Slashdot Mirror
The End of Solotrek
bobetov writes "For those of us fed up with gravity and gridlock, the Solotrek XFV personal VTOL aircraft has been the real IT. A Segway is a nice scooter and all, but this thing can fly. But it all comes down to dollars in the end, and, with a recent test-flight accident and a missed milestone, Trek Aerospace is calling it quits."
The skycar is coming along nicely.
I'd been following their website for the last few years and really thought they were going to do it. It looked so cool and seemed like a great commuter vehicle.
I am not a resource! I am a free man!
Why does it always seem like it's the most worthwhile projects that are forced to come to an end by lack of funding? Who decides that these endeavors aren't important enough? Humanity in general is held back by large corporations that edge out the smaller and perhaps more innovative smaller companies (after all, you have to start somewhere, so new ideas are destined to start small). Sure would have been nice to have one of those...
Thank god these aircrafts won't be on -or above- our roads anytime soon. It is difficult enough to drive in two dimensions. I would not want to be anywhere near such a craft when it runs out of fuel ;-)
where's all that Karma?
It all comes down to math and physics. Anyone who doesn't think so will get killed by those who know it.
Could have something to do with it: Flying car ..or maybe not.
Slashdot has a very, err, focused audience. ...
We like free things and explosions! ;)
As far as being a member of the living population
In December of 2000, Trek Aerospace was awarded $5,100,000 in development funding from DARPA over a thirty-six month period.
WHAT? 5 million dollars??? People wonder why the budget of the US is in such disorray, and we're throwin 5 million dollars at a personal flight vehicle?
The Second:
What benefit would a personal flying machine have? Aren't something like 90% of the recorded aircraft fatalities a direct result of personally owned aircraft? Are we trying to increase the death rate?
The Third:
Look at the design, how the hell could you use this for defense? It looks to me like the hands would have to be constantly working on keeping the damned thing in the air, how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?
Basically I see this as yet another clusterfuck of American tax dollars of entirely too well funded bureaucratic departments pissing money away. When is it exactly we're going to start acting like adults and not war happy mongers?
I commend DARPA for eliminating funding to this project, now what other bullshit programs can they cut?
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The Flying Cars that we were all supposed own are nearly 3 years late and this is the best they can come up with?
Man oh man..
Trolling is a art,
A loud sad sound was heard coming from the Darwin Awards website.
Look at the design, how the hell could you use this for defense?
Not a big fan of jump jets on your mecha? (kidding, kidding.. *grin* )
It is pure research. Never a bad thing. Had this been a 'show me a profit this quarter' deal, I'm sure it never would have left the ground. DARPA is one of the few places left to foot the bill for things that may be nothing more than a stepping stone for the next big thing.
I suspect it is a lot like flying a helecopter... it takes a long time before the machine goes where you think. A bit of PIC time and improved stability, there would be time to aim. Not sure what you would fire, but anyhow...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Can I see your invention?
Oh I'm sorry you dont have one?, I mistook your ranting for 'Don't give your money to things that might work but we wont know unless they're given money'.
Besides, how would you feel if you cut a project that was technologically advanced but your short-sightedness thought that it could never work and gave it to another country who then had a technological advantage? America is reknowned for doing such things.
Be you Admins? nay, we are but lusers!
The design seems kind of less-than-ideal.
There is a personal helicopter already in development in Japan that is fair superior in design, and has redundant backups for safety. It was posted here before...
how the hell could you use this for defense?
Good for scouting or recon, or extremely rapid platoon movement. The Air Cavalry concept has proven effective, and this would give each soldier his or her own "horse".
Not saying it would work out, but I can see why DARPA would be interested.
Wow, great flamebait piece.
Of course, I'm sure you couldn't have some gyroscopics and chips control the machine while your other hand hits a trigger button.
And of course it would horrific if everybody gave up their super safe cars for those death trap flying vehicles.
And my god, 5 whole million dollars was WASTED on this too! Thank god they didn't spend any more or they wouldn't have been able to get the leather toilet seat upgrade for the space station.
Dipshit. How did you get so far as to have a +1 bonus?
>What benefit would a personal flying machine have?
Umm, ariel urban combat perhaps?
>Are we trying to increase the death rate?
Only of the enemy.
>how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?
HUD with a weapons system control on one of the sticks. This is like asking how a pilot can use the stick and fire a weapon at the same time.
Nitpicking aside, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the strap-on helicopter concept, but just because SoloTrek can't do it doesn't mean its necessarily a bad idea.
Unfortunately, it was just at first glance.
