Hey Roger!
Awesome stuff, flying drones with LoRa sounds like a great idea, we always talked about drone deployments, but never considered controlling the drones using a LoRa radio.
For your chat device, you might be interested in checking out the Grey Cat collective,
https://greycat.co , they have a hardware kit that sounds similar to what you are describing. Unfortunately, I think their code is still closed source and last time I played with it (August 2018), it was only demo and the keyboard was not yet implemented.
Alternatively, you could build your own box around a Disaster Radio. While it wasn't designed to have a screen, I'm sure you could adapt its code to print messages to a built-in screen (probably an SPI OLED is your best best) and take input from a physical keyboard (or a push button matrix?). I'd recommend getting in touch with sudomeshers in Oakland who could send you a Disaster Radio prototype to play around with. If you are able to get a prototype, I'd be happy to walk you through the code, since I'm the one mostly responsible for it's current state.
Good luck!!!
-grant (@paidforby)