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- Hacker News
- Keeps reloading to load ads and LLM spam. Don’t post from this shitty site again pls.by anon48293
- Every post on this website looks AI generated but at least most of it doesn't feel like complete fluff.by LoganDark
- I imagine they're expanding a bunch of notes and reports and research into an article, whose total size is not that much bigger than the "meat" of the inputs. The annoying LLM fluff is largely when someone is trying to inflate some simple information in size by an order of magnitude, e.g. turning three bullet points into an article. If you have enough of actual content to furnish an article, well, LLMs are excellent at restyling that into coherent prose.by TeMPOraL
- Winning $ 1.25 million is great - but I wonder how they feel about not getting the full $ 2.5 million prize because they missed the 4:1 target by 4% ?by rob74
- They probably feel like the athlete who missed breaking a record, like the shipping company which just failed to load the goods in 4 trucks and now needs 5, like the painter who just needed that extra 50 cm on his ladder: "darn, so close".by Leonard_of_Q
- They've probably got companies lined up to give them jobs that will pay multiples of those. The runner up is even more interesting, with a slightly larger reason to feel like they should have won it. They did ~3nm (out of 4 iirc) of 4.04:1 ratio.by lnenad
- > Avidrone Inc.
Nice to see a Canadian company at the top.
It seems like the defense industry in Canada is starting to boom.
by xyzzy_plugh - I assume blimps or lighter than air components where illegal? Or is it just too hard to fly the larger volume around the course?by stubish
- Your assumption is correct, they were prohibited:
>3.7 Heavier than air: The UAS must be a heavier-than-air aircraft. The use of any lighter-than-air gases to provide buoyant lift is strictly prohibited. Teams may use chemically inert gases for subsystem actuation, safety inerting, and component rigidity, provided that there is no buoyant advantage and the gas is contained in components operating at pressures indicative of mechanical function.
by jml7c5 - The prize terms are neat. To incentivize not sabotaging other teams in some way? You would win more if someone were to win.by odyssey7
- Hunh so for pure lifting our standard helicopter design is apparently the best. How did we stumble on the perfect design half a century ago? Was it sheer luck and constraints or can you actually do the math for this to work it out?by dyauspitr
- We have also achieved optimal teapot design for perfect flow thousands of years ago.
We have some times very good intuition and ideas.
by whatever1 - I am surprised it was not a coaxial design(think the mars copter, but designed for a real atmosphere)by somat
- The article makes reference to this being expected from the physics, but I don't think it's particularly intuitive why it should be the case. Unless it's as simple as smaller swept areas needing higher tip speeds for the same lift? That would make the energy loss to drag worse for multirotors.by regularfry
- As other commenters say, there's physics reasons one big rotor is most efficient.
The reason the earliest rotary wing aircraft took this configuration is because where was no other choice with the technology of the time. They had to pick the most efficient option for it to be cost effective and have useful capacity.
- For a given lift, a larger, lower speed rotor is strictly more efficient than a smaller faster one, all else being equal. So no surprises that when efficiency matters we don’t see quadcopter-type designs. The reason they became ubiquitous is because they are so mechanically simple, all the control can be done with cheap electronics, no need for the great mechanical complexity of a swashplate.by ballooney
- I saw a lot of novel designs for this but what was interesting to me was Hoarder Sam's design which I followed for a bit. He started without a tail rotor but did have one large main rotor. Then his design kinda evolved to use a tail rotor. Didn't use a swash plate, but by the end of it he was a short hop away from basically just an efficiently designed conventional helicopter. Like carcinisation.by Neywiny
- A nearly 4:1 ratio makes a 25kg drone very interesting from a personal mobility perspective. Something you could fly a few miles with and then easily roll around an office. Sadly scaling in aerodynamics is notoriously non-linear.by VBprogrammer
- > a conventional single-main-rotor helicopter that weighed 13.3 kg (29.3 pounds) and hauled 51 kg (112.4 pounds)
I think this was the sweet spot for now and we'll need to wait for anything that maintains that ratio at double the carrying capacity.
by close04 - YouTube playlist linked on DARPA site: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6wMum5UsYvbuxFAptr9LYCnd...by egormakarov
- Wow, there were a bunch of very interesting designs, Probably telling the winner was a very tradition design, but I love seeing wild stuff being tried.
The kite copter was my favorite, but the large rotor powered by small tip rotors was a close second.
by somat - Interesting event, annoyingly bad written AI articleby bart__
- Slop city, it felt like I was having an LLM chat.by camkego
- Utter garbage by the "authors" of this post. Shame on you Haye Kesteloo. It takes three sentences to not vomit this crap into the world.by genxy
- I wonder if there’s a way to hide comments regarding AI in HN, complaints included.by Cameri