I don't see how personal flight vehicles for the masses could ever come to fruition. It's been a struggle to reduce highway fatalities due to people losing control over a vehicle capable of moving over an essentially planar surface. Now, how about the problems associated with the ability to travel in the third dimension. Running out of fuel while in midair - you splat down hard, instead of coasting to stop. Collisions with trees, buildings, fogbanks, aircraft, including fellow SoloTrekkers, etc. Imagine the possibilities opening up for ordinary criminals and terrorists. If the ultimate goal is the rapid conveyance of people intra and inter city, we need to: 1. Use massive tax incentives to encourage working from home. Jet Blue, for instance, largely does away with call centers by having its reservation agents receive the calls at home. 2. Construct efficient new light rail systems. 3. Encourage a new generation of small ultraefficient jet aircraft to ferry small loads of passengers on the less popular routes. There has been an upsurge in fractional jet ownership programs, with ensuing competition driving down prices. Big airlines and big planes are showing their age. It's time for new thinking in the post-jet age.
The U.S. government has a yearly budget of one trillion dollars, and over forty percent of that goes to the millitary.
At least this could've been used by citizens.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Comment removed based on user account deletion
LOL.
You guys have any idea how much taxpayers gave Enron last year? Something like billons of dollars. Oh, they went Chap 11 because they were crooks? Well, we're giving them 125 million again this year.
Open your eyes.
I'll just get a loan against my .com stock and...
"It looks to me like the hands would have to be constantly working on keeping the damned thing in the air, how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?"
Last I looked, most popular fighter jets took both hands to fly as well.
-9mm-
Moller International is still developing it's Skycar. We'll have our flying cars yet!
And the brethren went away edified.
These things wouldn't even work if they were all controlled by some kind of ubercomputer to keep them in line, nevermind if they were just go-n-fly's completely at the whim of the operator.
A list, if you will, of things I never wan't to see coming my way, especially from above, and a few other things I don't want to see, either.
1. Idiot hot rodders whamming around over your head and between the trees.
2. Slashdotters who had cracked the codes on the ubercomputer, going seriously against the grain.
3. Low maintainence goobers who won't keep their rig in proper flying order.
4. Bank robbers (or worse), fleeing the scene of the crime, guns blazing.
5. People who drop things.
6. Horny losers, staring at some girl's butt, from just below treetop level.
7. Idiots on the ground with guns pointed at the sky and a psychotic grin on their face.
8. The bad eyesight brigade, especially when near overhead powerlines.
9. People who forget to check the gas gauge before driving down to the store.
10. Folks altered chemically, including the chemical alcohol.
11. Heart attack victims.
12. People who all of a sudden regurgitate dinner, or perhaps didn't wear their depends.
13. Suicidal types (including the overly religious ones).
Thirteen's enough, yes?
Is it fascism yet?
I'm confussed, are you anti-american or anti-american tax money going to research?
This reads like one of the many trolls here, and I'll hand it to ya, it's so well written even I'm responding. Let me go through point by point, this I'm sure we'll both enjoy.
1) $5,100,000 is chump change for R&D. When you get out into the real world you will be amazed how much money is getting thrown around to study the amount of time it takes for Ketchup to be poured out of a bottle. (I'm not making this up, there really was a federal grant provided to a research project like this.)
2) This is just insane. If you hate americans, why don't you want us killing ourselves with our personal aircrafts? You know I bet the % of american auto acidents in personal vechicles vs commercial/public transportation is about 90% to. Doesn't mean we're not going to drive to work tommarow. You give us personal helicopters and we'll be flying them drunk, I assure you. We got places to go people to see and your % doesn't mean a good goddamn to the impressive profit you'd see selling a personal aircraft like this.
But wait, I know... that's just the evil american capitalist in me. Argh I am such a friggen infadel! Would someone blow me up already?
3) This is also insane, wtf was I thinking when I called this well written. Nevermind, I must have been looking at something else entirely. This 3rd argument makes it pretty obvious you didn't even read the story and are making shit up as you go.
Pick your favorite, Steven King/Hawking Dead at 55, or the ever present "Fucking Americans all you care about is __________ when there are people starving in the world!". Personally I like the trolls that argue over which one Steven should be trolled about being dead.(common trolls where's your solidarity?)
Did anyone else see the title and think of an exercise machine? It struck me as strange that I'd be seeing health & fitness articles on /.
would it really be all that useful? Don't get me wrong, it's veyr cool. I just can't see what good this thing would have been. It has about as much potential as those jet packs from the 70's and 80's, which isn't much.
Would I want to fly in one? Sure, who wouldn't. Frankly, I think DARPA's money could be going to more useful things, though. Sorry if that bothers anyone.
> ariel urban combat
For a mermaid, she is one tough cookie.
> how the hell could you fire a weapon etc. with no hands?
Could she use her fin? The seashell bra?
They're just trying to cover up the fact that they've been bought out by COBRA, a ruthless international terrorist organization determined to rule the world!
Want proof? Here it is! They've got blueprints and everything.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
... couple this with powered exoskeleton body armor with a micro fission power source..
Whee!
If they could use them in some of the current roles of expensive to operate police or search helicopters, 5 million would be chump change.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
How bout' me and a few friends swing by on our solotrek xfvs and take you babes to see the Lord of Rings?
