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Fuelless Flight with Air Submarine?
An anonymous reader writes "Using the same physics principles as submarines, a new company is planning a fuelless air ship. Recent advances in ultra light and strong materials are making this concept a practical reality." There's no question that changes in buoyancy can be used to propel a vehicle, but "fuelless" is going to be tricky.
I don't know about you... it looks kewl, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna fly on that thing. Personally, I trust engines, fuel, etc.
Isn't that what the sci-fi writers of the 1940s/1950s thought the future would be like? After all, the Empire State Building has a blimp port at the top. I'll stick with good old ozone layer killing cars, thank you.
Wouldn't something in the air be a Supermarine?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Fuelless falling.
Sure, no fuel sounds good, but I wouldn't fly on one.
Where's the backup if the "engine" mechanism stops working?
Using the same physics principles as submarines, a new company is planning a fuelless air ship.
Isn't a fuelless air submarine usually called a "balloon"?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It's a little creepy that this website looks like this other famous site and that they both advocate leaving the earth for a long trip in a high-tech airship. Coincidence?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I mean up periscope.
Ugh.
U-571, will now be A-571.
Hmm.
but I bet that this story should be titled "Fuelless Flight with Vapour Submarine".
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
All the same, it's still a cool idea. I want a small one to fly to work in (maybe add pedals for all the compression-> decompression stuff and you'll have a human powered plane ;)
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
The pontoons will be multiple layers of Kevlar and epoxy, which weigh as little as 1 lb/ft2, around a rigid carbon-fiber airframe
I've heard that there's a really bad problem from lightning strikes if you plane isn't made from an excellent conductor like metal. Various attempts have been made to make non-metal composites that don't get badly damaged by a strike. If this plan goes really high then this will be a problem.
Can some engineer tell me, have they solved this problem or is this idea just hot air?
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
However, just because it may not use fuel to continue on it's journey doesn't mean it didn't need some power to get it started...
Physics 101. Law of thermodymanics. Etcetera.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Ahm, did I hear somebody say air-friction. Even if you ignore the fuel needed to pump the helium in and out of the storage, they will need the power to propel the "gravy"-plane forward.
Maybe it is fuel free because they plan to use nuclear power (like the real submarines). Either that or the yoga flyers.
-Y
Like a lot of hot air.
I don't recall which physics principles make submarines fuelless. Anyone?
eskwayrd = m^2c^4
I just hope it doesnt hail... *pop* fzzzzzzzzzzzz
Well, in any case, you might want to get an Immortality Device before you board one of these things.
Did you know you can fertilize your lawn with used motor oil?
Didn't Marry Poppins beat them to it? Just use a lighter-than-air umbrella!
...don't question it!!!
To save on the compressed air, just fill me full of mexican food, and I could provide a cheap source of propulsion. Or we can outsource that to Mumbai.
Perpetual motion machines are not "science".
Because you never know when you might run out of air up there!
It would be but the USMC has already trademarked that term for their next generation of soldiers :-P
Isn't this another perpetual-motion machine?
After all, there's going to be wind drag against the fuselage (even if they made it out of Teflon), which will require additional energy input to keep the plane/dirigible/submarine in the air. Their wind-turbine will also have some losses in the system (presumably it charges up some batteries for later use).
I say "scam".
Chip H.
it is not fuel free, but uses very little fuel. If it were not for the darkness under water, the little survey bot would have solar panels. Why can the supermarine not have a few solar panels for a helium pump. Or batteries to save up the NRG from the turbine during a glide?
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
-------
Create a WAP server
You know... there's another name for flying without fuel. Its called skydiving!
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
but if it gains energy by losing altitude and uses that to gain altitude have they discovered some kind of losless system? where is the extra energy coming from?
Also they state that it wouldn't be a threat as far as terrorism since it uses no fuel and isn't a "flyinmg" bomb".. ah so what, you can still fly it into vuildings, and if it requires no fuel you can fly it a lot further.
it all sounds like a bunch of hot air to me though:P
Now that's some un-deep sea men!
Well this PhD smells a quack (from the link on the page http://www.fuellessflight.com/techno/tech.htm):
"We humans can rarely invent any process that nature does not already use. Most of the science we know today merely copies nature. Our thermodynamic laws were formed by observation of nature. They are not proven, merely not disproved. Within this section of our website you will be taught a new science that mimics the earth's weather, by harnessing the dual forces of gravity -- buoyancy and gravity acceleration. Harnessing gravity may be more technically described as the science of harnessing mass differentials. High density mass falls within a low density lifting fluid, like rain falls from the sky, and low density mass rises in a high density lifting fluid, like a bubble rises in water or helium rises in air."
I think I understand the technology he is proposing (I'm confident it still requires input energy, beyond the environment), but he really should tone down the quack-o-meter. I think we can rest easily that the thermodynamic laws are intact.
-Sean
Since it was members of the popular boy bands (not so)N'Sync and the Backstreet boys that were so anxious to drop millions and sign up to catch a flight to the moon, perhaps we could let them beta test this little fuelless beast for free. If it crashes, the world will be a better place.
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
This thing is supposed to fly because of a combination of reduced bouyancy (by way of creating multiple vacuum's inside it) and stored energy (by way of a turbine invented by the apparent author).
The turbine is for compressing air, to be used as power storage. I think.
If your craft is dependant on creating a vacuum inside for easy lift, but your power supply is compressed air, don't the two kinda cancel eachother out?
Even if you made it and got it up, what would it be like to try to control a zero-weight plane with mass? I picture it flipping around in the wind like a feather...
It seems this plane needs a very light but very strong structure, could nanotubes be helpful for that kind of design?
Iraq: war to save the U
Come ON. Lighter than air materials are all well and fine, so yes, it will be airborne, but do you know what will happen next? *You* will sit in it and *it* will fall.
We all live in an airborne submarine...
"Supermarine" just doesn't fit right...
Last time I made a Beatles reference, I got modded down. Go figure.
The aircraft, still in development, will be similar to a submarine that changes its buoyancy, a form of gravity, to float on the surface of the sea or cruise 300 ft below it.
Stephen J. Mraz, "Senior Editor," is in need of a severe beating. Since when is buoyancy "a form of gravity?"
I stopped reading there. Nothing bothers me more than shitty pseudoscience.
According the the white paper on the "Technology" link:
.0755 pounds per cubic foot lifting capacity for air).
The gravityplane must be very large in order to be lifted by a lighter-than-air lifting gas such as helium that provides a very low amount of lift, thus a small gravityplane can never be built and models of the craft will always be very large. However, a scale model of the gravityplane can be built as a sea glider that is less than 30 foot long that will be capable of holding four passengers. The sea glider can work in water at this small size, because water has a lifting capacity 821 times greater than the lifting capacity of air (62 pounds per cubic foot lifting capacity for water and
If at 30 feet a gravityplane can hold 4 passengers, could this design ever provide a viable means of transport for larger groups of people?
30 feet/4 people = 7.5 feet/person
Thats approx 75 feet per group of 10. Makes for quite a large plane for even medium sized groups.
For cargo I suppose this could be cost effective depending on the maintenance costs and its lifetime. Lets assume that an average person weighs 200lbs (I know it may be too large, but to allow for an optimistic view of the plane's carying capacity).
7.5feet/200lbs ~= 1foot/26lbs
May be good for cargo because shape, size and conditions don't really matter.
When I want to launch my RC glider, I tie a 15 foot rubber band to a stake in the grand and pull it back about 50 feet, then let go. It gets *launched* by the rubber band retraction. So how will this fuelless baby get into the air?
The only thing necessary for Micro$oft to triumph is for a few good programmers to do nothing". North County Computers
"Gravity fuelled", yeah, sure.
Nope.
Much older.
Carl Sagan, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and a number of other scientists and writers were inspired by "The Martian Tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs". The first one, "A Princess of Mars" was published in 1912. (And it's on Project Gutenberg!).
In these books, John Carter was mysteriously transported to Mars, which was called Barsoom by the inhabitants. He became the Prince of Helium (a city/city-state -- not the element). The Barsoomian navies had huge airships that were held in the air by use of the 9th (or 8th?) light ray, so they needed no power to stay aloft. (According to Burroughs, we only know of 7 rays of sunlight, as seen in a rainbow, from red to violet, but Barsoomian scientists had isolated 2 other colors, never seen on Earth, and one of these colors is what gave light a repulsive power so it was repulsed from objects and reflected to our eyes, and it was used to keep the Barsoom airships in the air.)
The Martian Tales are far-fetched, but a ripping good time to read (at least the 1st 10 are -- skip the last one).
When I first read the story, all I could think about were E.R.B.'s descriptions of the huge naval vessels floating through the air of a dead planet (there were no sea going navies, since there were no seas, except one at the south pole).
Too bad these stories seem all but forgotten now.
Apparently, these people have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics...or, in layperson's terms, "The Idiot Filter."
-joe.
A continuous external feed of energy could, in theory, cause a craft to continue to operate without carrying any fuel. Perhaps one could capture energy from a large radiant light source. If only there were such a thing somewhere near the Earth...
However, if one were using efficient solar cells, one might expect such a ship to be black on the top. The inverted-orca coloring pictured would reflect too much light. Service to Seattle may be erratic, but you'd never have to worry about being forced to take a red-eye.
But, you know, this particular one reeks of vaporware. Ignore them until they demonstrate something useful and allow independent observers to examine it. Move along.
Well this PhD smells a quack ...
