engine that otherwise wouldn’t have the power, but currently it doesn’t pen out. You need an order of magnitude more energy density from batteries before you can come anywhere close to what combustion engines can do.
- amluto 6mo agoThe same problem that a hybrid architecture solves for ships: the ability to use physically small electric motors with very high power density that are mechanically decoupled from the rest of the vehicle. This lets a bunch of designs pull off neat thrust vectoring tricky with much simpler and lighter components than a mechanical thrust vectoring system would need. (Electric azimuth thrusters are becoming common in large ships for roughly this reason, too.)
- dzhiurgis 6mo ago> ships That's a tangent from most sensitive vehicle to weight to the _least_ sensitive one.