DARPA unveils 6 new designs for uncrewed vertical-takeoff military aircraft
livescience.com
livescience.com
They could consider 2-stage launch/landing?
A booster drone lifts the operational drone to flight height and speed, releases it, and then immediately returns. And then either the same, or a dedicated landing drone, catches the aircraft and lands it.
Kind of a virtual runway.
There is advantage to take off vertically close to troops. I’ve been following V-BAT which is tail lander, and competing to replace recon drone that takes off from field. And only needs a couple people to operate.
Of course, it just seems you could launch them vertically, in two stages, so the drone itself is unencumbered by VTOL requirements, and such a system could potentially scale to manned craft.
The size is important too, instead of having a small drone, you have a small drone and bigger drone. You have to transport the bigger drone, when the whole point was to use a small drone.
It would make sense to have a launch system. The ScanEagle uses launcher and pole to capture it on landing. Or drones that launch from runways with rockets, and then get caught by nets. But the VTOL designs mean that you don't need to any of that infrastructure. You pay a penalty in weight and maybe increased size, but that isn't a problem for these drones where flexibility is more important.
But as you say, maybe it makes less sense for these kinds of drone.
The idea comes from thinking about aircraft carriers. A carrier with 50-odd planes is $100B+ crown-jewel target, and in an age of drone swarms, massed smart missiles, etc, it must have a fairly short half-life. An alternative might be to launch single planes from small boats with 'virtual runways'. Pure speculation and thought-experiment of course.
At last, a reason to deploy a trebuchet.
Meanwhile other military only have "standards", you buy of the shelve components, add standardized interfaces and can iterrate and produce ridiculous fast. Drone does not fly or bombs otherwise? Change it, even automated build it, fly it, while darpa hasn't started reading reports on equipment failures.
Stack several drones on top of some old outdated longrange system, have one float a starlink connections for the others. Still cheaper, faster in the field and similar effective compared to those artisanal systems.