Yeah, well this Ph.D. smells an arrogant asshole who loves to make sure everyone knows about his higher degree. Hey, if you're an aerospace engineer then just say so. No need to shove your doctorate in everyone's face. Like we're supposed to trust you because you've got a Ph.D.? Hey, I've got one too and let me tell you what I learned while working on my thesis: I'm wrong an awful lot of the time. So drop the pretentious bullshit, Sean.
A marvel of agriculture...
Seedless corn!
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
ro
While it's possible to convert altitude into momentum, the energy harvested by doing this won't get you back to the same height. If the wind is gusty, it could be possible to pick up a bit of energy, but nowhere near enough to power a useful transportation vehicle. A possible exception: they could have a special way of harnessing energy from vomiting passengers...
That reminds me of the old joke back in the Navy... I think it went: There are more airplanes in the oceans than submarines in the sky.
I guess that's no longer true. :-)
The aircraft, still in development, will be similar to a submarine that changes its buoyancy, a form of gravity, to float on the surface of the sea or cruise 300 ft below it.
What's scarrier, flying without an engine, or that the general public won't think twice about this sentence?
In this house, we OBEY the laws of thermodynamics!
you need energy.
That would be the helium in this case. You could argues that it takes energy to build the thing, during which contained energy would be loaded via fuel powered vihicals, but thats a little overly semantical.
I mean, I can fill a ballon with helium, and it will rise without power.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Doing this will expose us to even more astronomical amounts radiation then a normal airplane due to being closer to the sun. A fuelless flight will provide cheaper flying rates causing more and more cancer in todays people.
There is no such material...at least google doesn't know anything about airplane anti-static shrinkwrap. Who are you going to trust, an anonymous aerospace engineer (or so he says), or Google?
Even if you ignore the fuel needed to pump the helium in and out of the storage, they will need the power to propel the "gravy"-plane forward
They don't plan on pumping the helium in and out. It looks like they plan on leaving the helium static in the tanks, and pumping air in and out of other tanks, making the plane weigh more and less. However, it's not really the weight of the plane that matters, it's the density. The goal is to get the average density of all the materials onboard i.e. the people, instruments, seats, structure, tanks, etc to be less than the density of the air around it. This is where I think they will have problems.
Anyone familar with aviation or the atmosphere knows that the atmosphere gets much less dense as you go up. Here in Columbus, altitude 1,000 feet, the density of air is 1.2 kg/m^3 At 10,000 feet the density is 0.88 kg/m^3 and at 30,000 feet it is 0.41 kg/m^3. This plane would have to have an average density less than those values to reach those altitudes, and keep in mind that simply having the cabin pressurized for humans will make the entire cabin a bubble of "heavy" air.
The energy to pressurize air will come from a wind powered turbine which will be deployed when the plane is descending, but I don't know how much power they expect to get from this. Any power produced by this turbine would affect the plane in the form of drag, which decreases speed and range. This would have to be a very flexible air storage system, since the requirements would change every day depending on high and low pressure systems, temperature, and the weight of whoever is on board.
They may also have stability and control issues. I assume that this would have to be a large plane, even with today's light weight materials. Just look at how big blimps have to be to carry their minimal cargo. A plane like this with huge wingspan and extreme buoyancy would be affected by every gust of wind and bit of turbulence that affected it, and although it could be very stable, control inputs would have to combat huge wind loads, and control effectiveness would be marginal, to say the least.
From my armchair view of this project, it seems possible on a small scale, but not to the point of carrying "massive loads" of people and cargo as the website claims.
My $0.02
I checked out the site and checked the "technology" page. They kept going on about the opposite effects of gravity - and didn't seem to be talking about dark energy or anything. So we get to the explaination - _bouyancy_ is gravity's alternate effect? WTF? If I recall, the only thing bouyancy and Archimedes have in common is the phrase 'specific gravity'.
It appears they just plan to do what hawks and eagles to every day and ride the thermals. Great idea, but thier marketing sucks, like thier trying to get big money from people who are clueless.
BK
"None of us are as dumb as all of us." - meeting mantra
In the year 2000... we will all fly in little vehicles that don't require fuel and can skip over rush hour traffic. Except rush hour traffic will be up in the air, and we'll have to drive in a car to avoid it... Unless, there's still people who drive below the flyers... or, or...
[head explodes]
As always, RTFA before commenting please.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
Ignoring the possibility that these scientists might have to wait for a different set of physical laws before this craft becomes viable, are we to understand that this thingmarine will operate in a constant dive/climb cycle? The cost to fly it could be cheap, but the cleanup costs after a passenger flight would be astronomical. Anti-emetic anyone?
Tumbleweed.
next!
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
It's just a load of hot air!
When I first read the story, all I could think about were E.R.B.'s descriptions of the huge naval vessels floating through the air of a dead planet
I really don't want to sound like an Anime Fanboy here, but you might like to check out Last Exile if you haven't already seen it. It's a decent little series with some really impressive graphics, built around exactly that kind of concept...
I am an aerospace engineer, and you can rest assured that this problem has been adequately dealt with. There's a material of similar thickness and composition to your common anti-static bag for sensitive electrical components. This material can be "shrink-wrapped" onto the Kevlar/epoxy structure. In tests, this material has been known to resist electrical charges of over 12,000 volts. Varying the thickness changes the resistance capacity in a geometric fashion.
...'resist electrical chargesof over 12,000 volts.'?
...'in a geometric fashion.', alright then, that might just work. Sorry, carry on. My bad.
I call bullshit.
Resist 'electrical charges'?
How about conducting sufficent current? At acceptable voltage drops?
...'changes the resistance capacity'..., um, OK. How'er them Flux Capacitors doing? Does this involve Di-Lithium crystals? Oh, wait
The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel
So far so good.
The new hybrid "gravity-powered aircraft"
Starting to get bogus.
is formed by merging the capabilities of the following devices into a single new aircraft apparatus:
(1) an aircraft capable of aerostatic (lighter-than-air) lift to gain altitude; and,
Still OK.
(2) a glider aircraft capable of aerodynamic lift, having a high glide ratio to accomplish long range gliding; and,
Starting to get bogus.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
(3) a (patented, new design of Robert D Hunt) wind turbine that is capable of harnessing the force of wind to generate power as the aircraft glides downward. This cycle can be repeated indefinitely to allow the craft to stay aloft virtually forever.
Bingo! Perpetual motion.
You CAN get a lot of forward motion out of lift-driven vertical motion. But it takes ENERGY to adjust the lift. The submarines described in the original Slashdot posting are one example. Zepplins with diving planes that achieved speeds in excess of 200 MPH by this mechanism also existed in the mid 20th century.
But the Zepplins BURNED FUEL to change their bouyancy (by heating some of their bouyancy gas), just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
This craft proposes to use a turbine to collect energy from the wind of its passage and use that to adjust its bouyancy, use the bouyancy to produce forward motion, creating the wind to drive the turbine. Like a generator with its shaft connected to a motor which is also wired to its output, the energy goes around and around, with some being lost in every pass.
This is not to say it won't fly at all. But to the extent that it DOES fly it's getting its basic power from vertical air currents, just like any other glider. By being nearly neutrally bouyant it sacrificed the ability to store energy in the gravitational potential of its own weight at altitude, and it's replacing that by being able to convert the wind of its passage to stored electricity, then feed that back into forward motion via bouyancy adjustments rather than propulsive fans.
But I expect this to be more expensive and less efficient than other alternatives - such as an equivalent modification to the original 200-MPH zepplins WITHOUT the fixed wings.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Honestly, after reading this site, it smacks of all the hype around the Segway (and many similar, less-successful "revolutionary breakthrough" schemes).
Yes, it is possible to create a fuel-less aeroplane that can still maintain forward motion. Advanced glider technology certainly fits this description. However, there are a couple of things that are missing from the adware:
The physics of underwater motion are similar those of flight - basic fluid dynamics here. The problem is he's ignoring fundamental environmental differences between water and air. The density differences between the two make it possible to move large masses underwater, but only tiny masses in the air using the same principles. Not to mention that the fluid consistency and motion between air and water are radically different, which invalidates using the ocean as a model for the sky.
He's a fraud. Pure and simple.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
"Pilot to tower, we're now cruising at an altitude of 15,000 feet... make that 14,000 feet... request clearance to drop to 13,000 feet... ok, now could we go back to 15,000 feet?... over." Seriously, aren't you supposed to specify an altitude when you file a flight plan? What do gliders do?
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Live at the Isle of Wight!
And that reminds me, where are the James Bond jet-packs we were promised?
Sig: Closed for refurbishment.
You're forgetting that lift capacity goes by the cubic footage of the lifting body, not the length.
I'm too lazy to do the math, but a longer body would have a far larger volume in the lifting body than liner.
7.5 ft per person on a 30ft version != 75ft for 10 ppl.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
Pork rinds perhaps? :)
.02
cLive ;-)
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Is it just me, or does http://www.fuellessflight.com/ closely resemble another rather interesting web site which we've seen on /. before?
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Loosing power on only one side is not a picnic even. The remaining engines will have to push harder to maintain speed but this makes the entire aircraft want to turn constantly. Very few runways come in corners.
Gliders on the other hand are designed to ehm well glide. This thing would never suffer an engine failure. Power system (it does have one) fail? Simply glide gently down giving you a far wider range in wich to find a suitable landing splot.
There are many reasons this can fail but worries about safety because of a lack of engines ain't one of them . Note that it isn't a balloon. With wings that size it could exchange hight for speed and with that control over its direction.
