so, problem with electricity powered drones is they cannot
really carry anything very heavy for very long using onboard
batteries.
tethered drones exist. however, if you want to carry cargo ,
heavy cargo for a relatively moderate distance, you will
need
a HEAVY and LONG tether----because
a kilometer of tether
than can supply upwards of 10kw or more of juice to a
fairly
Large heavy cargo drone
my inspiration for this idea is my 'flotel nyc idea which
relies on passenger ferrying cargo drones. such drones don't
really exist yet or at least, the battery requirements mean
they will spend far far too much time charging and very
very little time actually carrying passengers which means,
at the veyr least, using state of the art stuff, you would
need far too many of these vehicles to get the job done.
the solution is charge carrying tethers.
to create a tether that has a quadcopter attached to nodes
along the length of the tether. each quadcopter is powered
by the tether, and built to support a certain weight of the
rope.
the last quadcopter is of course freed up to dedicate ALL of
its power to carrying its cargo, rather than the weight of
the
tether.
my inpsiration for this idea is my 'loiter flotel nyc' idea.
problem with having big drones capable of carrying people
is that they run out of juice too quickly. other than placing
gasoline burning motors on them, the alternative is to
supply juice by long tethers.
since my loiter flotel drones will ONLY be traveling from a
boat to the coast/edge of manhattan, the drone can fly in a
straight line and string a tether more or less in a straight
direction . a nodal drone can even ensure the tether
creates an 'arc' shape so that any boats or river based
objects are ensured not to get in the way of the tether.
the real issue here is , how long can the tether be? 1km,
2km? 5km???? certainly a 5km tether would give the flotel
drones just about ALL the range they would need to enable
the flotel to oeprate effectively.