[pininja]

With a 20 minute flight time (and is that with any safety margin remaining? Doesn’t say.) at ~60mph I can only make a 10 mile round trip. 20 miles of each landing spot has a charger (and I doubt there’s weight budget to carry a decent charger with me).

It’s a very cool kit for hobbyists but there are very few missions this can fly with utility.

[mattlondon]

I don't know - 10 miles across impassable terrain sounds pretty good if the alternative is a 60 miles detour driving around a fjord or Forrest or something.

Still I don't think this is designed for "utility" - seems to me it is more for the fun of it.

[pininja]

Totally agree it’d be great in those situations, but I just don’t think there are a lot of people who need that. It’s probably a lot of fun to fly.

It’s just stressful to think if something isn’t going right in flight and I want time to think and react.. every minute is 5% of my battery. I also saw in another post that fully loaded the battery life is 12 minutes total.. nearly 10% a minute brand new (which every charge cycle reducing my total energy).

They also said the batteries are swappable, so if I had 3 in a rotation they could all be charging/flying with up to an hour of flight. Sounds like a fun day!

[stavros]

If something goes wrong, you're done for. If you're close to the ground, you have no time to do anything. Even if the flight controller discovers the failure early enough and cuts the motors, you'll still probably flip over/smash into the ground. If you're high enough, you'll just fall to your death.

[raxxorrax]

Better have an emergency parachute for when power fails. Doubt autorotation is an option here.

[SergeAx]

I personally wouldn't want to fly over impassable terrain with vehicle this short range. Anything happens - and I have to call for helicopter rescue team, opposed to just land anywhere more or less flat and call for tow truck.

[ginko]

If you live in Vanvikan that would be just the right range to cross the Trondheimsfjord to Trondheim, slashing the usual commute by ferry by a factor of 5 or so.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/vanvikan/trondheim/@63.49028...

[namibj]

Actually, the power density of a charger shouldn't be an issue for this. You can get very dense systems if you're willing to cool them appropriately (the frequencies you can use thanks to modern GaN and SiC transistors allow for very compact inductors and make switched capacitor converters feasible for mains voltages).

10 kW/kg is not even exotic anymore, and I doubt you'd want to charge at more than 100 kW with an on-board charger, anyways.

[timwis]

Perfect for beating London traffic