After that we can head to my parents house and y'all can check out my autographed copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, You've Invented The Train.
OK, time to share a personal experience. This happened my last year at UVa. Every engineering student was required to do a 4th year thesis, something that was held out as a matter of pride in the rigor of the engineering program. Mine was some software that tracked the edge of the roadway using splines. The justficication for it was that one day we'd have real-time MI that could drive cars, and that the technique might be a useful component of that.
Another student was designing a "volkscopter" personal flight vehicle.
Well, we all had to give presentations (including a Q & A) during the development phase, and I made the Trent Lott-like blunder of bringing up the fact that such things were routinely advertised in Popular Mechanics when I posed a question.
We were all so busy, I never got around to settling this issue with people. I just got some hardball questions during my Q & A from students sympathetic to the other guy, which I was able to dodge. The thesis project taught me as much about politics as it did about engineering!
To the student who was designing the volkscopter, I apologize. There was no need to drag you into what I was discovering.
First, I realized that asking an entire class of engineering students to do an "original" research project is just ridiculous. Truly original ideas are like winning lotto tickets.
Second, the whole idea of self-driving cars is just ridiculous. Why not just put us all back on trains? Well, we subsidize roads way too much. We're plunking $1 billion into the Springfield Interchange near where I live, and although I must say it has added some aesthetic flair to Springfield, it won't solve gridlock. Contrast this with how much money Amtrack needs to stay afloat. I don't think Amtrack was even asking for $1 billion, wasn't it $900 million? Regardless, the point is that if we subsidized rail at the same rate per passenger and freight mile that we do highways, things would, in my opinion, be a lot better.
So, at some point it dawned on me that my thesis was really just inventing the train. I thought to myself, Congratulations Mr. Marthouse, you've invented the train. Of course I never disclosed this to my profs. I wanted to graduate. My only form of protest was to refuse to change the title of my thesis to "An application of rational uniform bezier splines for edge detection in an automated navigation system" from "Snakes: an improved method for highway line following". I swear I'm not making this up. The prof was really disappointed I wouldn't give it an important sounding title.
What does this have to do with personal flight? Well, it's only safe if you build a train-like system where the vehicle "locks on" to a program and the user doesn't actually have to pilot the vehicle.
People will not accept this in a personal flight system until they accept it in a ground transportation system. If you try to do it in a ground system, they will ask themselves the same question I asked: why not just use trains.
The answer, like many things, has more to do with politics than engineering.
--Steven Marthouse, UVa ENGR '93.
p.s., the story of my "greening" after graduation has some interesting turns, but you'll have to buy my book. :)
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If you're interested in other programs that the government is funding, check out this and that. You might get funding for your very own bullshit idea!
must... stay... awake...
I am a student pilot and I know the time and commitment that it takes to learn how to fly.
The "powered lift" products like this and the mollar sky car use computer control to vastly simplify flying. Controls dont really need to be much more complex than "go up, go down, turn left, turn right" if the computer controls the power as well as control surfaces.
Today small aircrafts are just now starting to adopt "FADEC" to reduce three knobs on the dashboard just to control power, to only one. Big deal. FADEC systems are similar to the engine computer that your 10 year old car has.
Due to the threat of product liability lawsuits, it is very hard to get investment dollars for any type of new aircraft or flight critical system, let alone something as radical as this.
In Aviation, change happens slowly, oh so slowly. Personal VTOL will happen, but maybe not during my lifetime.
I'll take you up on that....I LOVE jumpjets....they could be the uber-weapon if used correctly.
Yes, there isn't much protection for the operator, but imagine 75-100 of these things swarming around some "target of interest"...
Not quite as "remote control" as the Preditor or Global Hawk...but more lethal because the guys could jump out of their suits once they arrive on the scene.
This is something that DARPA should be funding, not John Poindexter looking at your credit card purchases!
It's too bad too, I've seen other cool projects get killed by the Dept. of Defense too.
I imagine that this technology will be scooped up for pennies by one of the big defense contractors. This is really too cool and too adaptable to pass up for the soldier in the field.
I haven't read the article or anything, but
that sucks.
Segway costing $6000 or $2000 or $10000 or however much it is sucks too. I will buy a car at any of those price points, I'm sorry to say, before I get a Segway.
They should make the Segway go faster and allow them on the roads. That thing has got to be able to do 20 MPH, which is faster than most cyclists. I dont think "it" takes up significantly more lane space than a bicycle, either.
Dammit, I want Segway to kill commuter cars. But it's not happening! Hey Segway, give me one for free and I'll ride it around Seattle for ya!
The development of the tank was plagued with setbacks and the original inventors were brushed off by the american war office, only to be adopted by the brits.
Even then, the program really didn't get started until after a lot of patriotic young men were were killed on the fields of the first world war.
If we believe the website (especially the third link in the slashdot article) then the solotrek flew, there are two prototypes capable of controlled hover (one of which is slightly damaged in a test flight accident due to a problem with the test rig and not the vehicle) and all of it is available for cash.
