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I used to use (and still own) one of those PowerBook G3 laptops where you could swap the media bay for a CD-RW, a floppy, or a Zip drive, or just more batteries. With modern Li-ion battery technology in both the main battery and the media bay, that thing ran for 20+ hours. It was amazing.

Many Dell Latitudes can also accommodate a media bay battery. I had a D830 with a 1920x1200 screen and loved having the 9-cell + LiPo combo.

The 15" rMBP has a 100 watt hour battery and is a lot smaller than that.

I strongly suspect that the weight of the battery that fills the volume of the DVD-RW drive is much greater than the weight of the drive, which would violate your initial condition. So which constraint do you break to satisfy your requirements?

Neither, I did not literally mean use the dvdrw drive space only, but keep the same chassis thickness and dimensions, much smaller motherboard, no 2.5" drive space (m.2 SSD only), fill the rest of the volume with battery. It would probably get a 12 hour low CPU load battery life even with the big screen.