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>how many of these limits are due to fundamental physics constraints

All of them.

Even with a 10x increase in battery energy density, you still need to move the same volume of air to generate enough upward thrust for a given weight.



Yeah, and that’s a very large volume of air for most interesting payloads. You have to move the same mass of air as the vehicle mass plus the payload mass. That’s a lot of air. Running UAVs indoors in a normal sized room quickly starts large air currents that have to be faught by blowing more air…


Yes, that phenomenon is called the vortex ring state and it's a big problem in rotorcraft.




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