Useful aerial recon vehicles for newly colonized worlds

Question

So, a colony ship has just arrived in orbit around a planet. It's a sleeper ship, rotational gravity, and they're looking to find a place to settle down. Obviously, this can't be decided just from orbit, so a set of smaller craft with pathfinder crews are being sent down to establish smaller footholds and from there explore the surrounding areas.

However, this means they need to perform relatively long-range recon, in order to locate wide-ranging ore deposits and other useful information. Now, while they do have fusion power, they can't miniaturize these enough for use on the recon vehicles, only the large shuttle-craft. They also don't want to use fossil fuels, both because they don't have local deposits and because of environmental awareness, but do have far more advanced batteries, so the decision was made to have them run on electricity, with them being charged at the base camp, and can be recharged (slowly) from solar power in the field when necessary.

So, what would actually be a good aerial vehicle to use in this situation for one-man recon flights? I figure they need to be energy efficient, easy on maintenance, and able to land and take off relatively easily in a variety of terrains. Also, they're limited to near-future technologies, so no anti-gravity devices.

I've been looking at autogyros, which seem to fit relatively well, but I'm unsure how good they'd actually be, at least compared to just using a lightweight helicopter.

The planet itself is life-bearing, with breathable atmosphere. 0.86g gravity, atmospheric pressures at sea-level are around 1.1 atm, oxygen levels sit at around 32%. Not entirely sure how much this matters though.

Answer 1

Frame challenge:

Use a multi-pronged strategy of mapping with balloon-drones and then directed exploration.

The simplest and cheapest drone-type with by-far the greatest range would be balloons:

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These things are available now on the WWW at a cost of less than $30 (about the same as some moderately-priced headphones).

They depend on wind for navigation, so must be released in batches as the wind direction changes. Their height can be adjusted with a valve and tiny cylinder of hydrogen (easier to make than helium is to get).

A line beneath the balloon would act as an aerial for a transceiver, to adjust programming - to allow the balloon to climb into crosswinds for a direction change or sink for close-ups of interesting features - and of course for transmission of footage and other data to base.

Then:

This is where the remote-piloted drones come in. They can be sent to areas that've not received as great a coverage of balloon-drones for meteorological reasons. They will be light simple and have an extended range, possibly infinite range - i.e. they can be used continuously like the Zephyr S was aiming for. (26 days of continuous flight on solar-power).

Too small for people at this time, but they can have an integrated AI so that they are able to: monitor weather conditions, coordinate with other drones and foray into areas that are out of reception from basecamp.

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After that, I'd suggest if humans want to visit a location, electric off-road motorbikes would be the go-to answer. Having taken a motorbike or two through hilly forested areas, I can attest that this should work just fine.

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The advantage of this strategy is that minimal expense is needed to get a pretty good view of the surrounding landscape for potentially hundreds of miles around - and with balloons returning after circling the planet, a lot more. The real effort goes into the remote-piloted drones which can look for water and shelter to be in place for the human expeditions.

Answer 2

Drones

A slight frame challenge in that the best vehicle to explore vast distances would be taking the human out of it. With drones you wouldn't even necessarily need to shuttle them down (and back up) to the surfaces. Just launch swarms of drones from orbit.

A human plus welfare equipment (as humans need to eat, drink, poop and potentially defend themselves) could be well over 100kg. Your drones don't need that. Whatever sensors or probes your humans would be carrying can be fitted on drones.

Drones can fly faster, further and be more precise in coverage.

Even in modern earth now drones are the most used aerial recon vehicle. You may still have aerial vehicles for humans in this colonised world but they wouldn't be for recon.

Also I've just gone with the flying drones for now, but for planetary surveys you may also get orbit launched rovers and tunnelling drones.

The future is drones.

Answer 3

Satellites, Drones, and a bit of Human oversight just to keep things interesting.

The first thing you will want to do is deploy a satellite network. A few dozen tons of satellites can create a global communications, GPS, and visual imaging network for your planet. This will serve several purposes. First it will open up the possibility of settling in and connecting more places than one which will be necessary for creating modern resource networks since not all of the things that modern tech need all occur in the same places. Second it will give you the ability to control drones on the ground via GPS. And lastly, it will give you a high quality map of the whole world pretty quickly so that you can identify from geological formations where the good stuff should be. These maps will make ruling out most of the planet's surface pretty easy, isolating what you actually need to explore down to a handful of high interest survey sites.

Once you have this global map, you need to send down geological and biological surveying vehicles to determine exact biohazards, soil conditions, and resources in each promising location. This part makes since to do with drones because remotely piloted or AI controlled drones don't need all the infrastructure that piloted vehicles need. It should not be 1 kind of drone either. In some places a fast flyover with an airplane design will give you all the info you need and provide the best power to range ratio. In others, an ultra light autogyro will be good. In others you might need an extra rugged quadcopter to safely navigate the strong winds around a mountain of interest. In others, you might need a swarm of small drones to fly through the underbrush of a forest. And this is all before you consider all the ground vehicles you need for taking actual samples which will range from 4-wheelers, to caterpillar tracks, to ATVs depending on what biomes you are exploring. Alternatively, if you are going for future-tech, it might be interesting to make convertible drones with many options for motility so you drones can fly, walk, roll, or float as needed.