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
FFMPH = Frequent Fly Mile per Hour.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I am still not sure if this is possible (the part with compressed air used to change boyancy), but even if it is, it has a few big problems. First, air is relatively thin medium even at sea level altitude- something around 1.2 kg/m3. At 10 km height it only has around 0.4 kg/m3
So, in order to be able to lift anything, it has to be less dense than that-much less if it aims to reach high altitudes. At 10 km altitude air density is only cca. 0.4 kg/m3 ! In order to have lift capabilities of say 10 tonnes (is this 20.000 lbs non-metric ? ) it would have to have volume of more than 25.000 m3-provided that plain does not have any mass, that would lift only payload.
Since this is outside of technical reality, one can guestimate that needed volume would be at least 3-4 times bigger- 100.000 m3 ! That is equal to a cube with 100m x 100m x 10 m !
That would be some big ass airplane...
Besides, changes of boyancy could be minimal and so the generated energy would be relatively small, so the plane would be dog slooow.
This means that it would be only usefull for carrying cargo, for which we already have cheap and suitable means.
How many of such planes would be needed to replace one supertanker ?
And how would such plane fare in the case of turbulence ?
_That_ would be an interesting sight...
John McPhee wrote an incredible book called "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed" about the Aeron company, which designed an aircraft that would combine airship technology with a lifting-body style airplane, where the entire body of the plane provides lift. This was a serious design, with no pseudo-science factor. However, the original design (the Aeron 3) was exactly the one described in this post. It was a two-hulled, helium-filled aircraft that would use wings to turn buoyant lift into forward motion. The whole idea was the dream of a christian missionary and pilot who wanted a craft that could deliver bibles and tractors to the third world at minimal cost. The Aeron 3 was destroyed on the ground by high winds before its first test flight. The company didn't bother to rebuild it after they hired some real engineers and hit on the lifting body idea.
The world record for hang gliding is 704 km (437 miles). Like all hanggliding, it was done by finding natural thermals, using them to gain altitude, and then once at the top, identifying and gliding to the next thermal. The really good hanggliding pilots are really good at predicting the weather. I think the record for my flight park was 100 or so miles over flat land, and there were a couple people in this league.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Bridge, in Brooklynn, used and in good condition.
$500,000.00. neg.
I accept PayPal.
A much better known of story by Burroghs is Tarzan, sad so few know who originaly wrote Tarzan.
Sorry to drift off topic, I'm rather fond the Barsoom series myself, even built my own 'martian chess' set and got a few people to play it when I was 10 or so.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Well turning a submarine inside out and 'filling' the inside with vacuum would have some nice effects.
Ok picture this. The neck of a helium balloon is connected to a small electric pump. The output of the pump is connected to a lightweight pressure tank... Like the fiber wound tanks used in paintball. When you turn on the pump you can pump the helium out of the balloon and into the tank, reducing the total volume of the system. So you drop out of the air. Want to go up.... let the pressurized helium push back through the pump and reinflate the balloon. Up you go. Since the gas flowing past the pump is turning it you can recapture some of the energy you used to compress the helium into the tank by having it run as a generator and charge a battery. Your not going to get back the same amount you put into it, but it's better than losing it all. With me so far? OK, now put a helicopter blade on top of the balloon, hook it to a generator and use it to charge the batteries as it spins. You then fly the balloon up and down in a cycle. As the balloon rises through the air, the air pushing paste the helicopter blades will spin them, which gives you energy to charge the batteries. When you get to a high enough altitude turn on the pump to deflate the balloon. As you fall to a lower altitude the air rushing paste the helicopter blades spins them, again generating energy. One again providing you with a source of power to charge the batteries. The energy you are getting from the spinning helicopter blades is being stolen from the angular momentum of the earth. The limiting factor as to weather this will produce more power than it uses is highly dependant on the materials being used being light and strong. I'm not strong enough in math to work out a simulation, but it's not entirely hooky. There is a gain of a useable idea in there. Also as has been pointed out in the article ... This technique has been used successfully on ocean going autonomous probes
Let's see, if only there were some way to distract the submarine driver right before he hit the ground.
Some sort of buzzer, or pop-up picture of Ashley Judd.
Then, once the driver has been distracted he can slowly and carefully bring his sub back into the air and start flying.
That same picture can pop-up when he loses enough altitude also.
I was thinking of converting to paganism, but where the hell can you find sacrificial virgins these days?
Not that big a coincidence. They both the "starry background" effect from this site. Of course, the Heavan's Gate bunch also liked the TNG jumpsuit uniforms that made the Enterprise crew look like eunuchs. Hopefully, that's not an issue for the airship people....
I'm not a physics major, I'm a math major, so someone correct me, please, if I'm wrong, but isn't this just yet another take on perpetual motion? Doesn't this proposal violate a couple laws of thermodynamics? And wouldn't this whole deal take some *serious* advances in materials engineering?
I'd be curious to hear if anyone in any of the fields of physics, materials sciences, or aviation would like to offer why this is bordering on revolutionary brilliance, or why this is a totally unmitigated crock of sh--.
Peace.
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
In there marketing movie the talk about about compressed air as there means of storing energy....then they say that after the aircraft has floated aloft as lighter than air vehicle they use the stored compressed air to drive turbines to compress air to increase the mass of the vehicle so it can become heavier than air and commence to glide (downwards) as a heavier than air vehicle....Now lets get this straight they can use X quantity of compressed air to compress Y quantity of air where the mass of Y is presumably much greater than X.....Err perpetual energy machine anyone???? Surely what they really do is compress the helium bags reducing there volume and hence allowing the air they would displace to reenter the craft??
ION
Hey! What happened to the flying pigs. There was all this talk about flying pigs in all those kids book. Never once did they mention flying submarines! Get the flying pigs problem fixed. then we can talk about flying submarines.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
Yup, it's a hoax. The Beech Starship used plain ol' Alumin(i)um:
Aluminum mesh embedded into the skin shielded the Starship's electronics by permitting electric current to flow through the body to a point where the charge exited the aircraft, with only minor cosmetic damage at the actual lightning strike point.
And Long-EZs (a composite aricraft) can be seriously damaged by lightning:
This incident is not a good example of what would occur to a Long-EZ in a lightning strike. A "full threat" stroke would likely have ripped a hole a foot or more in diameter through the composite and vaporized small diameter control cables and inter-connecting wiring. The accompanying shock waves would have caused extensive internal damage, delamination, etc.. I doubt very much whether the aircraft or pilot could have survived such a strike.
I forgot (but had intended) to point out that ERB is best known for Tarzan (and if you look at the current version of Tarzan -- the cartoon series by Disney, he is credited at the start of each episode! -- there was even one episode that featured him meeting Tarzan and writing the Tarzan story).
While he had a limited scope of characters and plots, he was just plain fun to read. I discovered him during college and found relief after many tough tests and papers by escaping into his books.
Pity he is hardly ever heard of now.
That is really cool that you built a jetan set. I wonder if it's possible to find something like that for sale anywhere?...
Unfortunately the website doesn't have all the arguments & evidence it used to - now it just sells stuff. It seems unlikely to be true, but it'd be cool if it were.
Someday we'll all be negroes
Anytime someone claims a fundamental concept in physics is wrong, *they* are almost certainly in error. Either they don't understand what they think is wrong (such as applying Carnot's proof to cases where it doesn't apply) or their own alternatives (even the Wright brothers made propellors with efficiencies in the 70% range so getting four times that isn't going to happen). This entire document is rife with such errors. Even the proposed heat engine is wrong - what happens when the gasses in it rise? They lose pressure and adiabatically lose temperature as well. The entire engine will stop due to lack of an effective temperature differential. Sigh. So many such folks and so few comets...
Well, if its a flying sub, at least we wont have any problems with water landings.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
If this looks interesting, it may be worth looking into John McPhee's piece (originally in the New Yorker) "The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed". That was about a "slightly heavier than air craft" (SHAC?) with the external frame being a delta wing to provide more lift. A good read even if nothing came of it - kind of a shame too as it seemed (to this aerodynamics novice) to be a cool idea with a lot of potential.
Yes, I remembered that book from years back, as soon as I saw the article. Interestingly, Aereon Corporation is still in business after all these years. Check it. . .
http://www.aereoncorp.com/
The page about the Aereon III is especially interesting.
These ships were based on the theory that a lighter-than-air craft could "glide" upwards, then vent some gas and glide downward, then drop some ballast and glide upward again, and continue in this manner until it ran out of gas or ballast. It's all about using aerodynamics to translate the up-and-down movements into horizontal motion. It's not a perpetual motion machine.
A nifty and clever idea, but one of dubious practicality.
While this is hokey couldn't a nuclear powered zepplin stay airborne for a long long time?
Of course every country in the world would go crazy if someone made such a thing... but would it work?
--- I do not moderate.
Parent is a troll with no useful information, someone mod it down.
Seeing as lightning discharges 10 to 100 million volts, http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=801459, I fail to see how resisting 12 thousand would help, and that is considering this "material" even exists, which considering the lack of details, it probably doesn't.
If this worked, then you could rig a piston in tube configuration which would provide 'free power'. The piston would of a variable displacement type, where energy used in compression would be recovered during expansion. This might work if the pressure at the top, and bottom of the tube were equal, which they most certainly are NOT. The energy consumed in expanding/contracting the piston is gauranteed to be more than the energy gained via boyancy. This question is not even interesting enough to warrant doing the math... next.
I'm thinking of all the differences between the sea and the air -- you don't have to 'land' a submarine, there aren't any 'storms' under the sea, and a sub can't just spin out of control like an airplane.
How is that informative?