If there is a real need for a single occupant exosuit flyer (for instance, making insertions into urban areas and avoiding the whole black hawk down kinda scenario) then somebody will fund it.
Whether its the EU, some asian power who has engineers who work for nothing or Somebody Else.
If the next developer waits until after the solotrek team scatters, then the resulting machine will not be a solotrek. But then again a Panzer is not the tank envisiged by the engineers at the Holt Company USA either.
Go peddle your hate speech somewhere else! ;)
"it'll never work!" Rocky
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
There are many reasons people may run out of fuel in a SoloTrek: 1. A newbie Solotrek user is so excited, that they really don't monitor the fuel gauge too closely. 2. Defective or inaccurately calibrated fuel gauge. 3. Procrastination about refilling the gas. 4. Too inebriated/intoxicated to monitor fuel, or to care. I heard someone call up Car Talk, an NPR show in which you pay $50 to ask "click and clack" tech questions about automotive issues. A somewhat distressed woman complained about her hubby who kept a jerrycan full of gas in the trunk because he kept procrastinating in going to a fuel station, to the point of running out and getting stuck. In addition to the list of issues with a personal flight device, I should have included catastrophic mechanical failure. Although one would hope that in most cases, the blades would sort of "autorotate" enough to bring the Solotrekker down for a controlled crash.
Under the Purchase Skycar link, they say this:
As a result of the recent successful hovering flights of the M400 Skycar, Moller International is once again accepting $5,000 deposits to secure delivery positions for our M400 Skycar. Your deposit is entirely refundable and will bear interest at an annual interest rate of 5%
Woa, 5%! That is better than you can get sticking your money in a Money Market account at the bank. Plus, the deposit is fully refundable! I gotta do this.
What calculator will let you type this in exactly as you have written it?
The Solotrek was at best, an ill-conceived concept with many drawbacks and a long list of flaws that doomed it from the start.
Firstly, it offered few real benefits over earlier options such as the Hiller flying platform.
Most of us will have seen archive footage of these platforms that were so stable that a regular foot-soldier (or man in the street) could learn to fly one in just a few short minutes.
Hiller poured a lot of money into these devices in the 1950s but ultimately they were deemed to be impractical for numerous reasons -- most of which are shared by the SoloTrek.
Actually, the Hiller might even have been superior in a number of areas -- such as being far simpler in design and construction. Remember -- when you double the complexity of something you reduce its reliabilty by more than an equivalent amount. When my life is dependent on a piece of technology, I want that technology to be as simple and reliable as possible!
I plan to build my own flying platform when time/funds allow but have no illusions that it will be anything other than a curiosity. There are certainly no plans to turn it into the personal transporter of the 21st century.
Moller's Sky Car falls into the same category as the SoloTrek -- it's an overly complicated, hideously expensive and completely impractical device.
That the SoloTrek and Moller Skycar managed to get any external funding amazes me.
And, if you're interested in personal VTOL transport then check out this ambitious amateur jet-pack project which may be very ambitious, but is also astonishingly impressive in its engineering.
Teleportation really is the future of transportation. To heck with all of this personal flight crap. :P
Your deposit is entirely refundable and will bear interest at an annual interest rate of 5%
They left out, "...unless we go bankrupt, in which case you will lose all your money, but that's HIGHLY UNLIKELY WE ASSURE YOU!"
"And like that
I dis-agree.
A train has set stops, set routes and set times. All this makes it very akward to use. As a train commuter in a previous life I hate the bloddy things.
Now automate the car so they can drive closer, faster and safer. All the problems of that train are eliminated.
The US would love automated cars. It's shiny, modern, safe, convienient. I can see the info commercials now.
Fully autonomous models have flown, these things could be safer than cars but you would have to give up control to the computer. A fully self flying/onboard controlled with video. It's expensive and a ways out, but we will probably fly in one. Well, not the model. Does leave the hands free to drop things, un-tethered cell phones would be very illegal.
In December of 2000, Trek Aerospace was awarded $5,100,000 in development funding from DARPA over a thirty-six month period.
;-0
I don't know about the USA but when I applied for a $30K R&D grant here in New Zealand, it cost me about $35K in time and effort just to file all the paperwork!
Suffice to say I haven't bothered applying for another (even thought the first application was successful).
Such grants appear to only be practical when you're a big enough organization that you can have staff dedicated to the full-time processing of all the forms, requests, reports and other bits of bureacracy that are required to meet all the criteria.
But hey, some nice person I've never heard of before sent me an email the other day telling me that I qualify for a government grant. I think their name was Ima Spamma or something
Another Star Trek series nipped in the bud.
If personal aircraft ever become economically viable, you can bet that they will be even more strongly regulated than current aircraft.
The whole airplane crash kills celebrities is getting a bit old so they're recycling the idea with a new twist you see..
