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Comment by porphyra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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