Comment by runjake
21 hours ago
The Skydweller is capable of carrying an ISR (Intelligence/Surveillance/Reconnaissance) equipment load, which is several times heavier than the Zephyr -- not to take away from the Zephyr's accomplishments ("on the shoulders of giants", etc).
The article mentions "wide-area surveillance"[1], which translates to "a lot of cameras" (FLIR, visible light, etc).
You also need more solar and more batteries to power all that ISR.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-area_motion_imagery (eg. GORGON STARE)
>You also need more solar and more batteries to power all that ISR.
I wonder if it would be feasible to use smaller sensors and on a smaller platform - then combine that data. Similar in concept to Gorgon stare where the idea was to combine data from multiple UAVs to create a larger image to provide a greater simultaneous coverage area.
https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night...
Mesh is the fad in the military right now, so I imagine this was designed with that in mind. On the other hand, the military likes its sensor data, so it's always going to go big.
I worked on non-maritime stuff, so I'm not familiar with maritime-specific sensors.
The smaller you make the sensors, often the closer you have to get to the thing being observed.
Cameras, optics, RF circuits, etc.