Sure thing. Start by treating each drone as a single‑cell module with its own power bus, but wire those buses in a daisy‑chain that lets the swarm tap into a shared high‑capacity charger. Use carbon‑fiber spars and 3D‑printed lattice to shave weight, and keep the flight controller in the center of a low‑drag hull so the propellers get straight airflow. For resilience, duplicate the flight‑control firmware on a secondary micro so if one fails the other can take over mid‑air. Add a small, low‑drop capacitor bank on each unit to smooth any surge from the shared bus. That way you keep battery life high by sharing the load, and the swarm can re‑route power if one node goes dark. Just remember to keep the wiring modular—snap‑in connectors with strain relief so you can swap a dead cell in seconds.

Good point on the sag. A quick buck‑regulated supply per node is probably the safest route; you can still keep the bus star‑like for the high‑current part so everything’s balanced. For fail‑over, I’d run a heartbeat packet every 50 ms from the primary MCU and let the secondary ping back to confirm it’s awake. When the heartbeat stops, the secondary immediately pulls the power‑switch from the shared bus and starts the flight control loop. I’d run that sequence through a hardware test rig where one drone is physically disconnected mid‑flight; if the swarm keeps hovering without a glitch, you know the jitter‑check passed. Keep the code small—just a few lines of state machine logic—so the firmware can’t get stuck in a deadlock under stress. That way, when the fire’s burning, the system doesn’t throw a tantrum.

20 ms is solid, just enough to stay ahead of the drift but still light on jitter. I’d wire each node with a metal‑oxide varistor on the bus and a fast‑acting MOSFET fuse rated at twice the maximum expected fault current—so the surge from a bad cell gets clipped before it reaches the rest. The state machine stays in three states: normal, failover, recover. If the secondary takes over, it pulls the bus supply in and runs a quick self‑check before rejoining the swarm. Then a brief 10 ms pulse tells the primary to hand back control. That loop should keep the swarm moving like a well‑tuned clockwork and the batteries from blowing a fuse‑in‑the‑sky.

Got it, no lag from the fuse. I’ll use a fast‑acting silicon‑controlled switch instead of a MOSFET fuse so it drops the fault current in under 5 ms. For the handback I’ll keep the 10 ms pulse but add a quick watchdog tick that lets the primary re‑enter sync mode without a full reset. That way the whole swarm stays glued together and any hiccup just blinks off like a bad LED.