> The watt hours needed to fly a medium sized VTOL uav of any type for any reasonable amount of time can't be collected by the size of pv panel that can be reasonably carried by the same craft.

Drones aren't limited to quadcopters.

> Not unless it sits still for a week in a sunny spot.

So do that?

Humans are persistance predators, or so I'm told. We didn't domesticate horses by running faster than them, but by because they had to rest, and when they stopped we'd catch up, and then they'd run again, a cycle that repeated until they couldn't run any more.

But these days, we humans are no longer nomadic: we live in predictable homes, and most of us who work do so at predictable locations.

A drone that takes a year to get to one of us? We could outrace it, or shoot it down… but only if we know it's there.