I wonder if you could make a combo with power delivery and signal via a wire+fibre spool — eliminating the battery. Then have intermediate drones holding up the strand to extend the range…
cool idea but that seems very hard. Resistance goes up with distance, and tiny wires (100 µm or so for fiber) would have high resistance and low current capacity).
each extra drone is more power needed to keep the drones and wire in the air. More power requirements means bigger wires, bigger wires mean more resistance, which means more power
In addition, every drone has dependency on all of the drones previously. Failure at any point in the chain will cause failure in the entire system.
So in essence, there is a limit to how far you can chain drones together and they will be very vulnerable to catastrophic failure.
You also have more and more drones to control and send signal to.
