Take a look at this! This is all kinds of awesome.
One thing bugs me about these multi-rotor vehicles though, and it’s been bugging me the whole time various inventors have been showing off their stuff: The designers are always running things off of batteries! That vehicle couldn’t have had much more range than what was depicted on batteries.
That’s fine for an awesome demo that flies around the block. But there is absolutely nothing, in terms of engineering or technology, preventing these from being practical vehicles: Except the designers’ strange refusal to put a combustion-driven generator (microturbine, lawnmower engine, whatever!) on it. With it, you have payload capacity, endurance, and range. Without it, it’ll just be the *suggestion* of a flying car.
(I realize that if you took any of these in the direction of a practical vehicle, the full fury of $bureacracy would descend upon the hapless inventor: But that’s the real problem, isn’t it?)
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