okay so this might be half baked but hear me out. we do a lot of location scouting and some light survey work alongside the cinematography stuff and i keep thinking about whether theres a practical way to run a small thermal or multispectral sensor on the Inspire 2 outside of just swapping the zenmuse for the XT2. like mounting something secondary under there for dual capture.

i know the Inspire 3 has some improvements for payload handling and the whole top-mounted thing opens up some ideas but ive never actually seen anyone do a dual sensor rig on either platform in a way that wasnt a total hack job. has anyone actually pulled something like this off in a professional context or is it always just cleaner to fly two separate birds and sync the data in post. genuinely not sure which direction makes sense here and the budget conversation with the client is going to happen soon so trying to figure out what to even propose.

we tried something similar a while back, rigged a small radiometric sensor off the landing gear skids on an Inspire 2 and it was just... not great. the vibration isolation wasnt there, the footage was usable but barely, and the whole rig added enough weight that our flight times dropped more than expected. ended up just flying two passes with different sensors which added time but the data quality was way better. for survey grade stuff especially i wouldnt try to combine it on one airframe unless you have a very specific reason and a lot of time to dial it in.

the Inspire 3 top-mount accessory port is actually interesting for some of this but i havent seen anyone do a production-ready dual capture setup on it yet outside of DJIs own ecosystem stuff. theres a guy on one of the facebook groups who was experimenting with a lidar puck up top while running the zenmuse below but i think he ran into interference issues or something, thread kind of went cold. honestly for client work where deliverables matter i think two birds is just the answer even if it feels like overkill. you can bill the extra flight time anyway and the data is clean.