When was the last time you saw an ICE with both a trunk and a frunk? :)
Seconds ago -- there's one in my carport :-) (A 1993 Toyota MR2; it's mid-engine. The frunk is small, and completely filled by the spare tire and aftermarket stereo amp.)
Even monster SUV motors are only ~350 lbs. That doesn't include cooling, oil, accessories, or transmission but EV's have those too.
You could also have battery swaps during flight as they pass over drone battery depots.
Sounds crazy. Might not be worth the gains for the complexity, but could be worth it across a whole fleet.
Microwave laser groundstations (or solar satellites) could come first, removing much of the battery requirement.
Instead of a catapult or a flying battery pack, go for a tethered launch. The plane taxis onto a platform that is actually a powerful "cable laying UAV" with powerful ducted fans for propulsion and some lift and two big powered spools of copper as heavy as it can carry. The platform arrests the plane's main undercarriage, connects power lines to the plane and raises itself on its own set of wheels. They accelerate together, leave the ground together, all while the powered spools are unrolling the wires to the ground station exactly as fast as needed to avoid mechanical drag (the wires are effectively in free-fall, perhaps issues with the cable landing could be evaded by sending up a chain of "cable carrying (T)UAVs" that take the role of virtual poles). In time before the spools run out, the platform disconnects from the plane slows down the spools so that the inertia and main motors of the platform start pulling on the wires, then reels itself back in while it maneuvers to a point above the base station, finishing the circle with a tail-landing followed by dropping into "platform" position controlled by its secondary fans. Meanwhile, the plane flies of into the sunset on a fresh set of batteries.
But the battery tender UAV actually sounds far more practical, I guess I just like ideas involving tethered UAV.
(and somehow I feel almost entitled do spew out the most improbable ideas, since seeing footage of the successful dual suicide burns of the Falcon Heavy boosters - if that's possible, why isn't everything else as well?)
Well, it doesn't need to have the same rate of acceleration as a carrier's, but honestly it just doesn't make sense in general.
Oh absolutely, it compares favourably to one of the most asinine first-pass approaches to this problem I've ever seen, heheh.
The real solution is to find a way to produce good liquid fuel from a cheap and abundant source of overprovisioned baseline power (maybe make hydrogen† from your nuclear power in off-peak hours).
Batteries are mostly composed of matrix, so even if you could extract energy as efficiently from the non-matrix materials in the battery as you can from hydrocarbon combustion, you would still be lugging around all that matrix.
† Yes, I get that it's 3 times less energy dense than good hydrocarbons, but it's a start when compared to batteries.
On a very cold day 60% of that waste heat might be used to warm the cabin. This translates to up to 50% range reduction in electric vehicles.
On longer trips, the waste heat from motors are cycled through the battery to bring it to ideal temperatures. Even in extreme cold weather, you get full "regen" capability (meaning battery is warmed up), just from the waste heat from the motors. There is also an option to pre-condition the battery for fast charging by intentionally driving the motors less efficiently to generate more heat.
Electric motors are 90% efficient, ICE are less than 20%. So in reality gasoline is 2-3x as energy dense, when you look at how much of the fuel's energy can be used to do useful work.