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Russians Invade with Flying Saucer
Ridgelift writes "Wired is covering a project revived from Russia by the US Naval Air Systems Command: The Ekip, a pita-bread-shaped, stubby-winged, wheel-less, unmanned ship that weighs in at 500 pounds. 'For more than two decades, engineers at a former Soviet aerospace plant have been toiling on a drone aircraft that looks a whole lot like a prop from Plan 9 From Outer Space.'"
that looks rather like a flying saucer.m shows a model of one. Vertically-oriented ringwings can be found at http://www.esotec.co.nz/hb/HTML/Aero.html
http://members.cox.net/twitt/dehnring.ht
Just found out that the Wright Bros had used lift tables on their early gliders that had been made 30 years before by a German man, and that they found these tables to be in error, when they made their own wind tunnel, with instruments and came up with the cross section of the perfect wing that we use today. Seems that changes to the wings didn't have the expected results, so the Wind Tunnel had to be made, and hundreds of wing configurations had to be tested. I don't know why the Wright Flyer didn't use that cross section, or at least look like it did.
Then, they designed and made their own engine to use in the powered Flyer, right down to casting the engine block. Just two guys doing this, with helpers, ranging from machinists on the engine, to crew at Kitty Hawk. Interesting to note that their parents encouraged them at an early age, and that they had a limited social life, directing their energy instead toward their scientific explorations. One time when the glider part of the project was going badly, one of them supposedly remarked that it would take 1000 years to come up with a design that would fly. I've gotten in that mood myself, especially when working on modern automobiles, where no thought was put into "ease of service" on certain components by the designers.
The development of flying saucer machines seems to be aimed at looking like something that a science fiction writer/illustrator came up with, rather than going after the final design of a real flying machine, like the Wright Flyer.
So the US navy is reviving a dead Russian project, after all other countries' previous attempts failed? Will this technology eventually use solar power, or is this question a dead end as far as exploring the universe?
I saw the V-173 on the ground in Connecticut in 1947 during a tour of the Chance Vought factory grounds. My uncle, a Chance-Vought employee, told me of the XF5U-1, which was not on display. The X plane was VTOL. The V-173 had a top airspeed of 500 MPH and a landing speed of 10 MPH. They were remarkable planes, killed by the jet age, just like the article says.
I remember seeing an interview with one of the engineers who worked on it. The videos of the AVRO flying saucer only showed it scooting about less than a metre above the ground. As cool as it was, the AVRO flying car had a fatal flaw - as soon as it rose more than a metre or so above the ground, it would "hubcap" - yawing about in an unstable circular motion, that got worse the higher the vehicle rose. They needed a fast response active stability control system, but were never able to design it in before the contract was cancelled.
(They sort of allude to this on page 3 of the aforementioned web site)
My rights don't need management.
The Flying Wing concept was pushed all the way to bomber size, and several were built. Most of them crashed. (Edwards AFB is named after a Flying Wing pilot.) Not until the 1980s, and the Have Blue stealth prototype, was the stability problem resolved adequately. (A modified F-16 analog autopilot handled the stabilization.)
Some of those 1950s designs could now be revisited. The AvroCar could be made to work today, if anybody cared. If a competent aircraft designer, like Rutan, built one, it would work.
The problem, of course, is that all pure-thrust vehicles need huge engines and have lousy fuel economy, since they need enough power to go straight up on thrust alone. The only sucessful pure-thrust VTOL aircraft is the Harrier. Since modern fighters have enough thrust to go straight up anyway, a VTOL fighter is feasible. Marginally.
This new Russian thing sounds flakey, but not fake. They should be able to build a prototype and fly it. But the claims for efficiency are probably not real.
It sounds like they're fooling around with boundary layer control. This has been done before, all the way back to WWII. Aircraft with "blown" or "sucked" wings have been tried. It works, but the practical problems with a wing full of holes and plumbing have been too great. Ice, for example. A few aircraft, including the C-17, have blown control surfaces, but not the whole wing.
There's considerable interest in disk-shaped craft in small scales, from the micro air vehicle people. AeroVironment has built some.
It's the dotless form of the IP address.
An IP is usually represented as
a.b.c.d, where each section is one byte.
However, if you combine those 4 bytes into one long, i.e.
(a << 24) | (b << 16) | (c << 8) | d,
That's also a valid representation of an IP.
3338121056 = 0xC6F7AF60 = 0xC6.0xF7.0xAF.0x60 = 98.247.175.96,
which is the IP address for hick.org.
$host hick.org
hick.org has address 198.247.175.96