Build Your Own UFO

Are Belong To Us dept. writes "Guess where the billions of dollars in the super-secret Air Force program are going? Build your own for $10 in parts. They're popularly called "Lifters" and they're flying (one of many videos) without engines and can hover in place. Admit it, it would have been cool to see a UFO. Never mind if you didn't, because now you can build your own (another, step-by-step instruction, here), like lots of people around the globe already have, for $10 in parts. A number of patents surround the technology, some by NASA. The best introduction site to all of this is Jean-Louis Naudin's site. There goes your sleep - this is fascinating stuff. ;-)" Any website that uses the phrase "a simple 30KV power supply" is okay in my book.

Comments

Re:Ah... Antigravatics

[PurpleFloyd]

Your post is so riddled with errors, it's hard to decide where to begin. First of all, it's not "magnitizam", it's "magnetism". To my knowledge there exist no currently working magnits. Magnets, on the other hand, are quite common.

As far as the electrogravatics, I don't have any URLs handy for that one, but I believe it has to do with exploiting the connection between electricity and gravity. People are working on this because of the unified field theory that brings together the different forces like electritcy, magnitizam, gravity, and acceleration. The link between electritcy and magnitizam is already apparent and we exploit it (motors, solonids, maglev trains). This has now become known as the electro-weak force and gravity is due to the strong force. The strong and weak forces are what hold the nucleus of atoms together. And I think that it's the 6 flavors of quarks that form the forces.

My oh my, this is where it starts to get hairy. There are four "fundamental" forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity. The strong force holds protons to protons, and acts on a very small scale, even in the atomic realm. This is why the nucleus of an atom is so dense: the protons have to be right up next to each other to hold the nucleus together, otherwise electromagnetic repulsion takes over. The weak force holds protons to neutrons, and neutrons to neutrons. Electromagnetism and gravity people are probably familar with. IIRC, the electromagnetic, strong and weak forces have been shown to have the same roots and are very similar at extreme energies (like a few milliseconds after the big bang). Gravity is still quite a mystery on the atomic scale: its effect is so small it is very hard to measure. Thus, a "theory of everything" that could relate all the fundamental forces of the universe is considered the Holy Grail by many in physics. Unfortunately, it seems just as hard to obtain as a certain chalice was for the Crusaders ;-).

Re:Ah... Antigravatics

[gilroy]

See, the problem with beginning a post like

Your post is so riddled with errors, it's hard to decide where to begin.

is that, then, you have to get everything right yourself, or you look like an idiot. Alas,

The weak force holds protons to neutrons, and neutrons to neutrons.

isn't so. The strong force binds nucleon to nucleon -- so p-p, n-n, and p-n are all strong interactions. IIRC (and it's been a while, so no guarantees), the weak nuclear force changes the "flavor" of heavy leptons and quarks, leading to instability. (Of course, the Standard Model has unified EM and weak into electroweak.)

Re:so what

[gilroy]

Blockquoth the poster:

Any real scientist or expert in physics knows anti gravity is possible, they also know our government most likely have anti gravity,

Well, that's a sweeping generalization that isn't true. Assuming by "antigravity" you mean an actual fundamental interaction, I haven't met a single "real scientist" who believes in it strongly. ("Antigravity" meaning "opposing gravity" is trivial... jump, for example.) Many believe there might be something fundamental -- for instance, a difference in how antimatter and matter couple to the gravitational field, leading antimatter to have a repulsive compoent to its gravitational interaction -- but as far as I've ever heard, no peer-reviewed paper has ever been published claiming to have seen that effect experimentally.

Re:First!

[Doctor K]

I skimmed through the the NASA patent in question.

It's not a reactionless drive. The propellant photons. The patent proposal seems to be a variant of an end-fire phased array antenna. (Or a less sophisticated version of laser propulsion system.)

However, if you have a background in propulsion, you are probably aware that photons are terrible for thrusters. It you want to spit off directed momentum, photons give you the _least_ bang for your buck. Photons are classically massless and only give you h_bar omega / c momentum. Only if your are talking about hard gamma do photons even start to compete with propellants of current rockets.

As far as the lifter page is concerned:

What is the damn frequency of the power supply? Heck, I have all the equipment (even a dead 14" monitor for salvage). I would build it for fun.

Monitors use both a high DC voltage for acceleration of electron beams and an two sawtooth-ish AC components for sweeping the beam (vertical at 70Hz and horizontal at 100KHz). Is this a purely DC phenomena or should I tap the sweep signals?

All in all, he didn't give sufficient details to replicate his work so it sets my BS detector humming. Or more likely, if I replicate it and it doesn't work, I'll probably be told that only magical NEC monitors from the mysterious Hokkaido forest manufacturing plant work ... not my crappy dead 14" CTX.

Kevin

Dean Drive, anyone?

[dpbsmith]

Remember the Dean Drive, a frequent subject of articles and editorials in Astounding (or was it Analog then) in the sixties? Dean had discovered that Newton's laws of motion were only approximate, f didn't equal ma, there was a tiny little high-order nonlinear term in it... which meant that big, massive, unbalanced, counter-rotating linear weights could generate a tiny little linear component. Without any reaction mass.

There were all sorts of photographs of the device in action. They were all marred by little details. Somehow it could never quite lift its own weight, although a simple scaling up would, of course, do it. The device was always tethered, or on a surface...

The best one was the before-and-after shot of it sitting on a bathroom scale. When turned off, the scale showed one reading. When turned on, the scale showed a lighter reading. Unfortunately the pointer was a little, well, BLURRED, but the accompanying text vouched that there was a net weight reduction and that the camera had not just captured an extreme swing of an oscillating pointer.

Whatever... HAPPENED to the Dean Drive? You don't suppose it could have been a fraud, do you?