Junior Spaceman Howard Reed knew that away back in the Twentieth Century, the average engineer could make a guess, count on his fingers, and come up with a pretty shrewd estimate of the horsepower per cubic inch that could be stored by the various ways and means available to the age.
Removing the human pilot and his needs did give the droneship quite a bit more space for cargo and power. But, as he looked at the droneship standing there, it became plain to Junior Spaceman Howard Reed that there was not room in that size of hull for both the necessary powerbanks and the full year's store of supplies for one man.
Whereupon Junior Spaceman Howard Reed dropped his tools. He donned his space suit and crossed the intervening space to the droneship.
He began to examine the ship's running gear with a critical and suspicious eye.
He was examining hardware that was familiar to him. It took him no more than two hours to determine beyond a shadow of a doubt that the droneship's drive was built along the theories and mathematical analysis that he had been told simply did not work!
Someone had reduced Hansen's Folly to practice!
He paused again. Hansen's Folly had been called a failure about two hundred years ago, but what did that really mean? He considered his history.
In 1724, Stephen Gray and Granville Wheeler made the proud announcement that they had succeeded in transmitting an electrical phenomenon along a wire for a distance of 682 feet. Two hundred years later the entire Earth was girdled with telegraph, telephone and cable wires and linked with the invisible bonds of radio waves.
In about 1904 the Wright Brothers made their first powered airplane flight. Forty years later men were flying in airplanes that carried a wingspread greater than the distance of the Wright's first flight.