Many comments are about how impractical/useless is this technology TODAY considering easier alternatives... but I see research exploring recharging electric flight devices in flight, which sounds as cool as powerful to have flight devices with larger services and ranges
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I think the biggest problem is that this way you have a beacon to your flying device and your recharging station, it would not be that difficult to build a bomb/missile that follow the trace to the ground station
I think that the "recharging" will always be a vulnerable stage and that the objective is to do that puntually and not a continuous dependence on power supply, but still seems safer and easier to abort than the one done currently with non electric planes, and for defense patrolling you will have more important infrastructures that would be targeted first, I still see only advantages if mature enough
I think that the “recharging” will always be a vulnerable stage and that the objective is to do that puntually and not a continuous dependence on power supply,
For an electric recharge I think you need a decent size infrastucture that you cannot move that much or easily. I don't think that you can do with a enourmous power bank mounted on a truck.
but still seems safer and easier to abort than the one done currently with non electric planes,
Except that you can refuel a normal plane with just a couple of trucks and a strip of road long enough (Sweden built the Viggen around this principle and even the US has the highway designed to work as temporary airfield by some old law).
While it is easy to hit an airport, it became a lot harder to take out all the roads (in part because you will later need them)
and for defense patrolling you will have more important infrastructures that would be targeted first, I still see only advantages if mature enough
Yes, the charging station. Once I take out it, you electric planes are out of order. No more patrolling.
I have no knowledge in this and it's early, but what happens to birds in the medium in between the receiver and emitter?
This can't be good for them.
Nothing. It's non-ionizing radiation.
Microwaves ovens work by using extreme amounts of energy concentrated into a very small area.
Microwave beams for energy transmission are different.
We've known this since at least 1996 when the first paper talking about it was published.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0038092X95000834
The biggest obstacle for it is actually RFI.
Edit to add, and here's a NASA paper from the 1980s talking about it
I think it's worth saying that while not ionizing, high power high gain RF can cause damage via burns. Not sure how much power/gain is used in this situation though. Staying away from unfamiliar transmitting antennas is in general a good thing.
Holy shit.
Getting the ability to remote charge things via microwave.... that are moving?
That's been basically sci fi nonsense, at a practical level, for a long time.
Anybody remember the Microwave Power stations in SimCity 2000?
If you could actually get this tech working, it has an incredible number of potential applications.
Uh...they actually got this tech working.
Will the US get this tech working? Can't get anything working after slashing all research and kicking 10,000 phds out of the country.
Cletus and his Ram 1500 is not going to figure this out.
We've known about the possibility of doing this for decades.
The NRL did a practical test of it in 2022 iirc.
I remember arguing with a mate in school about the damage a misaligned beam would cause to a city. I think the prevailing theory was a lot of cooked people without much structural damage.

That makes no sense. It's the wrong frequency to cook anything.
JFC...is US STEM education really this bad? Lemmy seems to struggle between STEM and Star Trek.
It’s the wrong frequency to cook anything.
The idea that microwave ovens use some specific frequency that's good for cooking is a myth.
Dielectric heating occurs over a very broad range of frequencies. What actually matters is the energy density of the EM field. A microwave oven cooks food because its putting more than 1000 watts into a small confined space, your cellphone doesn't because its transmitter is shooting less than 1 watt into the open air (where the energy density quickly diminishes by the square cube law).
I'm sorry, you know the precise frequency that would be used by a fictional/speculative 'microwave' beam emmitted from an orbiting solar array?
You... don't think that 'microwave' might be technically innacurate, but broadly colloquially understood term, to describe the broad concept?
Like maybe a 'phaser' weapon, or a 'lightsaber'?
Except that theory has no basis in reality.
Microwave ovens work by concentrating that energy into a very small space.
When is the last time you were cooked by radio waves?
Microwaves ARE radio waves.
Assuming 1MW of transfer, and a 10m diameter beam, your looking at 12.5kW/m^2 . Not instant vaporisation, but dangerous in seconds to humans. The penetration was also mean the energy is delivered internally, where it's harder to deal with (short term).
Any viable power transfer beam also, inherently, makes a good anti personnel weapon.
While the maths is slightly better for short range transfers, like drones, it would still definitely not be something you want hitting your body.
Are you somehow entirely unaware of the DEW crowd control devices that have been being used for like 2 decades now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
Yeah, the whole point of these things is they basically microwave the outer layer of your skin, when in wide beam mode.
