"@Hugues - I think the answer is fairly clearly publicity. Since when would you hire a creative agency in Shoreditch (a hipster-central bit on London) to 'test prototypes'? I wonder who they actually got to do the quadcopter bit?"

"We did some UAV flying in Davos. A blimp built as a platform for computer vision 3D reconstruction of the terrain. This was a few years ago now and the team has disbanded but I put a few vids up in my YT channel. Beautiful place to fly.
 
 "

"@ Daniel: no, that wasn't what I was talking about and that's not correct either. There is enough dynamic pressure up there for it to deploy, that is not a problem. Have a read up on the 'Added Mass effect' - Wikipedia is a good start.
@ Adrian,…"

"@Daniel have a go, especially at high altitude as was the aim of this project. I think you'll be unpleasantly surprised by some of the dynamic effects you encounter, for example the added mass effect in low density fluids making it very unstable. It…"

"I worked in a team of 4 last year to build and fly an autonomous blimp to do 3D reconstruction of the terrain using computer vision (a single camera + IMU).
 
We used a PC104 board featuring a 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo chip. Camera was firewire. Everything…"

"I'm into high altitude projects too (check my profile). I wonder about the legality of 'flying' something back from balloon burst to land at some pre-defined spot. If it's an unpowered bathtub-lifting body type thing, I wonder if you coud argue that…"

"This is something I'm very interested in. Does the controller have a discrete set of possible known faults or does it just re-learn its model constantly? How quickly can it detect a fault? I think this fault tolerant stuff is where UAV research (and…"

"An open source boat?!

while{1}{
float();
}

That's GPL by the way so I don't mind you using it."

"UFO-MAN: Try Aerocon Systems in the US. They've a nice range or surplus stuff.

Maybe elaborate a bit on your requirements for the parachute too, as that affects the design - drag vs stability, deployment speed and peak opening force, and so on. As…"

"I don't think you will have any luck with trying to fly a parafoil at 100,000ft, because of a phenomenon called 'Added Mass' - when calculating the CoG and thus stability of a parafoil, which is usually somewhere in the rigging between the foil and…"

"R. Drone - getting your basic ham radio license will both answer your legal questions and teach you enough electronics to be able to answer your electronics question. It will also let you experiment with more radio power. It's quite easy, not much…"

"Jim,

I notice you're from London. If you want to come to one of our near-space launches here in Cambridge, you'd be most welcome. There are some people other than us working on near-space recovery systems too. Can I recommend the #highaltitude irc…"

"Jim, JvdB

I do near space stuff myself (cuspaceflight.co.uk). I mainly do electronic and control, but also specialise in recovery after a pretty educational summer job (vorticity-systems.com).

So, your projects are pretty close to my heart! You'll…"