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Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

Their page reminds me a lot of the feature drone sales pages you see over at banggood.com or aliexpress, ebay, etc. But I don't find it that impressive overall. If they want actual range, put wings on it. You'll see that all the delivery drones are doing such a thing.

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Would it make sense as to build such a design where wings are integrated but Tilted at an upward angle, so when the drone is angled downward to improve forward thrust, the lift is generated by the wings and the motors are used mostly for propulsion, dramatically improving efficiency and getting the best of both worlds?

That's what Amazon did with theirs, correct? It must be difficult to control or have some other drawback, otherwise it feels like such an obvious win.

Maybe stability in windy conditions? or additional mobility issues at low speed.

There are a number of factors. Size, for one. Wings are big. They are also heavy. And during a vertical take off and landing, they aren't wings. They're sails.

That does make a lot of sense. I wonder, would a better design include making the arms attaching to the rotors have the same aerodynamic profile of a wing, made of carbon fibre to reduce weight. For propulsion the rotors can rotate do different angles depending on desired speed?

I've been thinking about the possibility of applying some computing power to recognizing or predicting thermals to use for greatly extending flight range. I'm sure this problem could be solved with today's technology, and it might provide some very large scale benefits.

There are already self thermalling RC gliders. But thermals are slow things, and everything these days has to be fast, right? Thermals would only allow for greater loitering. IF the thermal stays where you want to loiter. They move a lot.

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