This Tops Everything

Preying on the quadcopters might be made more difficult if they constantly report their GPS position to a logger at base.

Use a (large?) butterfly net or equivalent. Once captured, de-power it.

In-flight recharging. Drones with more energy than they need co-operate to keep those in need operating. Goddam socialist drones.

Or take a sneaky break resting on a power line with a thin wire thrown over an adjacent line.

Or strategic dumps of charged batteries.

Or hitch a ride on a motor vehicle and let the wind spinning the rotors recharge the battery.

Or a relay system.

Cheers

That's the Obamunist drone. It's "green" and just steals what it needs from those who have for those who don't.

How does that save energy?

Faraday net.

Kamikaze one-use drones?

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

The flying robots could "harvest" energy sources found in the environment.. solar, or maybe some form of biomass:

Amazon has conventional same-day delivery in about a dozen US cities, with more on the way (yay), but you have to order before noon (as early as 7AM cutoff) and be willing to wait as late as 8PM.

I kinda like the Digikey model- in my time zone, you order by 9:00pm (very binary cutoff) and the stuff is in hand by 11:00AM or so the next day. More hours, perhaps, but people generally sleep at night, so only a few waking hours for most.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Good point - the thought of anthrax dropped on a football stadium or busy mall by terrorists must mean that quadcopters in cities will soon be regulated and licensed out of existence.

Cheers

No, their operators will just have to take their shoes off before taking the controls.

They are going to have to bite the bullet and stick some sort of fossil fuel engine (or maybe a fuel cell?) in them if they are ever going to be useful - it's a question of energy density.

Either that or develop a drone that works like a V22 Osprey

Well, as long as you are ordering a quadrotor drone, the available delivery range should double.

I assume they will be smart enough to think of those problems. I envision a truck loaded with packages and four or five copters. The truck drives t hrough a neighbourhood and the copters fly from the moving truck with the p ackages and deliver to the houses. When they return to the truck , they la tch onto a charger and do not get another package to deliver until they hav e a full charge. Really heavy packages get delivered by the truck.

Dan