Or, they can be dialed in to be a more concentrated beam... to uh, internally heat up a bit more than just your skin.
But uh, for legal reasons of course nooo they do not do that and cannot do that.
While it is claimed not to cause burns under "ordinary use",[50][51] it is also described as being similar to that of an incandescent light bulb being pressed against the skin,[14] which can cause severe burns in just a few seconds. The beam can be focused up to 700 meters away, and is said to penetrate thick clothing although not walls.[52] At 95 GHz, the frequency is much higher than the 2.45 GHz of a microwave oven. This frequency was chosen because it penetrates less than 1⁄64 of an inch (0.40 mm),[53] which – in most humans, except for eyelids and the thinner skin of babies – avoids the second skin layer (the dermis) where critical structures are found such as nerve endings and blood vessels.
I would imagine that if you had an emorous amount of microwave energy from an orbiting solar array, being beamed to a recieving station on earth, (ie, a very small small space compared to the distance involved) and it uh, missed, yeah, yeah it would microwave people.
There's also this:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8733248/
Brief but intense pulses of radiofrequency (RF) energy can elicit auditory sensations when absorbed in the head of an individual, an effect known as the microwave auditory or “Frey effect” after the first investigator to examine the phenomenon (1). The effect is known to arise from thermoacoustically (TA)-induced acoustic waves in the head (2).
Lin has proposed that the Frey effect may be linked to unexplained health problems reported by U.S. officers in Cuba and elsewhere, the so-called Havana syndrome (3).
Probably don't tell any schizophrenics you may or may not know about that.
Yeah, xrays are also radio waves. That doesn't make them inherently less dangerous. Plenty of people have made mistakes around ground and ship based radar systems too and have accidentally cooked their insides. Just because 5G conspiracy theorists took over that argument doesn't mean it has no basis in reality.
Plenty of people...
https://academic.oup.com/milmed/advance-article/doi/10.1093/milmed/usaf613/8404557
It doesn't mention specific cases, but there's a local man who described his time working on radar arrays during his time in the Navy before he was medically discharged. His explanation of events was that he turned off the array while he was performing maintenance on a specific radar antenna, but someone turned it back on when he was still working. He said he heard the array come back online and stopped working, but there was thermal damage done to his testes.
I have no reason to doubt him because clearly its possible. But the primary point stands. There's enough evidence within the military to warrant safety guidelines when working with radar emitters.
I mean this is really cool but at the same time doesnt seem usefull? Apparently the peak of modern combat is chinese drones with small bombs and a plastic fiber-optic cable attached to them lol.
I’ve lost count of technologies during my lifetime that had initial skeptics of ‘seems cool, but who would use this?,’ and then that tech became ubiquitous or essential within a decade.
Room-sized computers that required punch cards also seemed cool but mostly useless once.
There are a lot of different drones being used. For example you can't use fiber-optic for drones that target something 100km afar. Either way the problem with this device is probably the same as with other anti-air systems - it costs, takes time to produce and to train the operator much much much more than to make a drone.
totaly agree with your firs two points....
re: training and operators - my take on it is this has all the hallmarks of a swarm setup constantly recharging a portion of it's numbers.... Ukraine has illustrated that AI shit's coming quickly, even if llm's and jensen huang are wildly out of touch.
1/r^2^
Wow that looks a lot like the UKs Taranis bomber drone.

Neat but 3 hours of loitering is nothing for a fixed wing drone. We have drones that stay in flight for a month or more.
The difference is likely size and expense.
Now you don't need a 100 million dollar Boeing 737 sized drone to loiter for 3 hours.
Previously small and cheap drones could loiter for 40 mins on an internal battery. Now they can stay up for 3 hours. That can be useful.
Of course these mobile wireless recharging stations will become military targets for the opposition. So the overall combat math isn't obvious to me, but it's not a tech I see as obviously useless.
This could be much more straightforwardly a win for civilian applications.
I have a 6 year old electric car that takes 40ish minutes to charge, now BYD has batteries that will go from 10% to 70% in 5-10 mins.
In a few years time these drones will be getting charged from a microwave stream of power from a solar array floating in the upper atmosphere.
But the Trump Navy will use cannons to fire coal up to drones and Tesla sexbots will shovel the coal.
The decreased chargng time comes with a massive increase in charging power. The equivalent in ths scenario is to massvely increase the microwave power - which would likely cook the drone.
