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.
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.
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
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/microwave-power-transmission
That was 8 years ago.
What I’m describing are… currently extremely active areas of research.
You should maybe look into the level of precision that things like Phalanx CIWS systems have at tracking a moving target, with the ability to throw bullets at it, and hit it.
Or basically any SPAAG type platform that throws rounds down range.
Or I dunno, MASERs used in deep space transmission.
Or all the research that has gone into developing tracking gimbal systems that do intentionally use lasers or some kind of DEW to shoot down small drones, or damage aircraft in flight, or burn out incoming missiles.
Hell of a lot easier to track a friendly aircraft.
Genuinely no clue what you are talking about.
Are you assuming only like, quadcopters here?
We’ve had RQ 4 drone aircraft the size of WW2 medium bomber planes, with jet engines, for 20 years now.
I’m fairly sure that a jet engine produces a considerable amount of consistent heat.
Do… you think aircraft engineers… do not know… how to handle… heat?
Shall I describe a ramjet to you?
Or maybe we could go with something like the Space Shuttle’s reentry tiles?
In conclusion, you are vastly uniformed as to the state of… not even state of the art technology, that would be incredibly relevant to this discussion.