Slashdot Mirror
Japanese Military Invents Tumbling, Flying Sphere
thebchuckster writes "A Japanese developer has released a cool, new sphere that is billed as being able to go where humans can't. The sphere is 17-inches, features eight movable rudders, and can hover in the air for at least eight minutes. While reaching speeds of up to 37 miles per hour, the sphere deftly moves through the air without much effort. It doesn't take much to get it up in the air and moving, and it will be adept at going into tight areas."
When one failed, you could roll out the next. Or you could triple the price to better the specs.
$1,390 is less than the cost of taking a congresscrook to "dinner" to show them your proposal for a $100 million version of this.
Oh FFS, so he's supposed to mine for rare earths and smelt his own exotic materials in order to say he INVENTED something?
Look, he DESIGNED and ASSEMBLED something that did not exist before. If you don't consider that inventing, you're just a dumb-ass.
BTW: what have you invented?
I got good money that says fuck all.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. - Carl Sagan
so there are lots of quad-copters around that have roughly similar specs. this one is a uni-copter with 8 thrust-vectoring flaps, which is, I guess somewhat novel. not sure why 8 is the right number, and seems like a fairly large number, given that each requires a servo and fairly big piece of material. but since the flaps are independent, they can provide both direction and rotational control (which is why a quad-copter needs 4 fans - and why a helicopter needs a tail fan.) the spherical cage (and uni-fan) makes it seem compact and tidy, but I'm not sure the layout is actually better than a quad-copter.