No it doesn&#x27;t scale 1:1 or any way else at least not in any specific manner.<p>The scaling depends on how much lift you generate, the lift is a question of speed and your the available lift surface the nominal lift produced is then divided by surface area to give you your wing loading.<p>Solar is pretty much the most inefficient way of powering virtually any aircraft because you needlessly increase the weight of the lifting surface and batteries weight considerably more than fuel and that weight is dead weight during the entire flight while a fueled aircraft becomes lighter.<p>That said the scaling between the volume and the &quot;surface area&quot; isn&#x27;t even in question here because you are going to be hitting a wall much quicker and that&#x27;s takeoff weight as mentioned before lift is a factor of the surface area that can provide lift and the speed of the aircraft (as well as air density and some other things but lets ignore it) the heavier the aircraft the more energy you need to actually get to takeoff speeds, and when you make your lift surface bigger you increase drag as well as weight.<p>The speed you can reach is going to be more or less limited because even a 100% efficiency solar powered engines are going to be limited to the max cell efficiency * cell surface area, the 2nd part of the equation is your wing surface and eventually there is a limit to how big your wings can be and still support themselves and most importantly not flutter.
When you take all that and more into account there is absolutely no fucking way that you&#x27;ll make an aircraft capable of lifting a 50,000lbs of crago, heck you won&#x27;t build a solar aircraft capable of lifting 50,000 lbs of anything including itself. To put that into perspective 50,000lbs is 1&#x2F;6th of the maximum structural load that a 747-8F (freighter) can carry, and about 1&#x2F;4th of the nominal cargo load.<p>To put it into even more perspective Solar Impulse weights 3000 lbs, it&#x27;s maximum takeoff weight is about 4000 lbs and it has a max speed of 80km&#x2F;h with a wing span greater than that of a 747.
To put it simply there is no freaking way to scale this up, there is a good reason why nature haven&#x27;t developed heavy flyers the heaviest bird capable of flight weights 35 lbs, the rule of thumb is that when you double the weight you need a 4th time as much wing area and spend 4 times more calories to achieve flight and while mechanical flight isn&#x27;t exactly the same it&#x27;s not that different - the amount of energy you can produce more or less limits how well you can fly because at the end if you stick 2 SRB&#x27;s to a cargo container you don&#x27;t even need wings.<p>P.S.
And that&#x27;s before we getting into finding a material light enough to be viable for solar flight while still being able to bare the load of 50,000 lbs without collapsing, but even if you&#x27;ll take perfect carbon nano tubes or any other super material you still won&#x27;t be getting off the ground.<p>If you want solar cargo air transport blimps are probably the way to go...