Welcome to the world of REAL innovation. The reason this project "failed" was it failed to be attractive to investors. This has NOTHING to do with the technical merits and possible future market value of such an invention (and family of inventions, as the tech matures). It has EVERYTHING to do with the fact that most investors are timid. Governments included.
Investors are so afraid of being burned by something that seems weird (ie: anything that has a remote chance of sparking a revolution in design) to take a long term risk on a great project. This happens with dumb and smart projects alike, without discrimination. And the ones that get funding are as likely to be losers as not.
The gatekeepers of capitol are painfully myopic when it comes to sponsoring cheap, smaller projects with lots of potential. There is more gravy in the big projects where everyone gets to fly around for a lot of meetings and stuff. Great, romantic, crazy enterprises are squashed with great vigour and relish by established interests. They are a threat to a stable mediocrity. Institutions crave control over a well-established domain, using a sort of clumsy Machiavellianism, a fumbling management of things: Reactive. Defensive. Mean.
Advancement and paradigm-shifting requires a tiger of innovative ideas, a world-breaker: the Market houses only those who worship the image of the tiger, while playing their monkey games on high, quite happy with their habit of competing for an unbroken world.
You know what the REAL problem these guys had? No interest from the U.S. Army. Too bad, they could have been wicked for forward observing. And I think fuel cells would have been a great "synergistic" technology. Maybe we'll see this again soon.
Or not. Screw innovation. I want a burrito.
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Regulated out of existance. Those fucking tethers are "required" by the FAA for experimental aircraft... for "safety" reasons. It's really interesting that they should be the cause of an "accident." I'm tellin ya folks, we aren't flying personal aircraft today because the powers that be have decided it allows too much freedom for joe blow who might decide to take a cruise over area 51. Your freedom - Regulated out of existance.
"Aren't something like 90% of the recorded aircraft fatalities a direct result of personally owned aircraft? " No.
"What benefit would a personal flying machine have?" I would have been far more difficult to get a liscence for this then a car. People would actually have to understand it, and prove they can opperate it in all contingencies before allowed to pilot one.
First off 5,000,000 isn't really that much for an R&D effort, espcially one that could of had this kind of payoff.
Second, this has a huge possible military benefit.
No not in combat, I mean logistic wise.
third, spin off from this could, in and of itself, had have a ice return(R&D wise).
Forth, it would have cost DARPA more to check out this possibility themselves, so it SAVED them money
Fifth, the govenment penny watchers are for more criticle about money, and understand the money side of risk analysis better then you ever will.
Sixth, The civillian use of this in a time of disaster would save many lives.
" Basically I see this as yet another clusterfuck of American tax dollars of entirely too well funded bureaucratic departments pissing money away."
I am sure many people would have said the same thing about the internet when it was being funded by the government.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it seems to me that this would be a company that larry Ellison would love...
He already has a Harrier... why not fund this wearable version....
Crap - he could even devote resources (like coders) to a project like this.
"The answer, like many things, has more to do with politics than engineering."
you get the train to stop in front of my house and pick me up, and then drop me off in front of my work, I'll take it. That, is an engineering issue.
People fly planes without "locking on" all the time. Of course it is more risky, so you have to actualy:
a) be well trained
b) fully understand the vehical
c)spend lots off money being trained.
Those write there would decrease the amount of possible flyers.
Seld driving vehicals are possible now, in fact a certian truck building company has one that works perfectly in all tests, including hazards.
This issue is emotional for most people, and political for truck driving unions.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
also note that One Trillion = 1000 Billion. 1 Billion = 1000 million. So One Trillion looks like: 1,000,000,000,000.00.
so:
1,000,000,000,000.00 / 5,000,000 = 1/50,000TH of ONE PERCENT.
(I think - If my math is right... late+beer doesnt help.)
anyway - thats is NOTHING out of a trillion dollars. I dont think people actually realize how much money one trillion dollars actually is. the word trillion is more money than you could actually ever ever spend in your lifetime. 5 mil on something likethis is a good thing.
Would you rather 5M on this - or 5M in 2 minutes of bombing in Afganistan?
put it another way. If you made $100.00 per hour - it would take you 1,141,552.5 YEARS to make 1 Trillion Dollars.
I caught a train in to work on a regular basis for over a year. I arrived at the station, boarded the train, and paid the conductor when he came to issue my ticket.
What part of that scenario was inconvenient? I required no insurance, had no vehicle maintenance costs, no car payment, no fuel costs, never had to look for a parking place (I lived a 10 minute walk from the station), and I got to read the newspaper over a cup of tea and a biscuit during the trip. I could even nap on my way to work, if I desired (and sometimes did).
I love commuting by train. I don't need to commute at all now (I live a 15 minute walk from work), but I would certainly take the train for trips into the next town if it were available, and said town is only eight miles away. I hate the inconvenience of a car, a sinkhole for money, on wheels.
But I guess we all have our own definitions of convenience, right?
