Posted on 10/21/2021 9:48:19 AM PDT by Red Badger
Now here’s a drone:
https://www.regimage.org/f-4-target-drone/
$92 grand and you crack it up the first time you fly it.
Priceless.
That’s VERY nice. Always loved F-4s.
Definitely a fair weather flyer.
Needs cup holders
So, does it only fly in ground effect or can it climb?
Did not see mention of that.
Yeah, cup holders to put your beer in while you’re going 60 MPH down an icy slope in what is basically a gravity powered snowmobile with a roll cage......
It uses LIDAR so is probably limited in it’s altitude.................
“just 15 minutes of airborne giggles before the battery needs to go back on the charger”
A bit worse than those oversized golf kart things on the road.
I can see rednecks already souping it up!.................
Gatling Gun is optional......................
you got me, you’re toast
Lose a rotor and your toast. More rotors is more chances for failure. I have played with quadcopters and just a little rotor damage or one failed motor makes the device uncontrollable.
Every pound of fat you lose allows another pound of batteries to add to eVTOL...
Out of Star Wars.
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throttle lever on the left, a joystick on the right
Backwards. Made for copilots, and they probably can't afford one of these!
At 92K it would take a captain with 2 or fewer ex's.
VERTOL is a costly proposition and all rotary-winged aircraft are far less efficient than their fixed-wing counterparts. So it wold take a quantum leap in battery technology to give this thing range anywhere near what a small private airplane has.
The four pairs of contra-rotaing rotors is smart because each rotor in each individual pair cancels the torque from its partner. There still will be some twisting about the engine mount but that is canceled by the twisting from the pair diagonally opposite. Net torque about the airframe is nil, so there’s no need for anti-torque controls.
And it saves weight and simplifies the flight controls because all that ever changes is the amount of electric current going to an individual motor. Conventional helicopter rotors spin at a constant rpm and change how much lift they’re producing by changing the rotors’ angles of attack, sometimes all around all at once (collectively) and sometimes just in one area (cyclically) to make the helicopter bank left or right, or to pitch nose up or pitch nose down. This requires a swash plate and pitch change tubes and all the associated bellcranks, gears and pulleys and whatnot.
This does the same thing by simply changing the voltage being sent to each individual motor. Increase the electricity to the four engines on the right (or decrease same to the four on the left) and it banks left. Pitch remains the same and the rotors just spin faster or slower.
Using electric motors makes the contra-rotating pairs much more compact than they could be with an ICE engine because you don’t have to accommodate a drive shaft or all the components in a conventional rotor head. Eight electric motors is the heart and soul of its redundancy, which is indispensable in a design like this because if you don’t have pitch control you can’t autorotate.
Overall this is a brilliant design that accounts for most any failure you can think of, including a ballistic parachute for sudden loss of power or catastrophic mechanical failure. And parachutes aren’t much good in a conventional helicopter because the fan up top would shred your parachute first, then you.
And if Loz Blain thinks building your own aircraft gets you out of having to get a license, he’s an idiot. If it can meet the FAA’s definition of an “ultralight” it might not require licensing, but not because it’s home-made.
Pete Butthole plans to name his “Boy Elroy”.
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