A config that strikes me as obvious but doesn’t seem to be popular would be just bistatic where you fire your own transmitter far away from yourself?

There’s got to be a reason, but it seems like best of both worlds.

I feel if the TUs were required to dogfood this, especially if generously funded such that startups could come along and provide the same service and support, that it could be a great positive externality

Could a few cargo ships be converted into floating fly farm aircraft carriers on either coast, maybe another in the amazon, and then just use a hundred reaper drone type things to do a creeping barrage? This must be within the budget of even a modest nation state.

But a third option I don’t see talked about a lot: finish the job. We could drop sterile flies all over the USA and Mexico all the way into panama with 1950s tech. We have drones now, surely some inexpensive paper planes shoved out of the back of hercs could cover roughly all of south america for fairly cheap.

Looking at things like bicycles designed this way leaves me suspicious that it doesn’t actually have the power to derive interesting insights about material properties. I suspect future versions may end up starting to look more mechanical as it discovers that, for example, something under tension should be a straight line.

A truck departs NY at the crack of dawn on the longest day of the year and cannonball-runs west at 100mph without hitting a single red light. The sun covers 15 degrees per hr. Denver is 30 degrees west of NY. The truck doesn't quite make it to Denver though, the sun sets on it somewhere in the middle of Nebraska. By chasing the sun, instead of 1700 miles, it gained a whole 1hr40mins of extra sunlight. That 20kW array turns that into 36kWh of extra power. By doing this chasing the sun instead of west-to-east, our truck turned a 1700 mile trip into something like 1718 miles.

On any 'typical' daily long-haul of 600 miles, we're looking at something more like an extra 3000-4000 feet. On something not as perfectly east-to-west like 900 miles NY to Atlanta, we're in the extra 100-200 feet, as long as it's not overcast.