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Comment by rgmerk | Hacker News Reader

Hmmm. No expert here but wouldn’t that thing be target practice for a MANPAD in war?

Getting a IR lock might be challenging on a hot day, and it's probably not very big on a radar. Imaging sensors and, hell, sound, would both be useful for targeting.

Hitting anything at altitude and moving with small arms is a waste of ammo almost all the time. You would need big energy (7.62 NATO or above) plus a little mount with a tracking system plus precision servos, all locked down on something that doesn't move much. It's a lot of kit to carry around.

But, regardless, that thing is dead meat. Electric drive drones everywhere today means AA platforms like Gepard/Cheetah, ZSUs, and similar have returned to the battlefield in force.

Those rapid fire cannons . . ok, basically, explosive shells and soft skinned vehicles like this are a terrible combination, due to how detonations affect flexy materials like this.

We saw this in WW2, when the otherwise-incredibly-durable[1] soft-skinned Wellington bombers and Hurricanes started eating cannon shells from new mods of fighters. The brisance of the explosive shells did a tremendous amount of damage, which sucked, because the Wimpy was frickin' awesome, IMO the most successful medium (but kinda heavy) bomber design of the war. Metal-skinned aircraft still got shredded, but the damage was a lot less - like a LOT a lot, it's hard to overstate what it did to the geodetic frame on a Wimpy - and frag didn't go as far.

[1] Wellingtons could eat infinity bullets, as even if they knocked out a strut, it's a geodetic structure - there's thousands more struts to go, and they share the load. Cannon rounds . . ah, sad Wimpy trumpet sounds

>and it's probably not very big on a radar

all those right angles and exposed props make me think otherwise

Depends on the wavelength. Unlike my (deceased) dad, I never studied or worked on radar, but from what I remember, if an object is much smaller than a wavelength then the structure blurs out of focus so it acts basically like a sphere of about the same size.

This is also why some radio telescopes can get away with mesh wire antennas.

I think it's even vulnerable to small arms fire. It's slow, low altitude, has miniscule range, and is manned, making it a much bigger target than drones.

It doesn't have to be that way though. Look at this like a PoC. Drop the electrics and the batteries in favor of regular motors, drop the pilot in favor of remote control or self-flying, and you have a vehicle that might be great for logistics in heavily mined areas. Mines are something that we've seen a lot in the war in Ukraine, some estimate that with modern technology it will take hundreds of years to demine what the Russians have put down. So having ways to avoid that to an extent could be extremely lucrative.

Electric motors are a pretty important part of this design. The throttle response is much quicker than is possible using gas powered engines.

This allows the craft to self stabilize in a way that isn’t possible without near instantaneous throttle response.

This response is possible with gas motors, but normally requires variable pitch props to respond fast enough which adds a lot of weight and failure points.

We already have fixed wing drones, vtol fixed wing drones, quadcopters, etc that are effectively open source, from off the shelf components, and an order of magnitude cheaper.

I’m very curious what the army thinks this can do that isnt already being done by various YouTubers in their backyard.

For these situations I think a small generator and cutting the battery size is the right move.

Probably won't be that small of a generator. I'm betting this thing pulls tens of kilowatts just hovering.

Would be interesting how small/light you could make a 100kW generator. Turbo a performance motorcycle engine, couple it to a modern neodymium magnet generator? Or go directly to a miniaturized turboshaft turbine?

Agree, this thing would get shredded by small arms. If it's going into combat zones, it will probably be in a drone configuration.

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