I prefer my drones cooked in an old fashioned oven, microwaves leave the middle too cold and the outside too hot.
Yes but you are charging through a conductive cable. It's not even remotely the same as charging something with microwaves.
The power delivered decreases exponentially with distance. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "inverse square law".
Because you divide the effect and gain by 4pi(r^2) meaning your output is decreased by 75% every time you double the distance.
You're going to need ridiculously powerful hardware and an enormous amount of electricity to run it on any meaningful distance.
A concentrated, collimated beam doesn't act like a point source. There's of course some amount of scattering and absorption loss due to atmospheric particles, but other than that a fully collimated wireless energy transmission doesn't lose intensity over distance. Kind of obvious, really, because "where would the energy go?".
We already have concentrated microwave beams. And they do suffer immense energy loss on longer distances.
If you want to transfer energy via microwaves, your efficency will reach single digits real fast on any meaningful distance.
You are right that the inverse square law doesn't realistically apply with concentrated beams. But you still have energy loss. Lots of it.
But don't take my word for it. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-25251-w
Quickly glancing through the paper it doesn't really seem to support your claim. They attribute their major losses to the parabolic reflector (meaning they don't have very well concentrated microwave beams?), and say that developing higher efficiency focusing components is important work for the future. I'm kind of guessing that's one thing the Chinese are doing.
Still, I'm sure there are relevant losses even in properly focused microwave beams. How much that is, I have no clue, and didn't see it addressed in the paper. Might have missed it - it was a very quick glance. :)
I'll be honest, I didn't exactly proof read every word either.
I think what they meant with parabolic reflector is the reciever. They mentioned they 3d printed a reciever to achieve recors breaking efficency (short range). It's not so easy to gather and convert the microwaves into electric energy. And it's probably not very easy to create a concentrated beam either.
But that was my interpretation. I'm not going to pretend I understand everything about this. I could be wrong.
I think the technology to have satellites charge drones in the sky is at least 50 years away.
Sounds:
- Pretty advanced
- Pretty expensive
- Quite useless (I mean it definitely has its uses, but I think you could find much cheaper and simpler solutions)
Getting some Ace Combat vibes
Is paywalled for me, do they explain the range and how much power they are throwing? An altitude of 15m suggests this thing needs to be pretty close ..
I don't think this is the full article (with 3rd-party js disabled) but the web archive didn't get more out of it either.
Edit: fixed formatting a bit
China’s ‘land aircraft carrier’ charges flying drone with microwave beam
While the technology is still at an early stage, it may one day allow drones to fly indefinitely
2-MIN

If wireless charging is deployed to a battlefield, it would not only allow drones to stay in the air for longer but could also allow them to carry bigger payloads by reducing the size of their batteries. Photo: Eugene Lee
Chao Kong in Beijing
Published: 7:00pm, 19 Apr 2026
A vehicle that can zap energy into a fleet of drones, allowing them to fly indefinitely, is getting closer to becoming a battlefield reality.
Scientists in China have demonstrated a wireless power transmission system that uses a ground-based microwave emitter to beam energy to an antenna array mounted on the aircraft’s underside. Importantly, they were able to do this while both the drone and charging system were in motion.
Some analysts have likened the concept to a “land-based aircraft carrier”, in which an armoured vehicle could function as a mobile command and energy node, launching and sustaining drones much just as naval carriers support aircraft.
They say such systems could extend the operational reach of ground forces, enabling persistent surveillance, airborne attacks and electronic warfare.
The findings were published on March 25 in the peer-reviewed Chinese journal Aeronautical Science & Technology by a team from Xidian University, which is known for its military technology research.
In tests, the car-mounted system kept fixed-wing drones in the air for up to 3.1 hours at an altitude of 15 metres (49 feet). The key challenge that the team overcame was maintaining alignment between the emitter and the drone during flight, wrote Song Liwei, the project’s leader.
To do so, the researchers integrated GPS positioning, a dynamic tracking system and onboard flight controls into the system.
I feel like practically this isn't very helpful. The car (or other much larger aircraft needs to pace the drones or vice versa and be in very close proximity, surely landing and hotswapping a battery pack would be faster and more efficient. Like if landing isn't an option is driving a car over garbage terrain while maintaining proximity to a low flying aircraft going to be possible? I guess you could use a blimp or large aircraft to pace the drones, but not sure a blimp and drone could match speeds without one breaking up or the other falling out of the sky.