NASA just landed the rover 'Perseverance' on Mars, and it includes a drone that is expected to fly even though the atmosphere is a hundred times thinner. Admittedly the gravity is just a third as strong, but whichever way you look at it you have to say that it puts most of our efforts in the 'umbra'.
So surely I can get someone airborne, two years on from conceptualising the notion and practically a year after the GoFly event at NASA's own Ames airfield? Once more unto the bench then, as Shakespeare might have said were he building a drone too.
This is the bottom end, which is set to provide nothing but lift ~ itself a novel concept among the designers of air vehicles such as these. Everything you see here in ensuing days is aimed at making the original notion ever more accessible in the making and in the operation.
There are two principal aims viz. (a) to suit the weight to a realistic test-program that falls within the CAA's own classifications for so doing and (b) to incorporate the best of all that has been learned (albeit the hard way) over the foregoing months and years.
Accordingly I've gone conventional with this quadcopter and arranged its 32" props on each corner of a square metre. Its direction of travel is also conventional for H-frames and this supports the use of an equally conventional set of skids. Its around 78" long and 46" wide and thus an approximation of a half-scale prototype... for which I've an upright mannekin to suit.
I would have used rectangular alloy section instead of square, yet another remarkable thing about this latest build is that all such lengths are repurposed from the previous efforts. I've also used the thinnest sections available, meaning the chassis seen here can be lifted with the little finger of either hand.
Enough for one day I feel (and the builds are faster than ever given previous practise), and thus tomorrow will see the flight compartment assembled and attached thereto.
