So it occurred to me that I really dont need to have all addresses assigned via DHCP and indeed, that would suck. The only one I need is the immediate node attached to the ARDrone to have contact with the outside world and get a DHCP address, everyone else can have a static IP, including the eth0 port on the same node as wlan0 attached to ARDrone. Of course, name resolution and routing are fuXXored  there so it requires manual routing and changes to /etc/network/interfaces as indicated in the amended build instructions.