" a trillion trillion trillion gallons of fuel" ? WTF? AV, are you REALLY telling me that dev costs are going to be equivalent to the cost of 1 x 10^36 gallons of fuel?
Yet again, Amsterdam Vallon posts some useless crap, follows it IMMEDIATELY with a A/C post asking for a "+1, Informative" - and some fool obliges.
Gentlemen: use your own sense of perspective. There is nothing insightful or informative about this post. It is factually incorrect, and is pointless. If you happen to notice that some less-than-perceptive moderator has succumbed to AV's weak attempt at karmawhoring, please use your own points to correct the problem.
Thanks.
Since buoyancy is caused by gravity pulling the fluid (air/water) around you toward the earth and you moving away from the earth to take its place. "Form of gravity" is probably a less accurate term than "effect of gravity." Still, Stephen J. Mraz was right, you're wrong. How about that severe beating?
Nothing bothers me more than shitty pseudoscience.
Be careful when you deride things you don't understand. This isn't new technology. It's been in use in autonomous submarines for years. Employing the same principles in the air hasn't been done yet because it's a bit more complicated: The speeds are a lot higher, the weather becomes a factor, and the margin for error is a lot smaller.
"With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not necessarily a good idea...."
RFC 1925
Yeah, very sad, he was a bit of a poineer.
I first ran into ERB in some old books my dad had when i was 7 or so, "A Fighting Man of Mars", Him EE Smith and Heinlein were probably my early favorites. (Even though ERB and EE Smith both died before I was born, sigh and Heinlien when I was 18). Heinlein is still the very top of my list though. (I got my nick from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", been using it since 84)
Mycroft
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Back in the 1930's, the airship Hindenburg went down to (I think) Buenos Aires and got there in the middle of a revolution. It simply floated over the city for about three days until things calmed down enough to be safe, then landed. Try that with a jumbo jet! If this thing works, it could do the same type of thing, or at least continue on with no worries to a safer location.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
However, it can not carry much on Mars.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
("Glider"? Using diving planes to add a significant forward component to upward/downward motion is well understood. But a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
In fairness to the design, I believe that the movie displayed on their page explains that they pump the helium out of the plane while at altitude. At that point, the plane is no longer flying as a lighter than air vehicle ans is now ballistic save for its glide planes.
However, I don't believe that this violates the 2nd law. Don't give up on me just yet. It's not a plane or a rocket using thrust for lift but an object that uses helium to become bouyant.
Does it require as much energy to pump the amounts of helium that this bird would need to fly as it does to push it up their conventionally? Probably not. Does it require some sort of refuelling? The skeptic in me says yes but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion outright.
Consider yourself lucky. :) He died when I was two, long before I started reading him.
PS
This is what part of the alphabet would look like if Q and R were eliminated. (mitchhedberg.net)
The work required to pump all the air out of the ship to make it buoyant and rise to some height is more than the work required to just lift the ship that distance. Drag and any forward kinetic energy given to the plane implies that the energy recovered by the turbines during fall is not sufficient to pump all the air out of the ship again to once again make it rise, thus you will have to carry along fuel to run an engine to drive the pump that changes your buoyancy. If you use external power to evacuate the buoyancy chambers on the ground, then it can be said that the pressure differential represent stored energy. As the ship rises, gas pressure potential energy is traded for gravitational potential energy (altitude) and kinetic energy (forward motion).... So both the compressed helium and the evacuated chamber represent stored energy which must be loaded onto the ship while on the ground, thus this ship requires fuel like any other ship. Not only this but the inefficiencies in recovering kinetic and gravitational potential energy demand that the ship carry much more stored energy that that required to lift the ship through one up and down cycle.... So you may not hear the phrase "filler up" that the air park, but "emptier out" if effectively the same thing DN
The seem to be expecting some serious speeds here...
In their 'technology' section they claim to be expecting a first tetherless flight of about 100 MPH... Now, excuse me for being a sceptic, but the sea gliders are getting speeds of well under 10MPH,
balloons normally rise at speeds of only a couple of miles per hour, so the only way you could hope to get speeds in the two (much less three) digit range would be if you were to almost entirely deflate the balloons and just become a pure glider.
This means that you can generally expect a top average speed of about half (best case) what a really fast glider can sustain. (what's the world record for the fastest sustained glider flight?)
Of course, if they're ever built, the yo-yo traffic patterns of these things are gonna make them the bane of air controllers, and I can just see a queue of them sprialing above every thermal source in the area.
Another question I come up with is whether strengthening (and airtighting) the pontoons to survive any appreciable pressure differential would cause more weight then the boyance gains from that pressure differential?
For a technology company with grandiose plans, I see very few signs of them doing any serious engineering work.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
I knew that was a Simpsons quote! =)
http://www.fortunecity.com/victorian/lexington/44/ thermo.wav
the JoshMeister on Security
Plain and simple.
In order to recover all of that energy you must transfer ALL of it back into the compression of the hydrogen. This is impossible as there are NO 100% efficient "wind turbines" to recover that energy.
Forget about the fact that the plane glides forward - that's just smoke and mirrors. Look at the simpler case where the "plane" falls straight down and doesn't glide at all then ask yourself if it can recover the energy required to get it back to its original altitude. Obviously it can't.
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
Even if this could work, which I doubt, would we want it? Doesn't this sound like other famous technology substitutes: * Cooking without fire: Microwave rice bowls. * Light without heat: Flourescent bulbs. * Sex without pleasure: Marriage. * TV without intelligence: TV. I'm sure flight without fuel would get there, but somehow leave you feeling dissatisfied ...
Chr0m0Dr0m!C
1) there is no such material
2) lighting is on the order of MILLIONS of volts
3) you dont EVER want to RESIST such electrical charges, you want to CONDUCT them AWAY from important parts.
4) you are obviously no engineer.
The structural requirements of a vacuum are much greater than helium. The entire structure goes into compression and bending when in a vacuum, meaning it will need to be extremely strong in order to resist bending. This is a bit like sucking the air out of a 2 liter pop bottle, it will collapse easily, and the pop bottle will need to be substituted with a steel canteen in order to keep its form. Unfortunately, this kind of structure is heavy, and in terms of air ships are extremely inneficient.
A regular blimp inflates, so the forces on the skin are entirely in tension, the only bending forces are caused by loads the ship is carrying and more importantly, sudden wind gusts which could tear a weak ship apart. Structurally speaking, this is vastly more efficient and completely eliminates bending due to a vacuum, and the tensile force alone in the skin is often enough to provide a stiff but flexible frame, just like a ballon once inflated keeps its shape even under tremendous strain. It is a very resiliant structure.
There are two huge problems that have always existed with airships, and fuel is not one of them. The first problem is landing the craft. They have a tendency to blow around with even slight gusts of wind, and if anything happens like a downdraft, they can get smashed into the ground. The second problem is weather related. In violent weather, the thin skin on these ships can get torn easily. The larger the craft, generally speaking, the bigger the problems. This is not to say these problems are inherently unsolvable, but why bother using zero fuel when fuel already will cost next to nothing if it uses solar power or fuel cells.
If this so-called genious had any serious understanding of thermodynamics he would know that a Carnot cycle has to take place in a CLOSED SYSTEM or else the thermodynamical model is flawed. That's first semester of physics knowledge.
;)
What is the closed system in this case ? The craft interacts with the atmosphere, thus the system must encompass the whole earth + the sun. And then there is no heat loss
The "fuel" for the aircraft, as other contributors have pointed out, is nothing else than the sun, and the inertia of the earth (self rotation -> coriolis force -> wind)
To say that these basic thermodynamical equations are "no longer true" is preposterous and shows the ignorance of the author.
The design is not a perpetual machine, just a very bad aircraft. Its just like the ultralight planes powered by photovoltaic cells covered on their huge wingspan, they're also "no fuel needed", but they serve no practical purpose whatsoever. slow, no cargo possible, and tributary to good weather conditions.
Besides, there are so many other flaws (cargo space, generator drag, self sustainability). I could even point out that his comparison with sea mamals is flawed, since the sea mamals dont start their "cycle" at the bottom of the ocean, but at the top, but that would be overkill.
There is a very good "fuelless" hauling method available to us since yearhundreds, allowing much larger cargo capacity and reasonably fast (with current technology): its called a FRIGGIN' SAILING SHIP.
To "antiglide" (my word, not theirs, at least I didn't see it when I skimmed the article) wouldn't you have to turn the wing upside down?
A traditional glider takes the force of gravity and re-directs it sideways. It does this via the Bernoulli (sp?) effect making the air go faster over the top side of the wing.
If gravity pulled up, the glider would naturally want to flip upside down.
A traditonal balloon has nothing to pull you sideways, except air currents.
A traditonal glider runs out of power when you hit the ground, and you have to tow it back up. A tradional balloon can only rise so high before it's impractical for buoyancy to overcome gravity--100,000 ft for high performance balloons.
Now, the idea is intriguing, but to antiglide in a manner comparable to a glider, they need to have enough upward force to impart something comparable to 1g on the craft for a significant part of the vertical range. Ever see a blimp take off? It certainly doesn't look like it's under the influence of 1g. No, far from it. The other challenge is to do this with a craft with surface area small enough so that the airfoil effect isn't overcome by air currents.
IANA Aeronautical Engineer, but I think they would have to build it out of unobtanium or something. Kevlar? That strong? I don't think so. I'd like to see some calculations. The fact that they are calling it "fuelless" certainly arouses suspicions. Even a sub needs fuel to blow that ballast. That's essentially what they are proposing--repeatedly cycling the ballast.
