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DARPA Kick-Starts Flying Car Program
coondoggie writes to share that DARPA is finally trying to make good on the promise of flying cars for our future with the new "Transformer" (TX) project. "DARPA said the vehicle will need to be able to drive on prepared surface and light off-road conditions, as well as support Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) features.
The TX will also support range and speed efficiencies that will allow for missions to be performed on a single tank of fuel. DARPA said the TX will 'provide the flexibility to adapt to traditional and asymmetric threats by providing the operator unimpeded movement over difficult terrain. In addition, transportation is no longer restricted to trafficable terrain that tends to makes movement predictable.'"
Darpa schmarpa!
Whatever happened to that DARPANET they used to have? Losers.
Some of my favourite people are from th US; Vonnegut, Chomsky, Bill Hicks.
Can't they put a starter motor in the thing? I'd hate to have to get out, kick-start the thing, and have it fly away; that'd be almost as bad as having an old crank-start car trying to run you over.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
By the time hover cars are available, cars should be driving by themselves so it shouldn't be a problem until computers start getting road rage.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I'm guessing it's an argument more like, "why are we allocating a bunch of money to [x], when [priority y] is more important, and we don't have unlimited money".
It's an odd sort of argument, in that it make sense to some extent, but in practice has to be ignored to some extent also, or we'll never do anything except really basic stuff. For example, if you have extra money you're thinking of donating to charity, why donate to the EFF, or to support an artist you like, when kids are dying in Africa; that's surely more important, right?
The more high-level question makes some sense though: is our current overall allocation of money to the military the proper level, or should it be reduced to free up money for other priorities?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One of the first tags on this story was "fixtheeconomyfirst"... but the core problem in our economy is that the dichotomy between wealthy investors and owner calss, and the mass of stagnant income earner class who mostly provide service to eachother and the wealthy. Flashy inefficient technology like these are about all we can do at this point to get anything out of the currently rather sheepish investors/owners. Our political system will NOT be fixing this situation anytime soon - not when money spent on campaigns is considered "political speech", and corporations are counted as people for those related rights.
Still, if most golden-parachute equipped managers can be convinced to sign a bankruptcy inducing contract just because one of these things are SO flying-car-smexy, and they can only get it through these government channels fully equipped to extract that money - then there's a chance to reduce their political power. And that WOULD fix the economy, in a roundabout way.
Not going to happen - but like with cheap flying cars, one can always dream.
Ryan Fenton
In most countries you already do need some sort of permission, don't you? An exception is if you're flying at relatively low altitudes over your own property, since in some countries airspace below a certain level is considered to be part of the ownership of the property. But if you're flying at even sort-of-high altitudes, you have to be a licensed pilot. And if you're flying at low altitudes over another person's property without permission, you're violating their property rights.
Another exception in the U.S. seems to be very light aircraft (I believe under 155 lbs), under the theory that in any crash you're not very likely to harm anyone but yourself. If a flying car weighed anything like a normal car, though, it wouldn't come close to meeting that threshhold (a Honda Civic is over 2500 lbs).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
HumVTOL.
We don't need flying cars. Flying cars = Falling cars. Add in volatile fuel and you have bombs. What they need to work on is a car that will hover about 2-3 feet above the ground. A hover car would eliminate the need for paved roads, road maintenance, bridges, bridge maintenance, etc... You just need lane guides and median dividers.
It's all fun and games till numb-nuts ram flying crafts into a buildings. Oh wait...
Life is not for the lazy.
Fly-by-wire, with a special, hard-to-get license for manual flight and restrictions on where it can be used.
Flying cars would also require a lot of safety features to ensure survivability in an accident or mechanical problem, including multiple engines with the ability to survive the failure of one or more of them, as well as vehicle parachutes launched by a spreader gun for rapid deployment, and possibly large airbags to cushion the landing of the vehicle itself.
Hmm... you know, I bet you could have the firing off of vehicle-scale airbags *be* the spreader for your chute if you did it right.
Present day. Present time.
Arpanet was slow, incredibly laggy, incapable of supporting a huge userbase, and as a result, impractical except in limited military and large-scale academic applications. It was largely ignored by the general public, and was of little value to society at large. It became the internet.
The original GPS system was horrifically expensive, and had a large enough margin of error that it was mainly used for coordinating naval fleets, where being a few hundred feet off course generally wasn't an issue in the middle of an ocean. You can now buy a fairly cheap device that both visually and verbally directs you through cities, usually with a margin of error of no more than 3 meters.
Note that in both cases, it only took about 20 years to go from an expensive, limited technology that the military had limited use for and civilians had none at all, to a common technology that no one thinks twice about using. So yes... the original flying car is going to be slow, terribly inefficient, and useless except in battlefields that it fits perfectly... but give it a decade or two, and you just may be driving one.
Also, keep in mind that even if taking off burns a huge amount of fuel, and your air MPG is not better than your ground MPG, the fact that you can aim in a straight line to your destination instead of following roads is going to save fuel on anything but very short trips... and you can still drive for those.