propeller

The tradeoff is a larger propeller and more expensive engine installation due to the required gearbox.

Even if the motor is quiet you still have the propeller making a lot of noise.

Consider how many cavitation bubbles a propeller has to deal with in its lifetime, versus a typical knuckle.

Anything like a gear or propeller is useless, rather you have to rely on self-generated chemical gradients.

There's very little evidence for the control system, the propeller design, and the engine, all of which are crucial.

Of course, you don't get the mechanical simplicity of 4-motor quadcopters, and there's still no redundancy for propeller loss.

If shot vertically and it so much as hits a propeller, the Phantom drone goes down.

Which is why propeller driven aircraft are still 'a thing' and you see turbofan engines with ever higher bypass ratio's.

Although with a giant engine and propeller and some gigantic control surfaces who knows.

In that, if you had a non-propeller method of propulsion, you could hook the powerplant to that and still have effectively the same system.

If you don't need to kill tanks or dodge air defences a propeller-powered plane that looks like something out of WW2 is a lot cheaper...

The Wrights also had a propeller design that was 90% efficient, compared with the flat design (used on the Langley machine) that was 50% efficient.

I wonder if you could use your propeller as a "wind turbine" when landing to recapture some energy?

I've taken a propeller to the face from a motor similar in strength to the consumer "drones", and it was spinning full throttle.

> I wonder if you could use your propeller as a "wind turbine" when landing to recapture some energy?

Suppose I take a bird or deer strike just after liftoff that damages the propeller and the "squat switch" (the weight-on-wheels sensor that prevents the gear being raised electrically).