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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.'"
AVRO Canada had a working flying saucer back in the height of the cold war.
Link: http://www.avroarrow.org/Avrocar/Avrocar.html
Desperation is a stinky cologne
I am a field investigator for MUFON. I've been investigating sightings here in the Midwest for quite some time now, and I've come to believe that stories like this one are planted by the government to make people believe that UFO's are secret military aircraft.
Well, I've been out there, in the field, taking the eyewitness reports. I do not believe for a second that these craft that people are seeing are made by humans.
Go out there, talk to eyewitnesses, talk to an abductee - you'll quickly realize that stories like this are carefully written "plants" by conspirators that reach the highest corridors of power in World Government.
That goes to prove russians really are aliens.
-green is the color of the rainbow
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In Soviet Russia, saucers belong to all bases welcoming new alien overlords.
Now that Gulf War 2: Junior's Revenge is ending we have Russian/American Space Race 2: Above and Beyond to look forward to.
Where will Hollywo^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Washington's obsession with sequels end?
The Flapjack was tested near Area 51, the clandestine military base that's been an obsession of X-Filers for decades.
"It's what originated many people's belief in flying saucers," said Phil Scott, author of The Wrong Stuff: Attempts at Flight Before (and After) the Wright Brothers. "Anyone on a lot of drugs would think it was a flying saucer."
I know at least half a dozen people who wouldn't need drugs for this.
It just tips the amusing/pathetic balance when they are.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
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
This is very interesting, but the plane in question does *not* use ion propulsion. It's not even a jest engine...it's a rotor! Or maybe you're talking about the space craft from Plan 9?
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.
sounds like it should come from /. circa 1957.
Learn something new.
Not only are they sapping and impurifying our precious bodily fluids, they're in league with the aliens. close off all communications at the base, Col. Mandrake.
read my blog
musings on politics and technol
One of the things that killed the passenger flying wing project was that folks on the outside of the aircraft will be going up and down too much when the plane rolls. This design appears to have the same problem. Hand out the sick bags!!!
Semper ubi sub ubi
Except for that there's probably been a million classified journeys by both US and Russian-made UFO-type objects, and somehow with all the Reality TV "send in your tape" shows, no one has caught one reliably on film... amazing. Or, maybe they did, and the gov't responsible bought the tape.
stuff |
So you need a phisics degree for this to explain?
Strc prst skrz krk and vomit! Can help.
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?
Pita-bread shaped? And I suppose a bus is shaped like a loaf of bread, a 747 is shaped like a baguette, a croissant, and some pieces of matzoh cracker.
Please, if there is any alternative, avoid copying text verbatim from Wired. Their editors make the ones around this joint look like the heads of mensa.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Check out http://www.ekip-aviation-concern.com/ for a brouchure with lots of details and more pictures.
Alaska Bugs Sweat Gold Nuggets
The very first thing you hear is essentially base sixteen floating point. As in--eight pounds, twelve ounces, being 8.C pounds.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
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.
Well, maybe not a flying saucer, but a neat flying wing with a very small take-off requirement. I think it was first used in Dick Tracy, the first of (I think) three serials done with Ralph Boyd in the lead. I'm not sure off-hand what other serials it was used in, but can find out if anybody's that interested. The Dick Tracy serials are fine entertainment, and Ralph Boyd looks like what Chester Gould was thinking of when he drew the character.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
1. Build 50s-UFO-throwback model plane 2. Fly plane over US 3. ??? 4. PROFIT!!!
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Aside from the OS, I haven't seen the movie. Anyone care to describe what they're talking about?
...the mig, the sikorsky helicopters, you name it, they built it well. Cars, well, cars are so pedestrian that under a strict military regime the best scientists and engineers build weaponry. Few can argue with the machines the Soviets built during the Cold War. All of their aircraft are works of art and many times more durable and simple than comparable US or other international warplanes.
Don't you know, a lot of our technology today was no doubt seeded by these aliens! A microchip to some yahoo engineer in the 40's and 50's who thought a tube was advanced technology might well look like magic. And operating systems, who'd a thunk of those? But now we know what happened to those recycled UFO parts once they were figured out; they became the seed stock for intel, and they ran windows! Thats why they crashed, after all...
They don't look enough alike to be a convincing debunk, and they don't do a thing to attack the many non-disk UFO stories (spheres, triangles, and what-have-you). Even if UFOs were true (on which I claim ignorance and hence, neutrality) a more sensible explanation would be both parties making use of shapes designed to exploit the same atmospheric physics.