Okay, when it's raining and cold, and I want to rent a video at 10:30pm because I can't sleep, a car is fantastic. I'll acknowledge they do have their uses. I don't have a washer or dryer, and I take the car to the laundromat. Grocery shopping is easier with a car. But those are all near-destinations; for commuting, which by defintion means that your destination is not local, a train is ideal. Different tools for different uses.
How I long for the convenience of train service when I need to drive the 350+ miles to Seattle...
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
It really doesn't seem like there would be that many to me. It's slow and low altitude, so whoever was piloting one would be a sitting duck. I guess if it was really quiet it might have some utility for use at night. Still, it seems like a very cheap project in military terms - DARPA could've funded them for another decade for what they spent on R&D for the cupholders in the F-22.
Look at the classic helicopter controls. Both feet to control direction, one hand to control tilt of rotor, one hand controlling pitch of rotor blade, one hand to operate avionics (all those switches on various panels), and three eyes for watching the other choppers, the ground, and the damn fuel gauge.
Problem already solved. Many tracks. Main problem is the stations are so expensive (price is cheaper if the elevator and its cost is shared with neighboring buildings which can take advantage of the wheelchair accessibility and the second-story business space around the station -- some cities such as Minneapolis have the second floors woven together like a huge mall due to enclosed pedestrian bridges).
One would hope that it would be smart enough to check your current altitude against current fuel reserves, and smartly "slowdown". It would reduce your lift enough that you would be forced to land, but you wouldn't plummet like a rock.
Hm, so relinquishing control of direction of the vehicle of transportation is the only safe option.
You might be right, I'm not qualified to judge there one way or another, but driving cars seems (statistically) to be safe enough for most purposes these days. Yes, having to drive on roads is a step in the direction of having predetermined flight paths, but you can still go to the office the short way or the long way.
I come from Egypt, and trains here are so darn unsafe it's almost safer to strap yourself to a 747's left wing and hope for the best. Even cars are safer.
When taking all factors into consideration, I think only statistics can tell you what is safer; the guided train or the wild automobile ride.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Now they have finally performed some flight tests (only tethered so far), it is beginning to look realistic as a project. However from a techie viewpoint they have stated their vehicle contains 24 microprocessors and 24000 lines of machine code so proving the technical platform is an issue.
First, WTF did they use assembler? Almost anything else would have been easier to bench test. Can't they simulate the hardware to a large degree so the software is properly checked?
In any case, I'm glad to see the project progressing (and the price dropping). The only problem is that it will require a major change in the national flight infrastructure before it can be fully relised (the dumbed-down pilot concept requires a close communication with ATC to prevent collisions).
Most people have driving licenses but they don't have pilot's licenses. This is a simple barrier to acquiring the right to fly and allows a class of license to be created for those who only will fly in a ground supervised flight mode on an appropriately equipped aircraft.
As regards your sentiments, the train falls down once you arrive at the station. Is the public transport system infrastructure then good enough to get you to within a few hundred metres of your home? I live in Germany and even there, it can be a problem if you live outside a well connected town so people continue to use cars. As people currently have the right to drive where and how they want, rhey won't want to give up this right to join a 'road train', even though it would be safer on motorways.
An added issue is that in Germany, the autobahn remains one of the few places that are comparitively unregulated. The motor industry and the public would fight any attempt to force poeple into road trains. Even though Germany has one of the best public transport systems in the world. many still don't want to use it.
Those blades look like a heck of a meat grinder, I was suprised to hear about the accident and what caused it - then I took another look at the pictures. Why did they not put the fans behind a protective mesh or something.
There are lits of things in the basic design that appear to be missing, maybe this is why getting it from a prototype to a final commercial system was deemed to expensive.
Another though - where has the R&D gone? all the designs and research papers? It would be interesting to know who has 'ownership' after liquidation.
Reason I raise this is it could all just vanish, this stops the 'enemy' getting their hands on the design before the Military have made it a reality.
-Sliver-
We're plunking $1 billion into the Springfield Interchange near where I live
Clearly what you need is a monorail.
Interesting.
I quite like public transportation too; the daily commute to town on the double-decker trains here is a joy - affordable, cozy and spacious, safe to snooze thru and if you like, you can surf the web from your laptop (power plug provided underneath the cafe-style small tables between the seat groups).
Rural residents obviously don't have [easy] access to such, and for this reason a personal motor vehicle is required to get anywhere. Some people equate this with freedom and I can certainly see that POV.
However, car ownership and operation is freedom under responsibility, and the congestion and frequent crashes and accidents clotting up the super expensive highway systems and interchanges, are all imo pretty good indicators that human beings on the whole are imperfect motorists.
Environmental factors aside, I think we'll be stuck with the personal motor vehicle for a while yet. At some point cars will be entirely computerized 'drive-by-wire' systems with servos making the turns of the car telegraphed by the steering wheel which would be nothing more than a sophisticated version of the wheels you use for toy console racing games, no mechanical linking anymore. There may be safety hazards, but they can no doubt be overcome with redundancy planning.
