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Comment by dkjaudyeqooe | Hacker News Reader

It's odd that people in the comments assume use without permission and stealing.

You wouldn't attempt any of this without permission, regulatory approval and insurance, unless you wanted to be sued, prosecuted and go broke if something went wrong. How do people think the real world operates exactly?

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Oh but the scenario where the drone does it without permission is just way more entertaining.

Three-quarters of a megavolt of electricity plus drones does seem like a lively mix.

There's no current though, the same way birds can sit safely on lines all day long.

There is definitely current or there would be no wattage.

I dont know. There is definitely a flow of energy between the power line and the drone. But there is no closed circuit between them so there is no current flowing. I imagine there is a (slightly, almost not measureable) raised current in the powerline due to a lower resistance due to the parasitic voltage drop and phase shifting cause by the inductive load. So technically no current between the drone and the powerline. Although there is energy transfer. But there are probably lots of people here that understand the laws of electromagnetism a lot better than me.

The current for charging comes from magnetic induction but touching just the wire gives no voltage differential for current to flow across.

Where is there no current? The video says 300A if I heard correctly

300A of current is going through the wire, at high voltage - that's the transmission current. Drone is not charging directly from that, it lacks a ground / other phase connection to directly tap into the wire voltage (also, it lacks a... power substation and a bunch of other stuff to step down and convert the high-voltage AC from the line to low-voltage DC for the battery). Instead it uses an induction charger that "leeches" off of the magnetic field of the wire. If the wire current is higher, the magnetic field is stronger, so it can pull more power than the currently possible 50W.

It's hard to induce a current in a bird.

Imagine a future in which the power company manages drones that destroy the electronic barnacles on their lines.

For this public demonstration, sure.

I’m curious how you think power companies are supposed to be aware of entities leeching off transmission lines?

America does everything via a combination of insurance and lawsuits and regulations.

If people are doing this at any appreciable scale, the penalties for being caught will get ratcheted up until it's not worth it.

You only have to ruin a relatively small number of lives before people mostly choose to do what you want.

driving drunk is illegal as shit too, but you can't be naive enough to believe that's enough to stop people from doing that. If you had a drone and wanted to see if this worked, you'd just drive 50 miles from your house and just... try it out. The US isn't yet covered with surveillance cameras like the UK.

Have you met Silicon Valley?

> How do people think the real world operates exactly?

uh.. "Move fast and break things" and "It's easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission" come to mind.

Bro, "it's better to ask forgiveness than permission" is a pretty common saying in business circles. A lot of enormous businesses, such as Uber or AirBnB, were founded completely on operating without permission, regulatory approval, or insurance, until those things were absolutely forced upon them, and even then they didn't always comply with the law. It's also common that companies assume they will be sued, and go ahead anyway because they know they'll make more money than they'll be sued for. And if you do get sued... there's a good chance you can just never pay up, which I'm seeing more and more often.

The real world is certainly not your optimistic "corporations won't do anything wrong because they're afraid they'll get in trouble".

Skirting regulations and stealing from another megacorp in the open are somewhat different I think.

You mean like Microsoft and Apple stealing intellectual property from Xerox? Or more recently, like Cambridge Analytica?

Those are the ones that you can read about on Wikipedia. There's plenty of corporate theft happening all the time that never makes it into the public eye.

I mean bro, Boeing just murdered a whistleblower. It's not like criminality is inherently a barrier for companies.

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