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Jet-powered Nausicaa Glider Project
SuperElectric writes "As reported on slashdot.jp, Opensky is a project led by media artist Kazuhiko Hachiya to implement a working, jet-powered version of Moewe, the vehicle (pic) that the heroine rides on in "Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind". They've successfully test-flown (.mov, 8.6MB) a 1/2 scale model, and are moving into phase 2, which includes interviewing for test pilots (women only!). Can anybody knowledgeable in experimental aeronautics speculate on how doable this is? While it's not designed for general production (riders must be less than 50 kg/120 lbs), this would certainly beat Segway any day!"
And Nausicaa wears no underwear. Not that I was looking or anything...
Don't pay any attention to the stacks of Sailor Moon and tentacle porn DVDs under my bed!
I have been pwned because my
Cool when can I have one , and does it play mp3's ?
i have no sig
Well, off to join my buddy Wile E. Coyote, walking off cliffs and holding up little signs and waving bye-bye before I fall and that sort of thing.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
So Ya, Post a 8.6MB Movie file on the front page of /. and see what happens...
GOOD JOB!!
Totoro died, I have no reason to live anymore.
WTF.. how long has this been around?
Why? Those people who can use this gilder are either: naturally small and/or fairly in shape. The Segway, however, has no such restrictions, and allows anyone to go fast without effort.
In shorter: wider (figuratively) audience == good.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
This is taking "cosplay" to a whole new level. Now with real working props!
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Yes, but now to the real question: can they make the Batplane?
which includes interviewing for test pilots (women only!)
Actually, I remember the FAQ saying that women are preferable, weight and all :) Though I'm not that proficient in Japanese, and babelfish spits out mostly nonsense, so might have missed something. Don't forget, Nausicaa wasn't the only one able to fly such a glider well...
P.S. Please stop with those underwear jokes! See the movie(and watch what people are wearing), RTFF at nausicaa.net and keep in mind the messed up colours, too.(OT: read the manga tooThe simple fact that they've flown a 1/2 scale model indicates they have the aerodynamic controlls down well enough to get it into the air. From just looking at the model, it seems like it would be inherently unstable and require some respectably fast computer mediation of the controls.
Would _I_ fly it? (assuming I was the size of an "Anime babe") I would have to say "Maybe." If it had a recovery chute, it would probably be safe enough - and a real hoot to fly.
Though laying on TOP of a running jet engine doesn't seem like fun. Worse than piloting an old style racing sidehack...
Never attribute to malice what can as easily be the result of incompetence...
We're stabbing Picard in the heart, again?
(riders must be less than 50 kg/120 lbs) Sooo, this excludes like 95% of all americans.....
I'm curious about the degree of comfort when landing this thing. The undercarriage looks awfully small and your feet would most probably hit the ground before you go down to a decent speed. I'd hate to have to jump off in mid-air and perform a bad-ass roll everytime I have to go somewhere! (While also destroying my mean of transportation in a spectacular crash.) (These people might have played BF1942 before and realized that's how everyone land in that game, so it must be the best way to do it...)
This just in:
Scientists at an unknown and undisclosed location are researching into how to create giant bugs that clean up pollution. Plans have been made for a test run of these bugs in New Jersey. Details at 10!
Can anybody knowledgeable in experimental aeronautics speculate on how doable this is?
IANAAE (I am not an aeronautical engineer), but I am willing to speculate that it is not doable with legos. Not even with Mindstorms.
Watching the video, I was about to comment that shouldn't they consider including a dummy pilot in their half-sized flight model?
Then I saw the end of the film.
THAT THING'S FREAKING HUGE!
Seriously, there *is* a dummy pilot on their test model, but she's about the size of a 12-inch Star Wars doll. What's that going to put the full-sized mehve at, like a thirty-foot wingspan?!
It's waycool work and all, I don't deny that, but Nausicaa's mehve was a personal aircraft she could drag about tossed over her shoulder, and it was mostly steered by shifting her body weight, non unlike a hangglider. The big difference was that its jet propulsion gave it enough speed that it didn't need to be so large as a hangglider in order to generate sufficient lift.
That's what made it so amazing, and that's what made too fantastic to replicate in real life. These designers' trick? Make the thing so UNGODLY HUGE that the pilot has a minimal impact upon its aerodynamics and center of gravity.
So, waycool that they built it and all, but not nearly as cool as the tiny personal aircraft in the original manga.
I hope the guy who invented this glider doesn't use performance-enhancers, go insane, and start blowing up New York while wearing a Green Goblin costume.
I am officially gone from
You just don't get it, do you?
We've got to start training twelve-year-old schoolgirls to pilot advanced military weaponry at some point. Otherwise, who's going to defend us against giant killer robots?!
Oh, Yoshimi, they don't believe me. But you won't let those robots eat me.
I didn't know suicide was still a popular thing to do in Japan. The aircraft in the photo looks spectacularly unstable.
That flying wing sure isn't going to. Just the pendulum instability from the offset between CG and CL (that's center of gravity and center of lift for you 'dotters who never study anything but web engines and FPS technique) is going to drive you bats, and each change in thrust or drag is going to result in pitch moments. If designed badly, these can be fatal; if you have any doubts about this, you should look into the history of "interesting" airplanes like the original Mignet HM-14 Flying Flea.
There is a very real possibility of any such craft having serious PIOs (pilot-induced oscillations). Have them in a situation where you have no time to recover, and you can lose the airframe along with the crew.
While I am a firm believer in the value of Darwin Awards, I thnk that such a machine should not be flown with a human aboard. No matter how utterly fucking kewl all those anime fans would think it was, their refusal to recognize the distinction between cartoon physics and reality is not worth someone else's life, or undamaged brain, or functional spinal cord. It's appropriate that such a machine fly with only a dummy aboard; if it cracks up, you've got a hilarious photo-op rather than a tragedy.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I flew hang gliders for years. This thing looks like a death trap. The center of mass is on top of the wing. It should be hanging underneath like a hang glider. Just look at bag fags (I mean parapente pilots) to see the extreme case of a wing stabilized by the mass hanging underneath. So to turn it, you oooch over a little bit to lean it, oooch too far and over she goes. Front, back left or right, it doesn't matter. Maybe it flies well upside down though. Guess they'll find out. Hope they have enough altitude when they do though. How do you land it? You can't flare it like a hang glider.
Sheesh.
There is nothing that says that this thing cannot fly ever. Sure, there are many calculations to perform, but the design isn't inherently unusable.
First of all, the main thing to notice is the lack of a tail. The main difficulty with the lack of a tail is that you need to balance both Cm (moment coefficient) and AOA (angle of attack) with the trailing edge of the same airfoil, namely the wings. While possible, it's not an easy thing to do. Essentially, for the vehicle to be stable, it needs to have a positive pitching moment at zero AOA (Cmo) and a negative derivative of the pitching moment with respect to AOA (Cmalpha). With a flying wing, the positive Cmo is not difficult to achieve, it's the negative Cmalpha that's difficult. Think of it this way, if the plane is disturbed such that the nose goes up (ie: updraft), the plane needs to have the nose tend down. Tails are really good for this, but without a tail, it's pretty difficult.
The simplest solution is to push back the aerodynamic center (AC) of the wing. Since most wing profiles have an AC at about 1/4 chord (25% from leading edge) for subsonic applications, a profile not used commonly must be used. Once again, this can be done... it's just not very common.
The winglets are a nice touch... helps decrease downwash and therefore overall lift. That, and I think winglets are sexy.
Yes, I'm an aeronautical geek. Deal.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.