(near) working Avatar gunship

that's pretty cool, ubergeeky but cool.

At one point in the history of aviation they used to say that something which looked good would fly good and the Avatar ducted-fan gunships basically look good. If the guys at HK stick with it I'd assume they'll get it to work.

Pretty good.

I assume you've seen this before, right?

I've seen those before but not that flew nearly that well. Model aviation has several branches, most rc planes are models of real aircraft which carry people, while the hexcopter type thing is more like a personal unmanned aerial device and another case in which ordinary people with their hobbies may be getting ahead of government efforts which cost thousands of times as much. Most extreme case of something like that is Yves Rossi and his jet wing.

I suspect that we simply don't see what the government has available to it already. Even that home-built model has functional military uses already. A coke bottle payload could easily be an explosive device, or a really high resolution camera or listening device.

Or instead of building them bigger and heavier, the military could build them smaller and just build thousands of them. Imagine a swarm of micro-hexacopters, each with a micro camera and small explosive payload (enough to kill a person). Devices like that could sweep through towns and enter buildings. They could run autonomously on large targets and simple navigation missions, but could be run remotely by human operators in tighter conditions or trickier targets.

I suspect this is the direction warfare and surveillance is going.

Then again, you get something like the Electrifly Pluma which can do pretty nearly everything the F35 is supposed to be able to do other than fly supersonic, for forty five dollars...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHHd17048IE

I mean, if you can take off in two feet and come in high alpha and then just plop down without damage, what the hell do you need vtol fans for??

Why would you post a video of a flight simulator?

Sorry, I didn't really realize that's what it was...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NexPALy-vF0

You can get the idea searching on 'electrifly pluma' on youtube. I was hoping to get something which showed takeoffs and plop-down landings i.e. F35 type things....

The power to weight ratios of the new micro electric motors and batteries are enough to make almost anything fly

I think the HexaCopter design gives about the best lifting power and stability for the weight.

And without doing the calculations, I suspect that a single engine on a wing (some form of airplane) will be the most efficient for pure airspeed.

Flight time (range) is the other issue the military will care about.

The other thing which ucavs have is the ability to do maneuvers which a human body could not withstand.

Correct. And they are expendable, the perfect kamikaze.