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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.
Ah yes. The Buttered Cat drive. Actually works too. Got a car powered with that very drive. Well, I did, until those bastards at the oil companies crushed it into a tiny tiny cube.
Simple premise of the Buttered Cat drive is based in elementary physics. First, go and butter a slice of toast, then drop it on the floor. Note that it will, without err, land butter-side-down.
Next, obtain a cat. Fling it. Observe how it persists on landing feet-side-down.
Simple deduction would see that by attaching a buttered slice of toast to the back of a feline, would simply spin in place several feet above the ground.
Harnessing this energy is simple. All one needs is multiple cats and multiple slices of buttered toast. And string. Mustn't forget the string. Place the Buttered Cats into an enclosure, and marvel as it rises from the ground. Attach a ship around it, and voila! One flying saucer. To power this ship, tack shag carpet to the interior of the enclosure and draw the static electricity from within.
This explains the bright blue lights and humming/buzzing/PURRING that UFOs emit.
Try it yourself. Its great fun!
Teeee-quila! baby, Ten shots tonight. Let's try for twelve before I hit the floor. Heh...
Why is it when I hit ^R that ZSH calls me a cocksucker?
I know this is real stuff, I've seen it done before. The thing that scares my is if you read the page you see some stuff refering to "electrogravatics" stuff, i.e., pseudoscience. Can anyone really provide a reasonable explaination as to why we get this effect? I notice in the illustrations that the ground is shown as reference voltage (0V), while the craft is at 30kV. Isn't this just simply Coulombs Law at work?
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
About a year ago I built a UFO and let it fly away at about 1am. It was brightly lit and flew eastward, and it went way out of sight. I'd give exact details, and link to the photos, since I'm sure many people would LOVE to know the details. I heard some neighborhood children in the distance (I didn't know they were there prior to lift off) have a total fit after they noticed it. So the effect was that I spent about an hour rolling around in my yard laughing so hard I was unable to breathe.
Anyway, I'm a little concerned that releasing something that size that flies away on it's own and goes who-knows-where might be breaking some law somewhere. It certainly wasn't going to stay airborn forever and I know if it had come down and damaged someone's property (or unlikely, but possibly injured someone)I would be held liable if I could be linked to it (also unlikely...but I'm not taking any chances).
Anyway, the point is -- Making UFOs that fly away and freak people out isn't new. It's probably the cause of most UFO reports. It's also a whole lot of fun.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Appeal to ignorance - Claiming that what has not been proved false must be true.
Observational selection - Enumeratioon of Favorable Circumstances -- aka you have pointed out the hits of the past but have not pointed out the failiurs.
Non sequitur -- you make points that are not realy related in any form other than they are in the same feild (aviation) but assume that because it happend one way in the past that it will happen again the same way in the future.
Ascii artist &
I skimmed through the the NASA patent in question.
... not my crappy dead 14" CTX.
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
Kevin
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?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Sorry to respond to my own (once again typographically challenged) post.
However, thinking about it, assuming the lifter is using the AC from the horizontal monitor sweep, what you are probably seeing is an induced dipole effect.
This is nothing new. Take a balloon. Rub it against the carpet (charge it up statically). Stick it to the wall.
Why does the balloon stick?
The static electricity induceds dipoles in the wall. These dipoles attract the balloon.
In the case of the lifter, the + wire on top and the grounded foil forms a dipole. This dipole induces a mirror image dipole in the ground beneath it. However, if the AC is near at frequency that is in the general vicinity of the horizontal sweep frequency of the monitor, the induced dipole in the surroudings (table/ground/floor) will be out of phase with the regular dipole. This will cause a repulsive force.
As it stands though, the lifter is highly not optimized. The frequencies could be optimized which in turn would give you a stronger force (or conversely require a lower voltage power supply). The lifter layout could be redone to for a strong dpole moment or made out of studier materials (as the system currently is put together, the force would be very very weak).
Here is the difference between science and pseudo-science. The above is _testable_.
- The device should exhibit power supply frequency dependent characteristics. Notably there should be frequencies ranges exhibiting repulsive and attractive forces and these the ranges are dictated by the speed of light and the effective distance of the induced dipole.
- The device should be sensitive to the surroundings. i.e. it would have different operational characteristics if you operated it starting from a wooden table or a metal table.
No dubious "electrogravitics" required.
Kevin
You then have a bunch of slashdot-imposed link boxes [lanl.gov], etc., but no actual links.
The space.com article starts off with "NASA's Controversial Gravity Shield Experiment Fails to Produce" (my emphasis). They also comment "What has dogged the research, experts say, is that Podkletnov failed to adequately document his findings." This seems to be a bad habit of people proposing these sorts of exotic, revolutionary theories.
Ning Lee's proposal, which is not yet accepted anyway, isn't true antigravity. It's just another kind of motor. We can create "antigravity" by exclusion of magnetic field lines from a superconductor, in that this generates lift. Wait, wait, we can create "antigravity" by running air past a suitably shaped wing!
On the other hand, true antigravity -- say, a shielding of gravity's effects -- requires a complete change in how we perceive the laws of nature. I'm all for that, but not until you show me the peer-reviewed, well-documented, empirical evidence. I don't buy into the bullcrap conspiracy theories that act like the physicists of the world would engage in sinister collaboration to suppress wild new results. The fact is, most physicists would love to hear about easily-accessible fundamentally new physics.
But first they need proof. And so do I.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Of all places, I would have expected their to be some more objective people here on slashdot. Largely, what I've seen is a bunch of people with little or no scientific training calling this guy names and making light of his experiments. There was another time people did that, in the middle ages. Luckly, this thing called the Enlightenment happened and the scientific method allowed for the discovery of most of the luxuries the ignorant masses (of which I see nicely represented here) take for granted. There have already been lots of references to powered flight, but others, like electricity, AC vs. DC power, the automobile, etc all have examples through history.
I could justify you and I could stomach this crap if he was asking for investors or money. He's not. He has a genuinely interesting effect, he has indicated that here's how you do an INDEPENDANT VERIFICATION, and he has also proposed a number of experiments that can be done to see if there is something interesting here. Nowhere does he claim anything other than a interest in the science and experimentation with high voltage effects. Like you people do when you experiment with the kernel - after all, you're just a bunch of fools when there's tried-and-true existing kernels on the market, right? That's sarcasm, for the challenged.
I have actually built one of these things on a different design years ago. This is a well known ion-engine concept. The problem is the power suuplies needed to make it work in any kind of practical application. The effect I designed for was a air turbulence effect that used the high voltage to ionize air molecules and accllerate them downward. That is why I suspect that the devices have problems in humid situations. BUT YOU COULD EXPERIMENT AND PROPOSE THIS. There is an experiment that rules out an external field, the faraday cage one. You could try to reduce the air pressure and see if the effect drops linearly, or blow compressed air at it to try and reduce lift, or even put it in a vacuum chamber. BUT THOSE ARE EXPERIMENTS!
Calling this guy a crackpot without any attempt to verify his well laid out experiments is a disgrace. If you see a problem with his experiments or apparatus, tell us. Or if you care that much, replicate his experiment. If it fails, post your results. I might get bored and try some of this sometime. But the information is all there!
Kudos to this guy for showing the spirit of backyard experimentation, and shame on you mods for promoting the kind of crap that's in the parent.
..don't panic