For the sake of argument, let's assume it works. Imagine traveling accross the country in a plane where the pilot goes up to 20,000 ft, then glides down to 1000 then goes back up to 20,000... etc. Can you say "barf bag"?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
WWII subs are not a good example because they didn't dive very deep, and they were diesel powered, meaning they couldn't stay submerged very long on battery before they were forced to surface to run their engines.
:). In particular "hover mode" cycles a shitload of water per second (that's the highly specific non-classified term for you). The purpose is to create a very stable platform for launching weapons, missiles, whatever, with no forward motion.
Modern nuclear subs actually do put a lot of power into buoyancy adjustments, and yes that's the correct spelling
Without either forward motion, or hover tanks, standard buoyancy adjustments would not keep the ship stable and it would tend to tilt one way or another, especially after launching its payload.
Standard buoyancy adjustments aren't nearly as power intensive, but they are used more often than in WWII, since subs now dive very deep and may have to adjust for thermal layers and other ocean / weather events.
The plane adjustments are used differently depending on the desired effect. The stern planes adjust the orientation of the ship, while the bow planes allow you to move up and down without tilting much. This is important with subs nowadays because of their sheer length. One degree of tilt could put you at 7-10 feet of difference from bow to stern, which is a big deal when you're at periscope depth and don't want to breach.
The design this appears to be a "high" pressure balloon. Nasa is currently researching ultra long duration balloons.i ndex.shtml
:(
http://www.wff.nasa.gov/~code820/uldb/
During the day the sun will heats the helium causing it to expand and the craft floats upward.
During the night the helium cools causing it to contract and the craft falls downwards.
The whole thing looks too heavy to even get off the ground.
I always thought that it was high time to revisit the concept of airship design. After the Hindinberg killed off all progression in the topic, we need to compare to the science that has shown up in the last 70+ years. How about fly by wire, computer aided controls, new airodynamic theorys, and new materials that have come out? Remember many of the new Lawn Dart jets would be nearly uncontrolable if it wasn't for the aid of computers. Imagine an air ship that can be set to automatically sit in one spot despite what the wind is doing. cool.
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Namaste
what's your point? i didn't see anything about pm
As for the name:
Supermosphere? No.
Aerobouy? No.
Aeroship - Hmmmm. Too bad I can't copyright that now.
After the name is generalized we'll probably just call it an "LTA" for lighter-than-air.
I don't get the thing about terrorism though. Doesn't compressd air expand violently when its container is suddenly broken? Wouldn't the damn thing destroy most civillian targets? Jeeze.
Stuff that matters.
Looking at that design, I see a -lot- of side area, to act a one huge sail... You're gonna spend more enrgy keeping going where you wanna go than you save by using thrust bouyancy..
Is a sailboat a perpetual motion machine? Is a windmill a perpetual motion machine? This ship could sail in 3 dimensions and draw power from a turbine. Theoretically, that is possible. Althoug it does need some additional power, hard tack and beans possibly.
But what I don't understand is why he doesn't just create a giant inflatable airplane hybrid, that would probably work better. It could get 90% lift from helium and 10% from forward movement from a turbo fans powered by solar power. The helium ballon aspect of it could be the structural system as well, it would be an active system (inflatable), rather than a very heavy and expensive rigid frame.
I'm skeptical of information provided on web pages featuring starry backgrounds and bright blue text. It reminds me of UFO Abduction websites, Black Helicopter Life Cycle websites, and Heaven's Gate.
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
There's no doubt that the potential energy of an aircraft flying at a claimed altitude of 10 miles would be enough to harness into forward motion in some way. However, the energy needed to lift the aircraft needs to come from somehwere.
How large would this aircraft need to be to acheive less density than air (when filled with helium)? Unbuildably large, especially if it's going to carry cargo.
The video claims that compressed air will power pneumatic motors that store compressed air. Wow, if that works, maybe I can use an electric motor to turn a generator and save tons on my electric bill!
The inherent problem with airships is that the huge surface area combined with low weight means they get blown around easily and handle badly. Adding wings doesn't help. It's been tried. Adding power does help. Adding steerable power helps even more.
For an idea of what a successful modern lighter-than-air craft looks like, see Zeppelin Luftschifftechnik GmbH, which has built several large rigid airships in the last few years. But even with carbon fibre and Kevlar, the load capacity is small.
just as the submarines use energy to compress or expand gas in their bouyancy tanks. This makes them a heat engine (though a slowly cycling one) and subject to the carnot cycle limit.
Actually, as long as you compress and expand gas adiabatically, then the Carnot cycle is irrelevant.
Obviously you cannot make an engine that works in this way, because the point of an engine is (1) to do net work or (2) to cause a heat transfer. So the efficiency of any engine cycle has a Carnot limit.
But the process you have described need not be an engine. In fact, this should be completely obvious. Since there is no net work being done, and no heat transfer, how on earth can you even define an thermodynamic efficiency for the cycle?
And you don't even need to get this complicated. (Slow) compression and expansion of an isolated volume of a gas is reversible and adiabatic. Hence it is isentropic.
This is complete bull! There is no way for this thing to "to stay aloft virtually forever" without some sort of external energy input. Entropy 101.
On a side note, does anyone know how stinking cold it is at 50,000 ft. I don't know for certain but I'm sure is a really small number (in K of course). The heat loss from such a ship must be significant at these elevations. Does anyone know how these folks propose to keep their passengers from freezing? They can't always fly in the sun; they will need some sort of energy source to keep the temperatures at levels suitable for human existence. No, their magical compressors won't be able to do much about this
Obligitory King Arthur reference,
If it doesn't float, and it's not made from wood, IT MUST BE A WITCH! BURN HER!
>To be safe they re-ran the numbers three times to be absolutely, positively sure the refuelers hadn't made any mistakes; each time using 1.77 pounds/liter as the specific gravity factor. This was the factor written on the refueler's slip and used on all of the other planes in Air Canada's fleet. The factor the refuelers and the crew should have used on the brand new, all-metric 767 was .8 kg/liter of kerosene.
Lessons: a triple-check doesn't help you if there's a systematic error. Standardized measurements are a Good Thing.
>the EICAS issued a sharp bong--indicating the complete and total loss of both engines. Says Quintal "It's a sound that Bob and I had never heard before. It's not in the simulator."
Lesson: in a safety-critical system, train the users for "impossible" situations.
>Hydraulic pressure was falling fast and the plane's controls were quickly becoming inoperative. But the engineers at Boeing had foreseen even this most unlikely of scenarios and provided one last failsafethe RAT.
Lesson: when your engineers go paranoid, if there are lives at stake then for God's sake listen to them. "Belt and suspenders" engineering saved lives in this incident.
>Quintal "got busy" in the manuals looking for procedures for dealing with the loss of both engines. There were none..
Lesson: learn from experience. There have been incidents, like volcanic ash injection, that have forced shutdowns of all engines on a jetliner. If your statistics say the engines can't fail at the same time, and the graybeards say they can, then you left something out of the statistics.
>The avoidance of disaster was credited to Capt. Pearson's "Knowledge of gliding which he applied in an emergency situation to the landing of one of the most sophisticated aircraft ever built."
Lesson: there is no substitute for a wealth of experience. Downsize your 20-year veterans to save money, watch things go wrong.
Sorry for the diversion, but these are things I'm passionate about.
Secure Windows? Whats this world comming to these days.
Yes. Conservation of energy tells you there needs to be an energy input. The website admits to using one for launch, either with an external source of compressed air or by using the turbines as a windmill during high winds on the ground.
During flight, there are two ways you could get more range than your onboard "fuel" would permit.
You could play the same games as balloon pilots, and move up or down to get into air currents moving the right direction.
You could also play the same games as glider pilots, and circle inside "thermals", columns of rising warm air.
Neither is suitable if you're in a hurry. This looks like an airplane that "wants" to be big, slow, and stay up a long time. It also has the potential to be highly reliable, with no high-temperature components. On the other hand it would have a scary number of moving parts.
Communications relay, maybe, observation platform, AWACS? It's partway to being a stealth plane given the absence of hot engines and metal skin, but I don't know if you could stealthify those turbines.
Ohh come on!! You actually LIKE vi?!!! It has the worst user interface known to man. Fuck that, Notepad is all I need baby ;)
It was Heinlein that introduced me to Burroughs. Thank the gods for both of them. Btw: Heinlein died when I was 13.
The aircraft uses changes in altitude to propel itself. He's building a prototype that uses the same principle to propel itself through water.
Actually staying in the air in this case uses buoyancy so it doesn't require any energy. (think blimp)
This is not perpetual motion. It's using two forces: gravity and buoyancy to move.
Just stating the obvious for those less fortunate...
(I got my nick from "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress"
Funny once, Mike.
1. To change bouyance you will have to expend energy somehow.
2. It will be SLOW!!!
3. It will be huge and very dangerous in high winds. Super light and strong composits or not there are limits and this thing would be at the ragged edge.
4. For what? It will be super slow and trains, barges, and ships are very good at moving heavy loads over long distances at slow speeds.
5. No one will fund it. Not only would you have to build this thing but you would have to setup air fields for it. It will not mesh well at the current airports.
One of those great PopSci pipedreams like flying cars.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Mr. Hunt describes it convincingly. Buoyancy is caused by the differing force with which gravity pulls on heavy and light things. Gravity pulls with more force on heavier things, (F=MA; mass is higher), and less on lighter things. Hence, the heavier thing sinks relative to the lighter thing. Buoyancy.
