Slashdot Mirror
USS Enterprise Finally Flies
apetime writes "Found on Slashdot Japan: Model builder Kaname of Kumamoto, Japan has built a flying radio controlled model of the original Star Trek's USS Enterprise. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for a video. Or go here for an mpeg, and here for a WMV.) The ship measures from 75 cm, and only weighs 16 grams. It's a wobbly flight, but makes you think what else in Star Trek might work if it were tried."
I thought Scott Baio was the first person to do this. :-)
http://imdb.com/title/tt0084945/
Here is my local mirror on a server that won't be ./'ed...
mpg format
wmv format
The lower limit for freecache is 5 megs. That's a 4.2 meg file you karma whore.
Estes is the company that makes the model rockets that a lot of us shot as kids.
They made, later in my youth, model jets powered by "glow" engines, that burned for a few minutes instead of a few seconds. This way, you could fly a model jet around.
I think that they had a Star Trek Enterprise model that took glow engines. I know that they had a model that you could launch off your pad.
I don't know if this is the same model. Probably not, since the guy would get badly burned if he shot glow engines off in his face.
I never owned a model that took glow engines though. I think that most of them piggybacked on more powerful boosters off a launch pad, and then the user remotely fired the glows when he could see the thing clearly enough to control it.
slashdot japan?!
what?!
you mean to tell me ive been reading this all this time and i couldve been the uber1337 version from the land of the rising sun?!
sezu-sai....
time to go learn japanese.....
In ST:Generations, the saucer seperation occurred and demonstrated a mild-powered explosion-induced glided (or should I say firely) though Veridian III atmosphere.
Also, in ST:Voyager Episode 201 shows Voyager crash landing on an ice planet.
In ST:Voyager #192 (Demon), shows a graceful landing on a demon planet.
is it real flying if it is not a function of lift versus gravity?
Yes. In English, anyway... aerospace people "fly" their satellites, probes "fly" to planets, arrows "fly", even though they're on a ballistic trajectory, and so on.
MJC
nearly impossible. even a small motor and prop at the back would be very difficult. pusher RC models are very difficult to balance, it is hard to get enough weight up front to have a flyable CG. (I'm building a .40 size flying SPAD wing now and dealing with this issue...)
Should'nt Star Trek have its own icon?
Shouldn't you learn to use contractions properly? It's short for SHOULD NOT. The apostrophe denotes the position of the missing letter(s), in this case the "o" in "not".
ST:Voyager
(ok, ok, its not the Enterprise)
I am not responsible for what not the Enterprise did in Star Trek:Voyager.
I also mentioned that the LEM, which was known to make a soft landing or two, did not fly. It would have been just irrelevant to show me a picture of the space shuttle flying.
What else from Star Trek might work? Well, pretty much anything you look at and think "Oh. That might work."
They didn't just make everything up from nothing to do the show. They relied on current knowledge. They didn't do any science. Saucers have known aerodynamic qualities ( and any number of us in the 60s made "flying" devices of one sort or another by gluing two paper plates together, even before Star Trek). If you bang matter into antimatter you'll get energy. If you make clocks out of rotating cylinders. . . the whole thing ends up looking silly because you couldn't even predict simple technologies just a few years out.
The model is interesting, but doesn't mean or imply anything at all about Star Trek "technology." It isn't even a new idea, it just has a new web page.
KFG
I don't think space is a true vacume. It is just considered one in relation to earths atmosphere. Anyways how do solar sails work? I think with the differences in gravitiy there might be enough friction material in space for this to work to some degree.
Space ships don't fly with "lift". There's barely any gravity to lift from even taking into account the miniscule amount of gas in space. In fact, the design of the Enterprise was chosen by Roddenberry precisely because it *wasn't* aerodynamic (as a respose to all the space shows and books that depicted space ships as being such). A mile-wide cube would have also sufficed (*ahem*).
Also, a solar sail would look nothing like the Enterprise. It would look like, er, a sail. A BIG one at that; bigger than the aforementioned mile-wide cube.
--- Journals are boring; Go to my web page instead
They didn't have much range but they were pretty cool.
Also, I read somewhere... probably here, about a company that created a wearable one like in TNG as a cummunication device. The company has sold them to hospitals. See an article here http://www.forbes.com/technology/2004/03/16/cx_ah_ 0316chips.html
---
Let's see what our moderators score this one as :P
Karma, We don't need no stinkin' karma!
The babelfish translation of the Japanese site says that he has some "compound rudder, aileron, elevator" at the rear of the disk.
Actually, there is.
End of Line.
I'll see your geekiness and raise you a detail from the tech manual.
