Do you use or have you considered using potential energy as energy storage? That is, using the solar power in daytime to climb higher and glide lower during night time?
Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
191–200 of 206 posts
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#192Very cool. Good luck!
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#193Are you using thermals to stay in the air? Or do these not play any role in the stratosphere?
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#194Pretty sweet. What happens when it falls?
A question for anyone: how would a device like this best guarantee that it can broadcast its data? What would it use in practice?
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#195Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> we’re focusing on a lower cost system, and a larger payload which will enable more use cases. So you want to beat Airbus but also be cheaper. And do it with off-the-shelf components too, because those specialized ones are just too expensive. Not to say it's impossible but wow
the main cost is labor. Airbus probably has >1k people working on that project.
If so, did ever wonder why?
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would probably be shot down or hacked/jammed by the Russians in a day or two
Shooting down an airplane at 20km altitude requires an expensive rocket and reveals position of the launcher. No, can't use cheap MANPADs for this. My gut feeling tells me this airplane is potentially cheaper than a rocket, so if it is shot down, it is a win already. If it detects launcher position while rocket is on the way it is even bigger win. Potentially it reveals larger radar position too, that's another win.…
I don't know how they communicate with FPV drones 20-30Km away on the battlefield. They can't use cellphone networks, because they're compromised. I doubt you can fit a starlink terminal to a drone.
But this thing could be fitted with frequency-hopping comms, and could control a swarm of attack drones from 70,000 feet. It could also have a backlink to the pilot, allowing him to control any drone in the swarm.
I imagine the Ukrainian nerds are already all over this sort of idea.
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could be catapult launched?
Or balloon launched, parachute landing.
Other options that might work:
* Launch from the roof of a vehicle
* With a glider winch
* Towed by another aircraft
* Auxiliary engine / batteries that can be jettisoned & parachuted down
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, Airbus’s project and team is very cool! What we’re doing shares similarities with Zephyr, but we’re focusing on a lower cost system, and a larger payload which will enable more use cases. We’re using conventional silicon solar cells, rather than the GaAs cells used by Airbus. We give up some efficiency by doing this, but it keeps costs far lower - which we think is key to iterating quickly, and opening up some o…
> we’re focusing on a lower cost system, and a larger payload which will enable more use cases. So you want to beat Airbus but also be cheaper. And do it with off-the-shelf components too, because those specialized ones are just too expensive. Not to say it's impossible but wow
I think this is a bad take - large corporations like Airbus are terrible at R&D. They're simply not optimised for it. It's not very hard to move much, much quicker than a large corporation does - because the people inside the large corporation are having to contend with internal politics, legacy tools, legacy cost structures, and corporate inertia that doesn't like doing things a new way.
If you've worked in both a startup and a large corporation doing R&D, it's really obvious that startups are far, far more effective at it. If you gave $10m to a startup, vs a budget in a corporate project, you'd probably get 10x the result from the startup.
Where corporations excel is in scaling things up. Once you have a good design, you need a good manufacturing process and a solid supply chain. Startups rarely have the capital or knowledge to put that in place, while big engineering corporations will.
Re: Launch HN: Radical (YC W23) – Autonomous high-altitude solar aircraft
#200Fantastic work! What science packages are you looking to put on board? Do you have a target cargo/payload weight?
Tony Philips at SpaceWeather.com has been launching stratospheric balloons to sample cosmic rays for several years now, but of course he can only sample data while the balloon stays in the air, then he has to recover them in some very inhospitable places. A stratospheric airplane that can loiter for long periods of time would likely be something he'd be very interested in.