Comment by ddoolin
1 day ago
This was envisioned by the movie Interstellar where the opening scene shows them chasing an old autonomous Indian Air Force drone that had been flying for years, ostensibly after that agency ceased to exist. I'm sure it's been in other media as well but that's what comes to mind here.
Anyway, it should be interesting to see where this goes in the future.
I am still skeptical it would work out for regular aircraft due to all the moving mechanical parts, not o mention battery charge cycles for night flying.
But I could definitely see it working for autonomous underwater drones that glide in the water, going up and down by changing their density. Few simple mechanical parts & some project already demonstrated very long endurance.
Mechanical failure is usually a probability distribution and with a large enough population, you get outliers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centennial_Light
“ The Centennial Light is an incandescent light bulb recognized as the oldest known operating light bulb. It was first illuminated in 1901, and has only been turned off a few brief times since.”
I’m probably hugely oversimplifying here but let’s say you attach the electric motor directly to the prop, perhaps with some minor gearing, then what’s left in terms of moving parts? Some rudders, right?
Usually prop is directly attached to electric motor. If it's a flying wing then mechanical part is literally motor plus to ailerons. With little efforts thing cam be made hard to destroy even intentionally with heavy machine gun.
regarding battery cycles, what if they used something like a bank of capacitors that would be much lighter?
I think capacitors would be heavier, they have less energy density than batteries. They have high power density and they last more cycles, but for a given number of watt-hours they'd be bigger and heavier
how about a autonomous plane that mostly rides the air currents?
This was the central theme of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjJmTeBSEzU
Probably gets shut down due to being woke green technology.
And then we'll restart the research into nuclear powered aircraft instead!