HardOCP News
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While I like this idea, it seemed to lack any real excitement. Even the kid looked bored. Maybe a bigger drone is needed?
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Snowboarding Using A Drone
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GotNoRice
[H]F Junkie
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I've had similar questions. The quad-copter design appears to work very well though. One thing I don't understand is, why aren't there any full-size quad-copters yet?
DocFaustus
2[H]4U
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I like the way you are thinking
But helis are harder to fly. With multi copters, a blind deaf man can fly them with one hand behind his back and one shoe lace untied while eating ice cream on a Sunday morning.
AK0tA
Gawd
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Have you not played HL2, they are in the game so they are real.
The quadcopters are much easier and forgiving than the helicopters and can carry more payload IE: cameras.
Main reason i moved to quads is the ease of use. Do you realize how much work goes into the maintenance of an RC helicopter? The hours you spend just hovering hunting down the vibrations so it flies smooth on the field? Checking the belts, gears, blades, slop in the linkages, periodically adjusting the links as they wear out. If you skimp on the maintenance, it'll vibrate itself to pieces.
On a quad copter, i pick it up, go to the flying field, fly, go home throw it in the corner for the next flight out.
If a quad crashes, you don't have to re-tune anything as there are almost no moving parts and most of the time you only have to replace the props and you're ready to fly again five minutes later.
If a helicopter crashes, you spend a several days dismantling every part of the helicopter to check each component for damage and which part to replace, then reassembling it back together and retuning everything.
BTW, i fly FPV and manual. GPS mode on multirotors makes me feel similar to being carsick (airsick?)
The crash rate from component failures is horrendous. With a helicopter, if there's a malfunction, there's a very good chance you can still land it. With a multirotor, if anything fails, you're going down like a rock.
I don't know how the human carrying quadcopter compares to a personal helicopter, but on an RC helicopter, the only time i've had a major crash was back when i was a newbie and i dumb thumbed it into the ground. Since then, i've had a motor failure, a cyclic servo failure, a battery failure, a gear failure, each time i was able to autorotate it to the ground. As long as i had authority on the tail rotor, i can land it. A multirotor has less parts than a helicopter, but they're all critical and you're far less likely to survive.
There's also the matter of the power source, flight time is measured in minutes, you will always just barely have enough to make a trip. If you have to make a detour or get delayed while in the air, you'll be landing in the street.
On the other hand, a helicopter can fly for 2 hours on one tank of gas.
GotNoRice
[H]F Junkie
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Thank you, I appreciate your informative reply. The section that I quoted, does that imply that a full-sized multi-rotor would also be battery powered like the smaller versions? Couldn't you have a multi-rotor powered by gas engines just like a traditional helicopter?
Yes there are gas powered multirotors. But they work a bit differently, electric motors can change RPM instantaneously so they can change lift by simply making itself spin faster or slower, internal combustion engines are too slow to react to throttle commands. So instead of four gas motors, they have a central spinning engine that only has to spin at a constant speed and then the power is sent to the arms via drive shafts or belts. At the end of the arms are mechanisms similar to a helicopters tail rotor that allows it to change pitch. Development of this seems to be very slow tho and it does bring back the complexity of the helicopter several times over so you may as well just use a helicopter.
This is one of the attempts at developing a gas powered multirotor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwO4ncWLZnk
On the other hand, an electric multirotor is laughably simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQhHO7UvazA
Hornet
Supreme [H]ardness
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Certainly needs a more powerful drone.
At that pace, you might as well just walk.
At that pace, you might as well just walk.
sfsuphysics
[H]F Junkie
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He looked bored because his dad made him grab the drone and he had to move ahead at a speed that you could walk faster than... if you had two broken legs.
Better gas multicopter, well this one has a brushless motor but you can swap it with a nitro engine: https://youtu.be/TnGhEInTXYc?t=245
Its basically just a helicopter with 4 collectives... so like 4 times more shit to break than a normal helicopter which already is way too god damn fragile. You can fly a quad and maybe out of 50 crashes 40 of them break $1 props that take 20 seconds to swap, 1 of them will break an arm or something that is $10 but maybe like 20 minutes to swap.
Its basically just a helicopter with 4 collectives... so like 4 times more shit to break than a normal helicopter which already is way too god damn fragile. You can fly a quad and maybe out of 50 crashes 40 of them break $1 props that take 20 seconds to swap, 1 of them will break an arm or something that is $10 but maybe like 20 minutes to swap.