When / if we ever get to this point, a new application will come up - special high speed lanes reserved for vehicles using this technology. The lanes will have magnets embedded in the road to help guide the automatic driving systems in the cars, so drivers only have to get into this lane and let go of the wheel and put it in automatic coast mode.
Then the computer in the car will drive the car along this virtual track and select a speed which will allow traffic in this lane to run smoothly and compress as many cars as are safe to operate, in the lane, by letting them run nearly bumper to bumper.
This could be safe, because the cars in the lane would all be computer controlled, and a 'column' of cars in these 90mph bumper-to-bumper convoys would have their acceleration and braking linked so that if any one vehicle is braking, all other vehicles behind it begins to brake in the same split second, with the same force.
When you wanna break out of this column, you just press a 'breakout button' and vehicles in front and behind will push away to allow you to merge out. With regular intervals there will be breakout lanes, also with magnets, which the car will come to automatically, and here the driver will be required to grab controls and merge into ordinary traffic, which may all one day be flowing according to computerized control for greatest possible safety.
One imagines the steering wheel could be entirely obsolete in time, replaced with pushbuttons to merge left or right. In-vehicle computers would negotiate merge slots and you'd get in lane when safe to do so. Traffic flow would be much more efficient than today.
Perhaps you select at tbe beginning of your trip where you're going, and computers will schedule slots in the traffic streams, and your entire cruise from end to end will be factored into the overall traffic flow before you even get on the road. You'd know to the second exactly when you'd arrive. Unmanned delivery vehicles and supersized 'freight trains' on the road could safely ride side by side with ordinary passenger vehicles.
Imagine that emergency vehicles could push through traffic automatically pushing away to make room, like waters parting from a speeding boat.
(We pray that Microsoft will be providing neither the software to run the autonomous, in-vehicle computers, nor the traffic management systems organizing the traffic patterns. )
That's not happening, and that's not happening because money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house. But the reason money was spent on a road, rather than a rail track, in front of your house, *IS* political, and has everything to do with the history of railroads in this country (and most other countries too), where the railroads were built by big corporations or by government in order to serve big corporations or government. The highway system, on the other hand, originally arose in the dirt tracks that people made as they followed each other in ox-pulled wagons across the country during the great migrations that populated everything west of the Atlantic Ocean. I.e., it originated in the PEOPLE. When the automobile came along, politics forced those tracks to be paved, but it was not until after WWI that government in the U.S. became involved in actually planning and designing roads and highways on a large scale, and the pattern of roads and highways = personal use, railroads = centralized corporate and government use, had already been set by that time.
There are indeed engineering problems inherent in personal rail transportation. The inability to "jump the tracks" (for, e.g., temporary overflow parkings in a cow pasture outside of big events) is one of the bigger ones, as is the scheduling problem (making sure that you don't have two rail cars going at each other on the same track, or intersecting at a street corner!). But the fact that personal use of the rail network is impossible at all is a political problem, not an engineering problem, a political problem bound inherently in the mentality of the people who own and operate railroads and in the mentality of the government bodies that oversee railroads, a political problem that has been true for over 150 years here in the United States and will continue to be true for the foreseeable future because of the vast investment sunk into highways for personal use.
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but this is much better http://www.geocities.com/babygurljulie/julie1.jpg
In my experience, the problem with sufficiently long commutes (we're talking DART here) is that slight asyncs with the system added up to huge penalties. What I mean by this is that to reach my job I had to follow this route:
1. Drive to train station
2. Take train to another station 3. (FIRST PENALTY) Wait for next train...10 minutes 4. Take train to next station 5. (SECOND PENALTY) Wait for bus...12 minutes 6. Take bus to transit center 7. (THIRD PENALTY) Wait for last bus...17 minutes
Total penalties: 39 minutes. Add to this the drawback of having to be very specific about what time I arrive and leave, not being able to drive anywhere for lunch, having a very hard limit on how late I can stay...it simply wasn't possible.
Thinking like a good economist, I thought that commuting makes a lot more sense for people for whose time is less valuable, i.e., if I work at a 7-11, and public transportation saves me from having to own a car, then it's a much better deal.
Anyhow, you missed the point of your own project. It seems to me that the main application would be for shipping rather than personal transport. Items are shipped in trucks rather than trains for the same reasons (asynchronicity, necessity of trucking at least a portion of the route). Trucking routes have almost exactly the needs you describe.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
Damn it Bill, help them out will ya?
Hindsight is always 20-20, and in this case, had we been favored with good weather, the incident wouldn't have happened. Interestingly, the accident had absolutely nothing to do with the aircraft - which performed flawlessly!
Oh, but wait, right before that:
Because we were focused on the hovering aircraft, we failed to notice that the wet (and heavy) overhead safety tethers were not being collected up correctly until it was too late.
