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British Rail's Flying Saucer
Dynamoo writes "The Register is carrying a story about a patent for a fusion powered spacecraft filed by British Rail in the 1970s. While the concept may seem silly for a public railway, it seems that the British Rail Research Division employed a large number of aircraft engineers who presumably had some spare time between projects such as the Advanced Passenger Train."
Unfortunately, the Fluxcapacitor has already been patented (Fig. 1 & 2).
My work here is dung.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This design was made in 1965.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Is this the same British Rail that can't even keep a train running on time? What chance have they got with a flying saucer?
"British Rail would like to announce that the 17.34 UFO to Mars has been delayed due to a slight wind and a few leaves blowing in the air..."
"The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
Pulsed inertial confinement fusion is just a fancy version of Orion, and is what the British Interplanetary Society used in their Daedalus spacecraft concept. Given the 1973 date, the same year as the start of Project Daedalus, I imagine the 'inventor' was a member of the Society.
While this may get shot down (NPI) as all a bit of movie inspired silliness, it's people who attempt these very ambitious projects and designs that change the world. Hey - commercial spaceflight is a reality today so why not?
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The fusion powered spacecraft is delayed due to a signal failure at Camden Town. Passengers are advided to board the next fusion power spacecraft and change at Saturn.
"The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
After using the saucer, you are so full of radiation that you will begin to glow green.
This is helpful when trying to reproduce all aspects of 'alien' saucer lore, as well as to scare the crap out of your neighbours.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
....BR canned the Advanced Passenger Train project because apparently the test subjects didn't like the tilting inherent in a tilting train design.
They came up with the InterCity 125 (because it could do 125MPH) instead. This didn't tilt and was far less revolutionary, but is none the less still in service on our express lines, especially where the line hasn't been electrified.
It was at least the first train in the UK to have a DVT allowing it to be operated in either direction without being turned round and driven from either end
Annoyingly, the rights to the APT design were sold to an Italian firm (I think it was Bombardier) who turned it in to the commercialy succesful pendolino - which we have had to buy lots of to run on our West Coast Main line.
Shame we didn't finish the job ourselves really.
If you would like to find out more about the APT, visit the National Railway Museum in York UK!
The fact that sustainable fusion hasto this day eluded scientists was no deterrent to such a ferociously inventive mind. Frederick explains how to dodge the scientific watershed: "The thermonuclear fusion will take place in a series of pulses, each pulse being triggered by laser energy, and/or energetic particles reflected from a previous pulse. The system will be arranged so that the fusion process will decay after each pulse so that the stability of the system is maintained."
And according to a related report, the fusion required to run the thing may not be ready anytime soon
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so... when the aliens finally meet up with us, the first words between our race and theirs will be a notification of patent infringement and intent to sue said little green men for every neutrino core they've got... :-)
Someone beat Microsoft and Amazon to an insane patent!
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Lets just take a small rail network like the london underground. It is hideously expensive to build and maintain. There are only two ways to operate it.
See it as a commercial company. Nice idea but doesn't work. Why? Because commercial companies A got to earn their costs, their future investments and a bit extra. But how can you do this when you run a company that has to maintain loss making lines?
What?
Well it is simple, it is very easy to make money on the mainlines during peak times. Then the trains are packed and you can easily get your money even with reasonable ticket prices. But how many people would use those mainlines at peak times if there werent any feeder lines at non-peak times?
Simply put, to get on the mainline I need to take a bus from my house that is half empty. No way that bus makes a profit BUT if it wasn't running I would have no use for the mainline.
Think of it like this, a supermarket that only sells butter and cheese and jam and peanut butter but NOT bread wouldn't be much use now would it?
A rail network, or public transport in general will always be spending the money it makes on those non-profit lines. The moment you try to cut money by getting rid of unprofitable lines you gut the service meaning fewer people can use it.
This practice of cutting unprofitable lines and thereby cutting off whole parts of the country from public transport started long ago. The more it happens the less people can rely on public transport, the less they will use it, the more unprofitable lines you will have, and so on.
Only in those countries where public transport is seen as an vital part of the infrastructure still have a working system. Spending billions on keeping it all running year in and year out however is very difficult and it is very tempting for a goverment to just cut the budget for a term and hope it will all keep to gether and next term there will be money for the back maintenance. Off course that never happens and so the system is neglected for decades until people die.
Nothing new, the dutch railnetwork is going through similar problems, our politicians asure us that the we won't have the same problems as the brits and the fact that recently we have had a whole series of accidents is just coincendence.
Who is to blaim? People that believe in tax cuts. A goverment tax cut is like your landlord saying he will charge you 100 less. Just now you got to pay the elec bill of 200 yourselve. I never seen a tax cut that wasn't offset by an increase somewhere else.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Since I switched to Ruby on Rails, I can develop fusion powered spacecraft in half the time! With no code at all! And it all tests itself!
I used to laugh at UFO freaks....Until I actually saw one during a BBQ several years ago, with a small gathering of friends late one night outside my house. What we witnessed was a disc visible only by the absence of light in an eliptical shape. The perimeter of the disc had pin-holes of bright white light and I can only guess at the size due to the lack of landmarks in the sky, but the collective opinion seems to be somewhere around 100-200meters in diameter. When I first spotted the disc I could not understand what I was looking at. The eye must associate what it sees with what the brain knows (optics) and so I would have never reconsidered the matter had the UFO not passed directly over my house. From a distance of several miles it appeared to be a flock of white birds heading south. Hardly uncommon, as it slowly drew closer to me I thought maybe I was looking at some kind of helicopter.(I had by now alerted my guests to the event) Once it was on top of us we could see that what had been mistaken for white geese migrating was a ring of bright white lights slowly rotating just enough to make out a sillouhette of the disc against the nightsky, nobody could speak. My small gathering of friends had become a herd of deer in front of headlights. Certainly a once in a lifetime experience. I immediatly called the first aeronautical authority I could think of; the airport laughed at me, the laughter hasnt stopped. You cant talk about this shit without people labelling you a crackpot and why not? Isn't it easier to believe that thousands of eye witnesses are fools or madmen? I always thought so, just keep your eyes on the sky. Everything I've reported is true and I dont care if anyone besides the guests at my BBQ laugh themselves to death. I know what I saw.
The APT could not tilt into the path of another train. Its whole tilt motion envelope fell within the envelope of a non-tilting train; or in other words, within the loading gauge. True, if the tilt failed the train would have to slow to the speed of a non-tilting train, not for any technical reason but for passenger comfort or so as not to alarm the passengers. This would not be a huge problem - the tilt system would be pretty reliable and even if it did fail the train would only need to slow on the sharper curves.
As for causing sea-sickness, this depends on the tilting algorithm. When the APT came out little was known about passenger response and the APT was given a very simple algorithm that aimed for zero lateral g in the passenger saloon. Later knowledge, particularly aquired by FIAT with their Penulino development, made great improvements such as leaving a proportion of the centrifugal force uncorrected by tilt, and also better handling of the transitions. Given any programmable tilt control system (such as the APT had) such tuning could have been applied retrospectively.
As it was, the APT on its first publicity run made a bunch of press hack vomit their whisky-and-soda, leading to the bad press that caused the myth that the APT was some kind of total disaster, a myth that Mrs Thatcher seized upon as an excuse to can the project, and a myth which quite a few Slashdotters seem to have bought too.