Salty! and true. When I was a kid in the 70s we were sure we'd have flying cars before 1999. Not sure how they were supposed to be powered - I should have been paying more attention in school.
No doubt dead dinos are amazingly energy dense.
Look at the solar impulse - they kind of proved the concept of an electric aircraft - now it's up to the rest of us to take that work and run with it.
https://aroundtheworld.solarimpulse.com/
Some of the guys that built that are on this forum building RVs - I'm sure that they can chime in with their views.
Interesting, could you elaborate your thinking about sailplane? Is it the fact that high-density batteries don't tolerate being damaged or shorted or is there something more subtle to this?I can’t prove this but my suspicion is that as battery energy density increases, the potential hazards increase too. Li-ion are already pretty dangerous. After working on an electric V-TOL for a couple of years At Zee.Aero I decided against an electric self-launch sailplane. The folks I worked with were top in the field and we had a couple of spectacular accidents. Boeing and Tesla have both had big mishaps and you can bet they really know what they are doing.
It is not a realm for amateurs. It is really easy to turn a $20,000 battery into hazmat.