3 ms·
I would be willing to bet that this will never make its way into a consumer product or even a hardcore hobbyist product. Even human-powered winged flight is on
by marvin 13y ago
I would be willing to bet that this will never make its way into a consumer product or even a hardcore hobbyist product. Even human-powered winged flight is on the borders of what is anatomically and physically possible, and helicopters are even farther out on the feasibility scale. It's cool for a proof of concept, but you won't be able to improve this design by an order of magnitude even with weightless materials.
- bigiain 13y agoTrue, but my ~$120 quadcopter has about 80% of the power this thing needs to climb to 3m. There are people out there building human carrying scaled-up hobby quadcopters (well, hexa or duodec or hexadec copters). I suspect there are (other) people out there now thinking things along the lines on "Hmmm, made from balsa and foam covered in poly film, prepreg carbon tube, kevlar tow, epoxy and cyano. All pretty common high-end but regularly homebuilt model plane techniques. 10m long rotor blades are big - but only 2 or 3 times longer than pretty common competition rc glider wings. There's a very reasonable chance that the right group of comp rc glider builders and quad rotor hobbyists could build something that weighs maybe only twice what this does, and has 5 or 10 times as much power available - probably for a budget of not much more that $10k." I don't think "hardcore hobbyists" will be pedaling one of these anytime soon, but flying something similar electrically is certainly not an impossibility.