That said, your drones are not infinite. You have a lot of places you need to survey and only so many drones to do it with; so, they are not an expendable resource. When accidents happen (and they will happen), you will want to send in human technicians to recover and restore the damaged drone. For this you will want some kind of fairly small VTOL dropship that can land in hard to reach places, but also carry enough supplies to be able to repair the drones that they are trying to recover. Not only does this add a plausible layer of realism, but it also gives you a lot of excellent plot hooks for telling your story. If the humans were doing the surveying, then 99% of their time would be spent on boring rock collection and staring at test tubes, but by making your human element the guys who come in to see what went wrong, it means that every human interaction is a potentially tense situation. Maybe they lost a drone because a place is prone to violent electrical storms, or they lost it because some local megafauna tried to eat it, or maybe some intelligent species of nomads shot it down with a bow and arrow and they are unwittingly walking into a first contact scenario. Any which way, this means that every time your protagonist is needed, he's being called straight to the where the interesting stuff is happening on anotherwise vast, boring, and empty world.

Answer 4

I think drones are the best course of action, but this is your story and from the question it seems you would like humans to do the actual scouting (perhaps for story reasons?)

May I introduce:

Solar Planes

Solar Impulse is a fixed-wing aircraft that made the news a few years ago for being the first to circumnavigate the world, "without refueling". That last part isn't really true because the voyage was actually made in several legs over 2 years, and the 2 pilots have an interesting history of vastly overinflating their achievements to attract investors, but they've actually shown that the plane can indeed fly uninterrupted for several days.

From there, your main problem is the humans inside the aircraft: This is an aircraft and weight is at a premium, so you have a hard limit on how much food and water they can bring. Do they land at rudimentary airports every so often (can there be airports in various places?), or do they somehow land in plains they find and scavenge for food?

The technology was already there about 10 years ago, so if your story decides that there was significant investment and R&D into this for the purpose of using them in exoexploration, it's not that far fetched to imagine these planes rapidly becoming really good at what they do.

Answer 5

How scouting would actually happen

1. Deploy satellites. Depending on the opacity of the sky visual (including non-human wavelengths), lidar & radar but especially a positioning constellation.

2. Have them gather data for a year or 5 (the interstellar ship was in hibernation for centuries, what more is another 3 years?) while developing a climate-simulation and checking it's accuracy. [The mapping will be done really quickly but will improve in it's accuracy and detail]. This may include a

2b: Get more accurate temperature and humidity data (as well as air composition etc.) using Escaped dental patient's balloon proposal (releasing maybe 20 every 6 months should suffice, especially once the climate modelling gets better and better thy can be timed more accurately to cover further. If necessary, supplement with solar-based indefinite-flight drones. These could also include fine-grained radar- sonar- and lidar mapping. The climate data is far more important. The balloons once crashed act as on-the-ground weather stations. Since they need barely any power at this stage (only passive instruments and little data), tiny solar arrays or chemical/regular/radioactive batteries would suffice. Potentially include basic seismic probes (a microphone on a sharp stick/drill).

3. After 5+ years, wake up the humans. This will take a while for them to regenerate to functioning states, all of which will happen on the ship.

4. Deploy ground monitoring stations (with local Ingenuity-like copters) to measure air quality, local radiation etc.) to the top 50 or so spots where not enough balloons crashed. If the humans really want to participate they can fly the plane that drops these stations (risking on-the-ground deployment is absolutely not worth it at that stage). These stations would also film the surrounding area to get a vague assessment of the local wildlife. Also some biosphere samples will be gathered to check for potentially dangerous bacteria and create vaccination templates and antibiotics (especially the latter can be done quite generally once you know the overall base genetics of the planet), and provide seismic data.

5. Shuttle a few crews down to the 3-4 prime spots. But more for the vibe and symbolism than for actual scouting. We're talking about humans, they'll bulldoze anything that isn't visible from space anyway, so scouts won't find anything. Their only active contribution to the search will be collecting biological and other samples that have to be extensively checked for potential threats. This will include hunting/gathering bigger living animals, whatever fills the insect niche etc. This will happen in armoured hazmat suits. The first actual installations (with fusion reactors) will be placed in this step to allow for more energy-intensive operations like drone and rover fleets assessing nearby (~100km) resource availability and composition. Test mines may be dug. Still low to no permanent human presence.

6. Plan the initial colony/ies. With the selected spot(s), already having near perfect maps, the ship could run simulations and iterate through millions of potential layouts. Bots will begin construction, at least of the resource-gathering setups required, but also basic infrastructure.

7. Then, at least 10 years after arrival, main human planetfall will be called.

Why are humans left out of the process for the vast majority?

Because they are far too valuable to risk where robots could do. Even if the automated approach takes 20 times longer, it's worth it. Robots can be repaired and recycled, I'd also imagine them being designed and built for the specific conditions. You can compress the raw materials or parts very tightly and the storage requirements are minimal. On the other hand, the - comparatively few - humans you take along however are insanely expensive (in terms of resources at the very least). Every human needs a stasis chamber and likely on-board revival facilities as well as supplies for the first years in space and in the colony (or supply-generating complexes) as well as all that kept at. Planning (and stocking) for a human that dies 2 months after breaking planet from a crashed scouting plane would be an insane waste. Any human landing sites, even for the very first scout groups will be prepared intensely by robots including a wide landing area, walls and/or otherwise defended perimeter etc.

These considerations can of course easily be ignored for the story on grounds of ego / symbolism / culture.