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TAM 5 Has landed

Posted by Hemos on from the the-little-plane-that-could dept.

bzant writes "TAM 5 The model airplane, (see our previous story), has successfully landed in Ireland. This was the second plane they launched. Other than some slow speeds and a concern over a lean fuel mixture the flight seemed to go as planned."

7 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Help us out a little by mao+che+minh · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Alluding to the fact that there was a previous article isn't enough. The TAM5 link is a map and a bunch of coordinates - what is all of this? The "previous story" linked too turns around and links to yet two previous stories.

    At least give your audience a brief two sentence re-cap, state the goal of the endeavor, and give a reason why we should click the link (it's commonly refferred to as a "blurb" in journalism). Slashdot is now popular (and commercial) enough to have editors that can at least follow the basics of journalism. You are making OSDN look bad. Step up and be big boys, for Christ's sake.

    1. Re:Help us out a little by TheFlyingGoat · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or you could stop giving slashdot users a bad name and just click on the "Info" link on the site. It provides links to a couple of sites detailing the project. Here's one.

      Additionally, becoming a slashdot subscriber doesn't entitle you to better journalism, just less ads and a few other features. The editors aren't journalists. If you spent your money thinking they were, then I have a nice Nigerian man that you may need your help. :)

      --
      You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
  2. Congratulations! by martingunnarsson · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is really a cool project, and while it might seem like a geeky hobby thing, I think it's much more important than that. I think we'll se R/C helicopters that move around on their own used for surveillance and as a support for police and firefighters pretty soon. I mean, these things already exist. The flight over the ocean shows that they can handle long distance flights as well, at lest in 50% of the cases :-)

    --
    Martin
  3. national security? by samhalliday · · Score: 3, Insightful

    hmm, whats to stop anyone making one of these things and kitting it out with an explosive or biological warhead? can radars pick these things out as being targets without seagulls etc. raising false alarms?

    1. Re:national security? by quantaman · · Score: 2, Insightful

      hmm, whats to stop anyone making one of these things and kitting it out with an explosive or biological warhead? can radars pick these things out as being targets without seagulls etc. raising false alarms?

      What's to stop anyone from making weapons out of half a dozen other simple things, the fact is it doesn't take more then about a minute to think of a ton of ways to do some serious damage if you really wanted too. In the end trying to specifically thwart each possible type of attack is bound to fail, the only real solution is to try and take away peoples motives for attacking you otherwise you're just waiting for something to happen.

      That being said this admittadly does have potential to do more damage then many other alternatives if for no other reason then it allows for a more easily anonymous and somewhat large scale attack then a lot of other things I can think of at the moment.

      --
      I stole this Sig
  4. How about something marine? by cvk · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This was a great project. I know we've all had daydreams of building autonomous flying machines, and I wonder how many of us have also daydreamed of a small autonomous submersible? I think that a tiny submarine would be just as exciting to see cross the Atlantic although a bit slower.

    The primary benefit of a vehicle that uses the water as its transport mechanism is that it can't crash! It could stay a few dozen meters below the surface for optimum travel speed and emerge from the water at intervals to update its position by GPS and wire that and other data such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and the like back to the crew on land.

    Once nice side effect of traveling in such a dense medium is that a great deal of instrumentation weight would be okay since it's easy to make things float in water. The same cannot be said of the air! That means it might be possible to use a device like a gyroscope to keep track of heading while under the surface. Try loading something like that onto an RC airplane and you'll need some big wings.

  5. Re:Filthy Critic Dead? by Chundra · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah it's true. I saw it happen. The Harelip got angry at him for puking on her back after drinking too many Coors at happy hour. She chased him out of the Arvada Tavern with a pool cue. He hopped on his banana-seat bike and took off like a bat out of hell. I don't know if he shit himself or if he was just plastered (maybe both), but he definitely was swerving around a lot. Some blonde yuppie girl in a Ford Expedition (undoubtedly on her cell phone) broadsided him. He died instantly.