OK- we all know how well electric multirotor copters fly - no goofy linkages, tail rotors, airfoils, etc. They fly like they belong in the air.
Is it possible to scale it up to lift a couple hundred pounds? As far as I know, it has not happened but I was really hoping with the advent of electric car batteries / controllers / motors such a thing might be possible. I am no aero engineer (nor do I play one on TV) so I am wondering what barriers are left.
Has any one run the numbers on this? Anyone flying in their backyard?
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One of the keys to successfully flying a fixed-pitch system is minimising the inertial characteristics of the props, so you can *very* quickly change the speed of the prop/s in order to modify the lift at each prop, and keep balance by controlling the relative lift vectors.
As a result of all this, the inertial mass of a prop then becomes a significant non-linear problem for scaling to larger sizes.
Variable pitch props solve this by dissociating the variable-lift characteristic from the variable-speed characteristic.
<humor> I'd think that with that technology it should be possible to scale up to something using 4x full-scale Robinson R22 rotor-heads, and a single Robinson R44 engine to power it all? The limiting factor here being $$, of course. <end humor>