This IS a perpetual motion machine (unless, as some have suggested, they intend to use thermals). Here's why. Let's actually consider the water version; it's easier to analyze (since the ocean has, to a good approximation, constant density with depth).
Assume we have a big volume V (cross sectional area A and length L, so AL=V) which can fill with water or with vacuum. Our payload has mass m (and let's assume its volume is negligible compared to V). We drop this thing in the ocean, the volume V fills with water, and it decends to a depth H. In the process we can harvest up to mgH of energy (the gravitational energy). Now once we are at the depth H, we need to pump out the water. That takes energy! The force required to pump out the water is P*A and the total work done is P*A*L. But A*L=V, so the total work needed to pump out the volume is PV. The pressure at this depth is just rho*g*H, so the work needed to pump out the tank is rho*g*H*V.
BUT, in order to have bouyancy, we need the average density of our craft to be less than that of water, i.e. m/V m/V * (g * H * V) = m * g * H, which, as you recall, was the maximum energy we could recover during our drop. So we need more energy to pump out the water than we gained during the drop. (And you don't get it back when you let the water back in at the top; the pressure there is 0.)
The same analysis will work for the atmospheric case, but you need calculus because the density of air varies with height.
The answer is expense. Hunt claims that 80% of the operating cost of an airplane is its fuel cost. Lower operating costs = cheaper tickets on a fuelless airplane. Would you spend an extra, say, hour or two in the air on your flight from NYC to Chicago if the ticket cost half as much? I would.
Not that anyone ever actually follows a link and reads what is there, but I recommend that all the "non-believers" here take a look at Seaglider.
Or follow this google search for even more.
Seaglider applies much the same principles as this vehicle but to an underwater environment. It has a small onboard power supply, but it alternately uses gravity and bouyancy to propel itself.
I may not be an Aerospace Engineer but I am an Ocean Engineer and Fluid Dynamics in air is the same as Fluid Dynamics in water. Just change your value for rho.
I didn't RTFA, but an albatross can already fly for months at a time using the fact that air currents are different depending on their altitude.
Just call it an airship and be done with it.
I'm sure some of you are breaking out your ideal gas law to see if this is a perpetual motion machine. However, please take this into account: buoyant acceleration is actually = g*(m-md)/(m+md) where m is the mass of the buoyant object and md is the mass of the diplaced gas.
Or, to save even more energy, you could launch a very large tethered balloon and use the tether to lift up gliders, which can then be released. It would be good if the base of the balloon had an actual glider launcher (e.g. a winch) to provide a bit of starting velocity for the glider.
This sounds strangely animeish to me, but it's more feasible than the air fish in the story...
An empty 747-400 fuselage filled with He pumped down to 5psi would need to weigh 3000 lbs to just balance gravity. Adding wings, turbines, compressors, storage tanks and handlfull of passenges, the required size gets riduclous.
Would this kind of vehicle actually be able to travel against the prevailing winds? Or would a NY to LA flight be really really long?
Oh you guys and your wheel argument. Tumbleweed shmumbleweed, tumbleweeds don't carry loads larger than themselves. But I'm not going to take on that argument, I'm going to note a grossly incorrect word in the promo blurb, and then rip on the guy who wrote designed this thing.
;-)
... people and fire.
A ridged skin aircraft?!? Does he mean rigid? Unless you're trying to get funding from Ruffles, I don't see the advantage of making your aircraft skin ridged. If anything, that goes against making it so light.
So here's what's wrong: that silly turbine up top doesn't fit with the parabolic curve design of the rest of the aircraft, and it doesn't benefit the aircraft. What this thing needs is a collapsible air-brake that can generate electricity, like a giant folding propeller. It needs to be able to stop dead in the air to make near vertical landings. Aircraft that don't need runways = good. Aircraft that mess up air traffic patterns at local airports because they're too slow = bad.
And it needs solar panels on top, because perpetual motion is impossible, but harnessing fusion power requires only a solar panel. Then maybe he could go from selling a perpetual motion machine to one that harnesses fusion without creating heat. I think it'd be an easier sell.
And the body should be on the bottom, not the top. You put the buoyant pontoons up high and the weight down low so it doesn't flip over. Though it looks cool with the body on top, kinda like a catamaran. I like catamarans, they look really sharp. I just don't pretend I can make one fly.
And it's shown really high, so it must be waaaay lighter than air at sea level. Granted I got all this from the still. His promo video is in windows media. He's obviously a tool. Anyone trying to show stuff to the scientific community would let their video be shown on something other than windows. Mpeg anyone?
It's gonna be slow, and people want speed if they go into the air. Speed is THE reason to fly right now. If it doesn't go fast then there's no reason to leave the ground. So here's my solution:
It should be significantly lighter than air, and the pontoons should be filled with a near perfect vacuum. Then water should be added until it reaches perfect buoyancy at ground level so that taking off isn't harsh. Now it has expendable energy in the form of down force and up force. Expend away to achieve maximum velocity. Not much needs to be stored, and energy can be gathered from sunlight without causing drag like a turbine would.
You could drop all the water to get up force, and fill the vacuum to achieve downforce. I still have trouble seeing such a plane reaching speeds faster than you can go on the highway, and the energy would be fairly easy to create at ground level.
I could suggest using hydrogen and combining it with a fuel cell just to throw in a buzzword and get more venture capital. But hydrogen and lighter than air craft mix like
The idea that this guy is looking to debunk thermodynamics just kills me. His math doesn't work underwater, his math doesn't work in the air. He's missing the real nifty factor of this craft by trying to cram his dumb vertical turbine generator into it. Expand the idea of the underwater gliders to this and you've got something. The idea is cool, but this guy's implementation is both impossible and useless. The technology to make this really useful does not exist. The socio-political environment to make this desirable does not exist. This plane, as shown, does not and will not ever exist.
In short, this dog won't hunt. -theed
Whatcha do for fuelless flight is this:
1) Push the craft off a cliff. Has to be a cliff.
2) Aim for the ground
3) Get distracted, then you begin to fly.
Hehehe...
Kev
"Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky"-Pink Floyd
Though technically, i don't think it was a glide.
Well, after reading all the info on the website, I have a good grasp of how the plane works. Much better than most of the people that have posted here. They seem to have fixated on the concept of perpetual motion, which it is not. What it is however is a system that once it is charged up, is capable of sustaining itself without burning fossil fuels. It's actually such a simple system many people will look at it and think it can't possibly work. Either that or because it is different that current aircraft, it must be a hoax.
The vacume cells provide the lift, giving it the ability to hover or gain alitude with no engines. This is basic physics, airship 101. The system will lose power due to drag, that is where the wind turbines come into play, they generate power to operating the electrical systems, adjust & sustain the vacume and produce heat. The wind turns the turbine, but gravity gives the ship/plane the velocity it needs to create sufficient power. The flight pattern would not be like a jet plane, rising to an altitude and maintaining it till the destination is reached. Rather it would be a steep climb caused by the bouancy, followed by a long shallow decent powered by gravity. Depending on the distance, this would be repeated quite a few times. Travel over large distances would not be as fast as a 747, but I'm sure for cargo, the cost would be less and more of it could be carried. I'm not sure how passengers would take to the climb/dive flight pattern. I think it would require a pressurized cabin that doesn't suffer the variations that a modern passenger aircraft suffers.
I think this design could be a great success. As long as the oil companies don't off the guy or convince the aircraft manufactures to do a "Tucker" on him.
a "glider" is something else - a high-speed device with significant aerodynamic lift - initially powered by atmospheric thermal energy in the form of updrafts storing energy by raising a NON-bouyant craft against gravity, then trading this stored energy for momentum as necessary by gliding downward. Raising a neutrally-bouyant object stores no energy.)
Bzzt. Wrong.
Potential Energy = Mass * g * Height
How an object gets to 10,000 feet is irrelevant. Whether an object is neutrally bouyant, negatively buoyant, or positively buoyant is irrelevant.
"Bzzt. Wrong." yourself.
You neglected the potential energy of the displaced air.
If the object is at 10,000 feet, there's a chunk of air missing from 10,000 feet and present at ground level.
The total potential energy change is (M[vehicle] - M[air]) * g * h.
If the vehicle is neutrally-bouyant, M[vehicle] = M[air]. So the added potential energy of the vehicle/air system with the vehicle at 10,000 feet is 0 * g * 10,000 = 0.
If the vehicle weighs LESS than the air you have MORE potential energy when it's on the ground than when it's at 10,000 feet. (Which is why it goes up when you untie it.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Isn't Mycroft Sherlock Holmes' genius-genius brother in the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle books?
Doesn't need fossil fuels? Sounds too good to be true because it is. Unfortuantely our designer hasn't heard about a little thing called conservation of energy.
All that pumping and compressing of He takes it and at the moment we do most of that kind of work by fossil fuels. Submarines have power plants the last time I checked.
I doubt a craft that is slower and still uses a lot of fuel has much of a market.
Burroughs's writing is a nice bit of escapism, but it makes fairly terrible literature. Reading something like Tarzan, I can't help but get a headache from the endless, seemingly-repetitive passages and limited character development. They had different ideas of what a novel was supposed to be like back then, though, so I suppose it's excusable.
Of capitalism as we perceive! :-))
( No offense to bill
[rant]
I feel I have to say that, in light of the many comments already concerning perpetual motion (and yes, I've read the $#@!ing article), I really think that it's pretty weird that my last comment on the Second Law of Thermodynamics was moderated "Offtopic."
[/rant]
Obviously, it's absurd that anything that relies only upon a gravitational potential energy exchange can stay airborne forever, especially a vehicle that relies on a dissipative medium (i.e. air) to provide lift.
