Surely it would be easier to recharge rather than swap batteries? I wonder if in the future war will be like a turn based strategy game as everyone wait for drones to recharge before making a move.
Surely it would be easier to recharge rather than swap batteries? I wonder if in the future war will be like a turn based strategy game as everyone wait for drones to recharge before making a move.
Mid-air: yes. A boom with a charging cable or even beamed energy would be much easier.
On the ground: swapping batteries is faster, and batteries are cheaper than planes or drones. You want the expensive part back in the air as soon as possible so you don't need as many of them. On the whole this probably also simplifies logistics: in civilian aviation airport space is limited, in wartime it's easier to transport one hundred drones and two hundred battery packs to the frontline than to transport two hundred drones
That's a future thought when it comes to electric aircraft - remote/emergency refuelling. I know they have tested lasers, and even sent a megawatt in 30 seconds over a distance of a few miles, though current convention of the laser back into usable power is around 50% efficiency. All gets down to a needed leap in electricity production and wished the World would get together on fusion reactors and knock it out the park over a mad race to be the first and lock down patents.
A typical regional aircraft needs about 3MW of power to keep in cruise, and has about 50 square metre area, so 60kW per square metre. Even with 50% efficiency you're talking over 100kW/m^2
A laser over 10W has safety implications. This is 50,000 lasers all shining on the same plane.
Given your collectors are only going to be say 50% efficient, you're likely going to dumping enough wasted energy into the wings to melt the aircraft - not sure what dumping 3MW of heat energy into a plane would do over an hour, but I suspect it would stat to melt in a few seconds if you're lucky (otherwise your passengers would start getting very toasty)
At 3MW for an hour that's not a great amount of electricity that's needed - at 10c/kWh it's $300 an hour. You don't need fancy things like fusion to generate that. In the UK alone Solar is currently (in November) generating 600 times that - plus domestic installations.
Probably easier to link up with another aircraft and tow it.
I don't see it working like that in Ukraine...
Difficulty for swapping batteries too - how to differentiate between strategic bombings and a refueling accident.