The saucer wasn't held on by explosive bolts, but a system of retractable latches/slots. That way you could disconnect and reconnect multiple times (this only happened in the first episode in one movie, I think). Suposedly, the saucer has no warp drive, but has a "sustainer" that lets it leach warp energy off the main hull for a couple of minutes (time enough to separate at warp and slow down). Not too sure that's practical, but hey, it's their universe.
And yeah, if used as a (extreme last resort) atmospheric lander, the saucer would presumably be a total loss.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
As a pre-teen in the early '70's, I read the "Making of Star Trek" book, which I believe was authorized by Roddenberry and Paramount. Among the things I remember from the book:
- It stated that the Enterprise wasn't designed for atmospheric flight.
- The saucer section was said to be designed to separate from the rest of the ship. (Though this wasn't shown until either one of the TNG episodes or a TNG movie. I'm getting old, so I can't remember which. :-) )
- NBC censors considered a woman's nipple and underside of the breast to be verboten. (Quote from the book: "Perhaps they are afraid moss grows under there?")
- The studio asked Leonard Nimoy if he would consider plastic surgery to have his ears pointed for the show. He refused.
- The Enterprise was about a 10' long model mounted on a black pylon, with a star pattern on a wall behind it. The film crew ran the camera past the model on a dolly.
- For many years, the Smithsonian Institution's Air & Space Museum in Washington, DC had the actual filming model of the Enterprise hanging from the ceiling. (I think this is the only time it ever hung by wires.) Alas, the exhibit was taken down several years ago. It was one of my favorites.
- Dr. McCoy's portable "body scanner" devices were actually salt and pepper shakers found by the prop crew at a discount store.
- The shimmering "transporter effect" was done by attaching Christmas tree tinsel to sheets of wood and having stagehands shake them. The tinsel and live action film bits were merged together in post.
- There was a list of possible Vulcan male names, all of which "had to" (according to the book) start with "S" and end with "k", and contain only 5 letters. Among them was "Spork."
And before anyone accuses me of being a Trekkie, let me emphatically state that I am not. I have only watched almost every episode of all the series over the last four decades. I have never been to a convention, I have never worn a Starfleet uniform on Halloween or at any other time, and I do not know that any variant of "NCC-1701" is always called "Enterprise." So there.
And please don't read my sig.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
Intrepid class, Defiant class, Delta Flyers, runabouts, and shuttles can land on planets, light cruisers and larger cannot. Even the Enterprise D can't do it in one piece, and the only reason they landed (actually crashed) the saucer section is because they had no choice.
But then again, the way they write Star Trek stuff now is totally inconsistant with older shows, and forget about any of the books, including the tech manuals.
Remember that episode that was supposed to be a pilot for another show? You know, the one where the enterprise travels back in time to the 60's and meets this guy with a big computer who's messing around with a rocket? You know, the one where the enterprise enters the earth's atmosphere and gets spotted by a jet plane?
Hmmm...I guess you don't.
You can't take the sky from me...
Appears HERE .
It seems the plane weighs a bit more than 16 grams...
I think you don't understand solar sails.
The "sailing" effect of a solar sail is due to the Photoelectric Effect, the only real theory by Einstein that got him a Nobel Prize. Relativity was considered so radical and (at the time) unprovable that it was in a league of its own. BTW, this theory has absolutely nothing to do with Relativity... it was just another idea that Einstein played around with. Yes, this is the theory behind what makes photovoltaic cells work as well.
Getting back to solar sailing: Photons (not solar wind) hit the solar sails and raw energy from the photons in sunlight is directly converted into knetic energy that pushes the sail away from the sun. If anything, the solar wind actually increases drag to slow the craft down, but the photoelectric effect more than compensates for that issue. This isn't a contradiction of physics and Thomas Gold has been debunked.
A practical example of this effect and how it has already been used was with the launch of the Echo series of satellites. (More information can also be found here) Besides the ISS, these are the largest man-made objects ever to be launched into space, and that was back in 1960 & 1964. While these web pages say that they re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, my understanding was that they were pushed out of Earth orbit by solar forces, due to their low mass/area ratio. Certainly there were some significant effects on their orbits from solar activity, and this was carefully studied.
You mean something like this ? ;)
I'm not surprised they don't remember since you are mixing together two different episodes.
In the episode where the Enterprise sinks into the atmosphere and is spotted by a jet fighter, the travel back is accidental. The Enterprise spends the epsiode trying to get back home without messing up history.
In the episode where the Enterprise crew runs across the guy with the computer (Gary 7), they are back in time on purpose in order to observe historical events. In this episode, they never encounter a jet fighter or are spotted in the atmosphere.
Now, if I were a true geek, I would be able to tell you the titles of the episodes, but I cannot, and so must hang my head in shame.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.