IE- the accident, like most, was due to human negligence, and said negligence was not from pressure, but poor testing+safety procedures. Ie, nobody was watching the safety straps.
Further, most large ducted fan units have guards to keep people, birds, etc out of them. If it had been equipped with guards, the straps wouldn't have caught. Further, if they had utilized devices to reel in the slack(such is common on safety harness lines for workers), there wouldn't have been slack. Further, if they had designed shear bolts into it, there wouldn't have been as much catestrophic damage to the mechanicals. Further, if they had been carrying insurance...
The list goes on.
I see a WHOLE lot of negligence here. This isn't "wah wah, the weather broke our prototype and now big mean DARPA won't give us money!"
This is "we're a bunch of engineers who didn't have any safety, business, or risk management and now we fucked ourselves out of business with a minor accident."
That way if they do it again they'll be wiping themselves out instead of a family.
If they're caught driving anything else (Even sober, or in winter) they get automatic prison terms.
You're right. Both the Solo Trek and that Moller thingy are purely vectored-thrust, powered-lift aircraft designs. These kinds of things are the most unstable, fault-UNtolerant flying contraptions you could possibly conjure up. Hell, even a rocket is safer. This kind of aircraft is a fatal accident -guaranteed- just waiting to happen. They are very difficult to control and the total number of combinations and permutations of all possible operating parameters and various failure modes of all the components that keep such a craft in the sky would need a redundant beowulf cluster of redundant beowulf clusters to keep all the computations updated to stay on top of things in all circumstances the craft could possibly encounter in "flight"(sic). Don't even mention a BRS parachute to bail you out of trouble in one of these craft.... because when you blow the 'chute, you are no longer in control, you are just a passenger along for whatever ride you get... maybe into high-voltage power lines to get fried to an extra crispy crisp. And no, I'm not anti-personal-aviation at all...in fact I'm a pilot myself and I own a single engine small airplane that I fly all the time just for the fun of it. Give me a flying machine with a wing I can glide and stay in control of... or at the very least a rotorcraft that will give you at least one slim chance of autorotation to a controllable crashlanding.
It was used by the citizens.
When the government 'wastes' money it creates jobs and wealth. The philosophy that we'd all be better off if Uncle Sam would stop taxing us is sort of foolish. Uncle sam is redistibuting the wealth one way or another, I'd rather have him funding advanced research like this than feeding Ethiopians or putting more fat lazy cops on the street. Those 5.1 million dollars were put into the hands of honest, hardworking engineers and machinists.
I think Uncle Sam mismanages his money a lot, but there's fat that needs to get trimmed WAY before they start cutting into innovative research like this. The whole thing is sort of like the 'give a fish or teach to fish' debate; you can fork over loot to feed people who don't produce much for the whole of things, or you can invest the money into research that may or may not accomplish something AND will pay the mortgages of many people who DO produce their share of the GDP. It sounds like an asshole concept, but it actually staves off having a peasant-class population.
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The problem you describe is poor interconnections in the transit system. This is a symptom of poor system scheduling design. This is not a problem inherent in all transit.
Two solutions:
1. Schedule linking-trip times between lines to add up. The Bus/Tram would always meet with the other vehicle for quick tranfers at certain important junction points. No 12 minute wait for the bus at the light rail station or 17 minute wait at the transit center.
2. More direct service to reduce tranfers. An advantage Bus Rapid Transit is claiming over Light Rail is being able to run multiple lines over the same busway that enter and leave at diferent points. So many you get a bus or minibus that goes direct to the transit center without stopping.
Of course many commuter rail trains run people into a central downtown where if the office is somewhere in downtown, transit and walking and faster than a car at that point (in downtown) than driving and finding parking anyway. Another big advantage in commuter trains is that you can work/eat/sleep on the train, (none of which should be done while driving!) so you actually gain time.
I bet the buyer wouldn't want much publicity either.
On the other hand, if they sold one to the right bidder, maybe they might be able to keep going for a couple of months.
Also, here's another depressing story of the original inventors getting shafted: The inventor of the space suit got knocked back by the royal air force. ended up dying in a mental home. The royal air force take his design, build it and fly it in a plane after he's dead.
If there is a need, the technology will be built. The trick is to get some benefit out of being the inventor.
Forty percent! The Soviet Union didn't even spend that much! Try eighteen percent. Then, note that over half the federal budget goes to welfare.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But I guess we all have our own definitions of convenience, right? I think you're probably more in love with the idea of having trains, than the daily reality of having to get on the damn train again just to go to the bookstore.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'd rather see them spend money on non-military items from time to time
What part of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency did you not understand. Besides, DARPA projects often have wildly sucessful civillan spinoffs like this internet thing you kids are so fond of. The rest of the government spends heaps of money on non-military items.
Suffering alone exists, none who suffer;
The deed there is, but no doer thereof;
Nirvana is, but no one is seeking it;
The Path there is, but none who travel it.
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