They’ve known about the wingtip propeller thing since WWII, and blown airfoils are nothing new either. The only thing that’s new is that “distributed electric propulsion” can now be done sufficiently lightweight that it’s worth researching.

No, but it will cut through aluminum and plastic like butter.

Not at all. Even if you doubled the efficiency of current commercial cells (which thin film do not), and they weighed nothing, and they were free, and you only flew routes and times that kept your wings pointed at the Sun, you’re still producing only 1% the power the aircraft needs.

It’s also completely wrong. Rough ballpark value, the engines on a 737 are outputting somewhere around 8-10MW combined at cruise. Maybe the aircraft is pulling 240kW off the engines through accessory bleed air to power internal systems, but I think that number is a complete fabrication.

I’m not sure what caused the problem with the 787, but the S7 was a manufacturing defect, followed by another unrelated manufacturing defect. We do store fuel within the fuselage on some aircraft, and don’t think fuel is inherently safe. We’ve just had a century more experience in carrying large quantities of it,…

Batteries in use do not get cold. Low temperatures are only a problem for unused batteries.

It’s not technically possible, because these are just generic parts with no knowledge of where they are or what they’re doing.

The car was making a legitimate lane change

Sorry, but people can’t see fast moving motorcycles.

You want every piece or microcircuitry made by every manufacturer in the global marketplace to have a remote shutdown mechanism controlled by the US government? Nevermind the horrific security hazard that poses, the reach of the US government is just not that complete.

A microcontroller is just a low end microprocessor with a bunch of IO attached to it. Lots of people make them. They’re not made specifically for drones.

Faster targets is more a question of the targeting system than the laser, unless you’re talking about taking out the target before it’s out of range... or impacted it’s target.

I stand corrected. PAC-3 did add an active seeker for terminal guidance independent of ground radar.

Yes. I’m talking about gutting the control system, and just using the motors, speed controllers, and props combined with a new microcontroller. There are sizable communities on the internet doing just that, complete with howtos and software available for the taking.

Double the power is double the power. Remember, the laser causes damage by heating up its target, so the more power you’re pumping into your target, the faster it heats up and fails. Since you’re fighting how fast it convects/conducts that heat away, doubling the power (assuming the same focus) does better than…

It doesn’t take a whole lot of thought to roll your own control module for those thing, and once you’ve done the code once, you can churn them out easily. Hell, you don’t even have to write the code yourself, because you can find sources online for it.

Well it would work as an ugly planter...

In this specific scenario, with commodity off-the-shelf drones, yes, jamming would be very effective. It’s not tough to build your own control unit that would use GPS to hit a target. It’s not tough to have that control unit rely on semi-accurate INS if GPS gets jammed. It’s not out of the realm of possibility to…

One of those pesky little consequences of having a semi-active guidance system, the Patriot missile also requires the target be within line of sight of its launcher.

They were after the first time they had someone go into the booth slathered in stickum.