This should have been obvious from my first comment, and so I think I need to moderate my moderator as "-1, Uneducated."
Idiot Filter, indeed. So go ahead, metamoderate me this time; see if I care. But first, just promise me that you'll read the article (and go to college) first.
-joe.
If you look at the website there are many other things to laugh about. One of them is the "drag" windmill.
Basically the same idea was put forth years ago and took the form of a merry-go-round construction that sat on the top of a large pole. Some of them fell off and sort of cart-wheeled down the terrain. But they were built and investors did invest their hard earned sheckles in them.
The problem with these ideas is that in order to extract some of the energy from the wind, you must slow down some of the wind. The most efficient design for this is an air foil and this is why airplane propellers and wings are designed as such.
It would be pretty funny looking at a helechopper with a big flapping contraption up top - but it was tried - sometime before the turn of the century I think.
hahaha
Now I will give you an idea that might actually work. Since I don't have the funds to patent it nor to actually build it I will contribute this to the well being of the human race. At least everyone can point to the "prior art".
We can place into orbit a series of mirrors which are dispersed over a fairly wide width of orbits and are each reasonable small collectors.
Next we can harness a large number of these collectors to focus their sunlight into a fairly small region in the atmosphere and arrange to have a plane with black wings there. Note that any sunlight not falling on the wings spreads out harmlessly since the incident angles of the beams are not in alignment.
This can pipe a considerable amount of energy into a small area which the airplane can then transport into a chamber designed to heat a compressed air mass.
The basic operation of a turbine is this: You cram a bunch of air into a small chamber and heat it up by burning fuel. You let it expand and differentially push on a larger area as it does so and since the air mass is now hotter you get a larger volume of air doing the pushing and the push more than cancels the drag of the intake side of the engine. Go look at a basic ramjet design.
Well - it is pretty easy to turn a mirror. They can track a solar powered aircraft like this quite accurately. Thus we can have many 100's of suns intensity falling on the upper surface of our solar airplane.
Of course - material science to collect and transport this energy into a chamber which is analagous to the combustion chamber of a jet engine (or a ram jet engine for that matter) is not going to be easy... but at least - we have some energy to play around with.
Using a system like this we might even be able to eventually get craft into orbit.
------------
well - so much for the pipe dreams. Something like this might take 100,000 mirrors in space. Imagine the tracking system. hahaha.
It's pretty clear to me that the designer of this aircraft not only took some physics in college, but also actually studied the textbook and did the problem sets. And there lies the problem. I'm convinced that (s)he did a few too many of those problems that start out: "Disregarding air resistance, find the..." or "Ignoring the effects of friction, calculate...."
Perhaps first year physics texts should come with a shrink wrap EULA that states something along the lines of: "The scenarios presented in this book do not accurately represent reality."
One of the articles calls it a "Fuel-less Gravity Powered Flight"
P = power = WORK/TIME, (as in joules/second).
So how can gravity produce power?
If the plane does WORK = (force) x (direction)
and I apply
(very small force) x (-opposite direction)
I will eventullay stop the plane.
Ergo, gravity cannot power the plane.
Also note: "(patented, new design of Robert D Hunt) wind turbine".
A.K.A a propeller.
Are they patenting the basic laws of thermodynamics?
Did you know you can patent elements of the periodic table? The Constitution gives congress the power to grant exclusive rights to authors and inventors to their "writings and discoveries".
The FCC has taken a big chunk of the EM spectrum from us and a company has a patent on solving some physics equations.
Too many lawyers and not enough physicists.
--
How much does your electric provider charge you for bringing 1 liter of water to a boil?
Airships are the size of cruise liners, but the reason for that is that the lifting capacity of an airship increases with volume, i.e. x^3. You can get round about 1kg of lifting capacity from 1m^3 of helium.
It's also a rigid ship, the gas bags are inside a rigid frame. The frame used to be aluminium but they'd use carbon fibre these days. Buoyancy bladders are not a particularly big hurdle.
It's all technically possible but I'm not convinced it'd be what you could call quick.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Thankyou for the tip! I've been looking out for this in 2nd hand bookshops with of course no luck. Now I will read it all!
*#*#*#*#*#******* I love peanut butter sandwiches!
H + H = He + energy
.
I hear things get really fucking hot when you smash hydrogen atoms together.
And the best thing, hydrogen is the most abundant elemnt in the universe.
Very cute. Pilot: "Our engines have quit so we're going to have to look for a landing splot".
Also on the site:
The idea that an airplane can fly endlessly carrying heavy loads of passengers and cargo without burning any fuel,...
I don't know about you, but being born and living my entire life as a passenger on an airplane that is endlessly flying (and with that same old cargo to boot) isn't my idea of the good life.
Seriously, these kind of logical mistakes and spelling errors just show what a low-rent organization this is. They have about the same chance of building one of these as I do.
This isn't a typo, but just a plain old mistake by our illustrious Dr. Hunt:
"A conventional glider is towed to fairly high altitude by an airplane or is launched by a tow wench."
That must be one really big mama. The "Attack of the Forty Foot Woman" comes to mind.
Oh, maybe he meant "winch".
If you listen to the explanation (I know, it's ludicrous) they're basically saying you can get more air going down then you can going up.
Well duh. Air is denser underneather the craft than above it, so there will always be more air "on the way down".
I take this "article" with a big salt lick.
My balls are salty.
this is the Aerodyne invented in 1859
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock. Will Rogers
Considering that the vast majority of the mass of a spacecraft at launch is it's fuel (most of which is used to launch more fuel), the payload of the spacecraft that can be launched from an air-submarine would be considerably lighter than that of a conventional spacecraft at launch. Once the air-submarine has reached it's maximum height, the spacecraft could then take off (a horizontal launch would be preferable, as vertical thrust may not be as effective on a floating air-submarine than it would be on the ground, not to mention the air-submarine would have to be designed to survive a rocket thrusting against it's top). Thanks to the height it's already gained, it is closer to the altitude at which it is to orbit. Also, the lower gravity and the thinner atmosphere (less drag) would mean that the velocity to reach the desired orbit would be lower.
However, even with less fuel, spacecraft still tend to be massive. The air-submarine would have to have extremely large buoyancy chambers to be able to lift a payload the mass of the spacecraft (I'm not even sure if such large buoyancy chambers are feasable).
Anyway, speaking of launching spacecraft at an altitude. Does anyone know why NASA chose a launchpad in Florida that is more or less at sea-level? If they had built it high up in the Rockies, they could have saved some fuel. The difference in gravity and drag may not be much, but beacuse rockets as we know them are mostly fuel, then surely the ammount of fuel to accelerate it into orbit would be less.
Three reasons: wind, weather, and airship structure.
The wind can be brutal at higher altitutdes, that's where the jet stream is.
And the weather has all sorts of things like rain, high and low air pressure, hail, lightning, hurricanes, typhoons, and worst of all, other aircraft speeding around.
I've read the website. While it seems logical, an airship twice the size of a 747 built like they describe makes me wonder about rigidity and strength and weight.
My only other concern was it seems the cockpit is between the pods and has lousy visibility. But, that's me...
It my be the second most common element in the universe but we have a hard time getting it. Helium is mined from limited reserves and like fossil fuels takes millions of years to be produced. For this to actually be reusable (for years to come) it has to use vacuum, or dare I say it, hydrogen. Hydrogen is easy to get hold off and only dangerous when mixed with oxygen. It also has much better lift. But I suppose I shouldn't complain when someone puts forward an idea for clean flight AND gets some attention.
This man is just waiting for a vendor capitalist to be stupid enough to give him some money.
Nice trick also worked for small internet companies in the past, do a smart webpage, get some money and deliver nothing but words.
Lars
One thing that everyone keeps forgetting is drag / weight / size. The type of equipment that this guy is talking about is going to take up a lot of space. Usually things that take up space weight something. Things that also take up space require energy to move them through the air. His only form of propulsion is gliding / compressed air, but gliders are usually extremely aerodynamic vehicles with a high glide ratio. Drag and the weight of the aircraft are directly related to such a ratio. So in theory, the super marine would go up, glide a foot, and then have to repeat. Not to mention maneuverability. Highly impractical.
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing the reaction on people's faces when the first one comes porpoising along :-)
FREE WILLY 2007!
Sounds a little like Tom Swift's Paraplane (which used an external gasbag) from Tom Swift and His Electronic Retroscope, Grossett & Dunlap, 1959.
Right, a simple test case is a good way to prove the concept. So let's do it!
Let's immagine a very simple baloon that only picks itself up and then falls down. We will cheat a little by having compressed H/He available on the ground. We will imagine our baloon has some structural weight, W, and that it's large enough to have bouyancy to lift that W. Our baloon must have a pump and a tank inside so that the boyancy can be reduced so the baloon can decend. The only energy we need, then, is enough energy to reduce the volume of H/He enough to descend. The energy available is mgh, or Wh the weight times the height. If, like most baloons, we can take it to the edge of space there should be plenty of energy available to compress our H/He. The only practical problem is capturing that energy. So, how much energy would we need to capture?
A 5Kg mass taken to 10,000m would give us about half a million joules. Givent the relative densities of air and H/He, we will need between 4 and 5 cubic meters of gas to lift 5Kg. It would take, roughly, 250,000 joules to compress that volume by half and give you 2.5 Kg of downward force. Oh dear, at 10,000m this is looking like a wash out. Fortunately, manned balloon flight can get to 30,000m, so this is theoretically possible. Just don't try to do it like this
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A Solar powered blimp would cut it.
