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Comment by p1mrx | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, an LLM rejected my idea of building an enormous helicopter drone from wind turbine blades. They can't spin fast enough to generate sufficient lift.

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Alternative, can you make a turbine blade that can be an (inefficient) wing when bolted to a fuselage and engine? Effectively fly the blade there, using it as a lifting surface area.

I thought about this as well. The blades are asymmetric so you can't use two as wings unless the wind farm orders half of their turbines to rotate in the opposite direction.

What is the barrier for that? Seems like a reasonable compromise.

How do you get your plane back? Or would you just dispose of it like a rocket booster? :)

The carrier host fuselage would need huge controls surfaces anyways, could just use them as normal wings when flying for itself with way less drag.

Or just do self mounting Multicopter using the big wing as lift surface for the long haul.

They already use propellers for mounting anyway, its wild out there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1gUm_W1z28

Make the fuselage small enough to truck it back.

Why is that sad? That's way outside LLM training sets.

It's a fairly straightforward physics question, and Gemini Pro thinks the thrust to weight ratio is too low, by more than an order of magnitude, even before adding the weight of the frame and propulsion system.

Straightforward physics suggests the lift is a function of how fast you spin them. I'm sure with a fast enough spin you could get enough lift. Maybe rocket engines on the tips?

The tips need to stay subsonic. A bigger rotor must turn slower. AFAIK the tips of current wind turbines are already close to this limit.

Still subsonic speeds can produce a lot of lift. I mean jet aircraft weighing 200 tons lift off at about 160 mph. But googling wing tip thrust, jet engines are probably more practical than rockets.

Computer says no

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