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Oh, ok.
Even though this entire post is... about how it is small enough to fit on a drone, and efficient enough to power it for 3 hours.
Ok.
Gotcha.
I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but densely packed explosive bombs and missiles and warheads tend to be pretty heavy.
... the entire problem with purely onboard solar powered vehicles of any kind is that they have to be absurdly lightweight, flimsy.
That isn't practical.
It might be purely _efficient_, in a sense, but it isn't very _useful_.
Being able to actually move _**stuff**_, that is practical.
Most transportation modes involve the ability to haul **_stuff_**.
You know, do **_work_**, aka the capacity to make _**stuff**_ move.
You picking a fight that makes no sense to pick.
You can have solar and batteries be more stationary, and use microwaves to power things that are more mobile, this post is literally the proof of that concept... you can charge a battery with a any kind of power source.
Look heres another massive potential application of this, if you science fiction extend the accuracy/capability of this:
Plop a bunch of solar panels/batteries in the L1 point between the Earth and the sun.
Now, via a set of satellites in something like concentric orbits, you can get absurd amounts of power, beam it back along chains of satellites, snd then beam it to recieving stations on Earth. Or the Moon. Or orbital infrastructure.
Microwave transmission power loss will be waaaay less in space, because there's no atmosphere.
Same with solar panel efficiency!
Solar Power + Microwave Transmission = Very Good, Actually.
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The only two metrics that matter here are W/m^2 and weight.
You can't make a reasonable microwave receiver lighter than solar film and efficiency peaks around 50% *in FIXED installations* and you can easily assume less than a quarter (under 10%) when the target isn't just moving, but is also changing angles and distance (you'd have to put the receiver on a gimbal like for cameras) and now it's also interfering with flight (propeller airflow, unless you do weird propeller geometries or tilted body flight
Tldr DUMB
Microwave power transfer only make sense between distant fixed line of sight locations with minimal infrastructure available. On earth that's literally just island mountain tops. Even then it's easier and cheaper to still just install solar
On the moon, it would basically just mean you have one big generator and everything gets powered by the sun when in sunlight and switch to microwave from the generator when in shadow, which is pretty much the only configuration that even make sense
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