They have the surface area for lots of solar cells.
They don't require energy for lift.
Should work quite well.
Aside from perpmo in general, using stored compressed air to power the compressors to gather more compressed air? That was iterated at least twice. The Engineer in me would not tolerate a second audition for an exact count of banal pseudo-scientific nuggets...that one is a deal killer all by itself.
"If no one tilts at windmills, the damn things will take over the world!"- christian simpleman
They had different ideas of what a novel was supposed to be like back then, though, so I suppose it's excusable.
Don't blame the past. We have this tendancy to always think those in the past weren't as smart as we are. If what you say were true, then it would be hard to explain the quality of novels by Mark Twain, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, or any other writers during or before the time of ERB.
ERB's writing is flawed, there is no doubt. Some people can't stand him, but there is something in his writing that fired up the imagination of generations and inspired people like Robert Heinlein to want to write (read his "Number of the Beast", which includes multiple references to ERB's Martian Tales and Pellucidar). Carl Sagan has said that ERB's stories are what captured his imagination and inspired him to learn science. His Tarzan stories have so fascinated people that we are continually seeing new versions of Tarzan movies and TV shows.
His novels are not great literature, but there is something in them that has kept them inspiring those who read them for almost 100 years now (his first story was published 92 years ago this year).
BTW, another factor to remember is that his stories were originally published as serialized stories in pulp magazines. He was writing for a specific market and specific mags.
It'll be slow if you are really going "fuelless".
In which case you'd be competing against trains, ships and airships.
Doesn't really matter tho. They're looking for stupid investors- take the money, make an "honest attempt", and walk away.
--
Heck a wind powered blimp would sound even more convincing - just hang an adjustable sail/keel/rotorsail (like gyrocopter) a few hundred feet down, and you could do some sailing, this assumes of course that the winds a few hundred feet down are different enough from the winds above.
Add a windmill or two to get power for miscellaneous stuff for the blimp - assuming different winds at windmill altitude from blimp altitude. Still solar power could be more effective.
Hmm... It looks like a blimp with wings to me. There is no way you could carry very much in people or cargo with out making the thing huge. Also getting a 40:1 ratio on hight to speed seems very slow. You would have to wait until the thing had finished going up to start moving foreward. Also even if you could get it up ten miles (At that hight the air would be substaincially less dense.) You would have to stay at least a couple miles up because of FAA regulations. This would be a nightmare for the control tower:
Tower: Climb and Maintian 35,000 feet
Blimp: Okay but then I wont be able to move.
Also compressing the helium/vacum seems like it would take a lot of energy. When you factor in the fuel needed to run the cocpit etc. I think you would be better of with just a regular airplane.
Nice idea, but crap physics. Here's why:
From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C and 29.92 inches). So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3, or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble isn't really relevant here, OK?)
Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4 tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.
Now the problems start.
Blimps use balonets to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes. For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude) if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.
The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10 miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb. This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208 tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.
Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb, so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible lift.
Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.
This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around 10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think this plan is crap.
Pacifist paratroopers yell, "Ghandi!" when they jump.
A PRINCESS OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs
CHAPTER I : ON THE ARIZONA HILLS
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am
a hundred, possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have
never aged as other men, nor do I remember any childhood.
So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man
of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty years and
more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever;
that some day I shall die the real death from which there is
no resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death,
I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the
same horror of it as you who have never died, and it is
because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so
convinced of my mortality.
And because of this conviction I have determined to write
down the story of the interesting periods of my life and of
my death. I cannot explain the phenomena;I can only set
down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a
chronicle of the strange events that befell me during the ten
years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an Arizona
cave.
I have never told this story, nor shall mortal man see this
manuscript until after I have passed over for eternity. I know
that the average human mind will not believe what it cannot
grasp, and so I do not purpose being pilloried by the public,
the pulpit, and the press, and held up as a colossal
liar when I am but telling the simple truths which some da
science will substantiate. Possibly the suggestions which I
gained upon Mars, and the knowledge which I can set down
in this chronicle, will aid in an earlier understanding of the
mysteries of our sister planet; mysteries to you, but no
longer mysteries to me.
My name is John Carter; I am better known as Captain Jack
Carter of Virginia. At the close of the Civil War I found
myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars
(Confederate) and a captain's commission in the cavalry arm
of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state
which had vanished with the hopes of the South. Masterless,
penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting,
gone, I determined to work my way to the southwest and
attempt to retrieve my fallen fortunes in a search for gold.
- See The Project Gutenberg for more.
would be transportation in 2010. Cars that look like airdrops? these trains using electromagnetic railway? (not sure about the excact term), car free central city? how the the future looks like?
I hope you're kidding. It's not free propulsion. It takes energy to compress and/or produce the buoyant medium. The energy used in that is equal to the energy to move the craft, plus inefficiency. Now, the efficiency of such a craft could be terribly high, as the induced drag would be near-null. Instead of fighting against gravity, it sets its buoyancy to the optimum for gliding, and alternates between gliding up and down. Instead of wasting energy thrashing the air with a propeller (the turbulence ends up dissipated as heat), or heating and expelling air out the back (the heat gradient is largely wasted), it is as simple and elegant as a glider.
However, it's not really fuelless. Else, you could generate power for free by connecting balloons to a vertical belt, and pumping buoyant gas into the baloons on the side going up, and out of the ones on the side going down, or for that matter, pumping water into the ones going down, and out of the ones going up. There's probably a drawing somewhere of just such a perpetual-motion machine, and somebody probably believed that one, too.
Now, if it employed a mechanism for alternately increasing and decreasing heat transfer from the buoyant cells, it could the gas warm up near the earth's surface, keep the heat in while letting it expand adiabatically during ascent, then let it cool in the cold stratosphere, and keep the heat out while descending. That would be a heat engine, though, running off solar power. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Heck, it's a darned good idea. For better control, they could even have alternate skins to put between it and the sun, showing silver or black, as need be. Hell, I don't know, that might even be what it does, but I got disgusted with all the misleading crap on the front page, and dismissed it.
I don't think so. The system should work, and it should be very miserly with power, but obviously there will be power losses: you don't get something for nothing!
On the 10th of February 1972, in New Scientist magazine, Daedalus proposed a similar scheme, using ammonia as the working fluid:
"... one might think, a balloon filled with ammonia would rise rapidly to 25,000 feet, and then lose lift by the liquefaction of its gas."
"... overcome this by putting his ammonia in a somewhat elastic balloon which will always squeeze it to about 0.1 atmospheres greater pressure than the atmosphere outside. This will raise its condensation-point sufficiently for the ammonia to liquefy at about 34,000 feet."
It seems that someone has been taking Daedalus seriously, but when they did the math, they found that the ammonia was a bit troublesome, and they now seek to do without it.
You can read a copy of the original Daedalus column in "The Inventions of Daedalus: A Compendium of Plausible Schemes" by David E.H. Jones, W.H. Freeman & Co 1982. ISBN 0-7167-1412-4.
Regards.
Six boxes to use in the defense of liberty: letter, soap, ballot, witness, jury, ammo.
God I wish they made a bf1942 mod based on Last Exile. Airships own.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
:)
The not funny part is I've been using this nick for !20! years, course they were called handles back then, and you could only reach one system at a time then, had to hang up and dial another number on my 2400 baud modem (uphill both ways, in the snow too...). sheesh I'm starting to feel old now.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Yep that's right. The computer that helped the loonies in thier revolution in Heinlein's novel was H.O.L.M.E.S MK VII (i think it was a MK VII).
So the main character, the one who discovered the colonies main computer had 'woke up' named him Mycroft, because he was Holmes, and definately smarter than Sherlock. Only problem is the computer was also trying to develop of sense of humor. Manie helped him by telling him which jokes were funny always, funny once, and not funny at all.
Definately a good read.
Mycroft.
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
Are you talking about the old WWIV boards? I remember 2400 baud -- much faster than my Applecat ][ (even in the 1200 half duplex mode).
Those were the days!
I actually didn't goto to many WWIV boards, mostly Color64 and a local system called MTABBS (Mikes totaly awsome bulliten board system) that ran on trs-80's. it was system written by Mike while he was getting his ms in comp sci at Rolla (an engineering, comp sci colledge in southern central Missouri). there were only 4 or 5 boards that ran MTABBS, but those had the best discussions IMHO. I used a c64 back then and 4800 was the fastest modem you could use with it (c64's couldn't keep up with anything faster!) I even co-ran a color64 board for a month or so. Sigh.. much as I like the internet, somthing was lost when the bbs's died.
Mycroft
https://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4c3ed6600b6ea
That is to say pure poppy-cock.
Slashdot: What on earth are you doing even thinking about giving this poo a second thought?
Suggested slashdot enhancement: Article Scores: Irrelivent -1
Sucking the time and money out of trolls like you.
This was first done in the 1800s. I read about it in a book when I was a little kid. The guy used three suasage shaped baloons tied side by side. I built a model of it when I was in jr high school. It works great.
Jeez I hope they don't get a patent on a hundred year old idea.
Stonewolf
This machine is almost exactly the same as a device described in the obscure 1901 H.G. Wells short story Filmer, from 12 Stories and a Dream.
It's about a man who invents the world's first successful flying machine by combining the positives of lighter-than-air craft, which are stable but can't go against the wind, and heavier-than-air craft, which can go against the wind but just can't avoid disastrous crashes (this was before the Wright brothers' first successful flight).
Wells' machine even has a similar system of air chambers that compress to decrease buoyancy, and an air-filled hollow frame.
bin Laden?