Bastard.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I seem to remember seeing photos of a similar design from the '50s on the web some place obscure. Very similar to some flying designs from the '50's which used a large cross section instead of the wide wings of the B1 and Horten etc.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Quick! Order all the Gyros and Tzatziki in the country to be mobilized!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
they come from your nose :-D
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
Um, I don't know which article you were reading, but this plane does not use any kind of ion engine, nor are ion engines even mentioned in the article! While your post was factually correct, it has nothing to do with the article in question and is in fact completely offtopic. Hrm, maybe you've stumbled on a new formula for cheap karma:
1) Claim that something you know is relevant to the story (even if it's not)
2) Talk about what you know
3) Karma!!!
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
We always thought aliens from outer space would descend in flying saucers, but it's actually going to be (possibly illegal) aliens from Russia.
I, for one, welcome our vodka-drinking overlords.
-S
I was just watching "Flight of the Future" while reading slashdot and watdyaknow! There goes a flying Pita bread! Into the air!! Sounds like a lawn mower!!!
I dont do meaning of life questions.
I always idly thought: one reason all this UFO crap can't be true is: the design doesn't make sense.
:)
Guess that argument doesn't work any more
No, I think it' still true all right. It's just that the Wired people got suckered into a deal where someone showed some poor quality photos and insisted they were from some 'new' Russian airplane.
I mean, sorry, but those pictures are funny as hell. They look like scans from pictures that someone took in 1962. I'm pretty sure that Russia has come to advanced digital photography by now. (hehe, yeah that's on purpose)
In other words, if they had a program like this, we'd see something better than a bad picture of a model 'UFO' airplane and a few pictures that look worse than the best UFO sightings ever recorded...
Are you sure it's not shaped like a... saucer?
And it's even easier than you stated: you don't even have to talk about something you know, just something you can describe with impressive prose, or something you can crib a highly scored comment about from a previous Slashdot story.
Fortunately, the formula for dealing with it is just as simple:
1) Debunk this particular (apparantly trolling) post.
2) Check the author's prior posts and journals to see if this is a single mistake or a repeated pattern. Check any post that has been downrated or has tons of replies. In this particular case, journal entries like "I forgot how much fun trolling can be" make it too easy.
3) Make use of Slashdot's fun "friend or foe" system to automatically label (and optionally downrate for yourself) the offending user. Karma doesn't mean much when your posts have a big red warning flag on them (like rkz already had for me and any of my "fans") or have been rescored to the point where Slashdot won't even put them on the page.
As an airplane, it only makes sense if you want something that can turn 180 degrees, have something that can ascend and decend rather quickly, and if you're in space, have a small outline when going at fast speeds to reduce the chance of collision with small objects like rocks. Additionally, you can design a flying saucer so that it creats lift on it's own, so that in the event of a space-to-ground crash landing on a planet with an atmosphere you could theoretically glide to safe speed or landing spot, or at the very least, angle so you aren't going into the ground head first. An airplane shape is poorly poorly designed for this, although any craft with unidirectional thrust can be modified to have lots and lots of unidirectional thrust with a big engine, while a flying saucer has to somehow be able to either move their engine or something else. This is why you don't see gigantic flying saucer motherships in video games. You've got to carry a lot of ships a long distance inexpensivly. Big engine and an efficient design, coupled with lots of storage room and no need neccissarily to have craptons of manuverability and you've got the design needs for a carriar.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
The opening has a magnetized torid ring around it. Using the right hand rule (...) you create an electrical flow around the metal torid ring. The resulting magnetic field 'pulls' the ions through the ring, resulting in propulsion.
High school physics.
The force exerted on the charged particles by the magnetic field is always perpendicular to their velocity. Charged particles in a magnetic field move with a constant speed. Because of this ion engines use an electric field to accelerate ions.
Frank Whittle invented the turbojet engine - which is the modern jet engine.
In 1910, Henri Coanda, displayed an airplane wich was powered by a piston engine driving a turbine blade. That is similar to todays "Ducted Fan" engine.
These engines are entirely different in nature. The Turbo Jet would work well at any altitude and run on about any fuel. The Ducted Fan would only run well at low altitude and has a limited performance range.
Bill
It's my Sig and you can't have it. Mine! All Mine!
Could be useful as a rescue craft. Paint it green, and call it something exciting, like 'Thunderbird 2'.
Try looking at words instead of numerals. Twelve is not "onety two" or something like that. "Twelve" is not decimal in any shape or form. Hmm..."virst", "telve"--is the truth making you go crazy?
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Personally, I'd prefer the more interesting ride - my favourite flights involve small passenger aeroplanes coming into windy areas.
But then I'm just an inveterate people-watcher who likes to laugh at his fellow passengers.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!