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heavy cargo tether drone daisy chain

a very long heavy electric cable capable of deploying a heavy cargo
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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.

teslaberry, Aug 05 2016

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       The diameter of a needed electricity-carrying wire depends on two main factors. One is the amount of current (amps) you want to flow through the wire, and the other is the length of the wire. A thicker wire has less electrical resistance than a thinner wire, and of course the longer the wire, the greater the total electrical resistance.   

       You could possibly use aluminum wire instead of copper (weighs so much less that it makes up for needing a thicker wire to carry the same current).   

       If your drone motors used a highish voltage instead of the typical low voltage of most drones, then the total number of amps needed to flow through the wire, for the same total amount of power (amps multiplied by volts), will be significantly lessened. 440 volts is quite doable, for electric motors.   

       I won't go into the AC vs DC thing, because using AC will mean having drones carrying power transformers instead of cable or payload.
Vernon, Aug 05 2016
  

       Solid-fuelled exoatmospheric ballistic rockets.   

       Known technology, scalable, capable of precision delivery of payload.
8th of 7, Aug 05 2016
  

       <indicates all of Manhattan Island by waving arms>beads for this, yes?
not_morrison_rm, Aug 05 2016
  

       Maybe a system of skating along high tension power lines with jumps around pylons. A cable car type connection but verticle. Just landing to juice up might be the go.
wjt, Aug 06 2016
  
      
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