You can't just make the Traxxas 18x bigger and get linear performance improvement. Trying to compare power/weight between engines with radically different weight constraints is silly.

Ok, a Kawasaki H2R engine makes 326 horsepower and weighs about 160 pounds running regular fuel. That's almost identical to the Traxxas - 1hp for 0.49 pounds.

That engine is 4x heavier and supercharged. You're not comparing apples to apples.

my point is that this ratio exists both much smaller and also somewhat larger. it makes sense this same ratio would be possible in the middle of the two as well. also diesels have super/turbo chargers all the time on production engines, why is that cheating?

If you had 18 such engines it would get you precisely 18x the performance, at precisely 18x the weight.

No, because you would need to add structural elements, some way of combining power output, and cooling if you’re aiming for a similar form factor.

And precisely 1/18 the MTBF

In a way, sure. Often when a car engine fails people just replace it. If you were to replace all 18 when the first one failed, the same way you would with a regular car engine, it's not 1/18 the MTBF. And if it was just 1 failing prematurely and you replaced only that one, you also see that same dynamic with car engines.

but it fails gracefully, right? (only one engine fails at a time)

it's like RAID, great until the RAID card itself fails

It's probably most like losing power in a single cylinder; the effects vary from engine to engine.

They tend to seize and when they do and you gang them they'll likely break stuff in the other ones unless you add a freewheel or some other luxury like that.

That's why there's all sorts of widely produced performance vehicles with multiple independent engines!

I've read about a lot of people complaining about the difficulty of getting the mixture right, perhaps that might be a show stopper for a UAV that must reliably work unattended for a long time. Though the military should also be able to get such mixtures down to a science - so I don't know.

> Granted an RC engine runs on a mixture of fuel and nitromethane

That's a huge difference. The main limiting factor in engine power is mass air flow, not fuel. Engines are as much air pumps as they are containers for extracting expansion from explosions. Nitromethane provides extra oxidizer in liquid form, putting nitro engines in some ways closer to rocket engines in terms of power-to-weight ratio.

I'm not familiar with that engine, but I remember having little glow-plug engines and they didn't even have piston rings. (and were not efficient)