When I read the book Project Orion
[via boingboing]
Category: Mad Science
Invisible UAV?
Ok, not 100 % invisible but it’s just going to be a whirring blur if you happen to spot one. The craft is powered by two propellers at one end and uses just a half of a wing to fly. Huh? Half a wing? Talk about cutting costs… Lift is generated by having the plane spin around its center of mass that is in space back behind the wing and between the motors. This gives an impressive amount of control to the craft while making it very hard to see. When coupled with the VeraTech proprietary panoramic camera system this will provide video surveillance within 75 feet of a target. The system is very light, only four pounds for the two foot version.
I seem to remember seeing plans for a model airplane that used a half propeller and a counter weight on it. This was in some papers that my father had from back in the 40’s and 50’s. He was pretty big into model planes back then. I don’t remember why it was made like this, perhaps it was to get higher speeds on the old ‘U-control‘ planes.
[via new scientist]
The Rudiments of Wisdom Cartoon Encyclopedia
Another brilliant work by a master of the arts and sciences, Tim Hunkin. His cartoons that cover, well pretty much everything you can think of, are a joy to browse through and are sure to get your mind a churning.
Latest Master of the Automaton
These are brilliant works, very much in the same line as the works of Tim Hunkin (a personal hero of mine).
… he started researching kinetics and developed his own system for animating wood-carved figures with the turn of a crank. One of the results was a small body of work featuring important modern artists acting out some of their more eccentric or unfavorable characteristics. In “Picasso and Barbie,” the famously promiscuous Spaniard paints a portrait from a model, in this case a scantily clad blond doll in a suggestive pose. A crank on the piece powers a network of exposed gears that move the artist’s arm up and down, as if painting, and turn his head back and forth from the model to the canvas.
[via suicidebots]
Superconducting Ring to Fling Satellites Into Space
This so reminds me to the high altitude research project that was dreamt up by Gerald Bull. Bull had this idea that he could build the gigantic gun that would shoot satellites into space like something out of a Jules Vern book. He came close, he was able to loft a 330 pound round about 60 miles off the Earth. He was assassinated in 1990 after making some rather poor choices in the countries that he dealt with. Ah, he would have loved this concept. LaunchPoint Technologies has this idea would utilize a 1-1/4 mile superconducting ring to, over the course of several hours, accelerate a sled with a 22lb payload to a speed of 5 miles a second. The payload would then separate from the sled and be ‘fired’ through a tunnel that is angled 30 degrees up. The projectile would be moving at over 23 times the speed of sound at this point and the next stop would be low Earth orbit. The payload would only have to survive around 2000G but it’s pointed out that laser guided artillery rounds routinely survive forces of over 20,000G. So far it’s just a theoretical design but if it works it could bring the cost per pound to launch hardware into space down to Earth.
[via jwz]
Huge ‘launch ring’ to fling satellites into orbit
Was it a Nuke?
As all the news sources are saying the explosion that was detected in North Korea today was equivalent to less than a kilo tone of TNT I’m asking the question was it a nuclear device? We won’t know this answer until some form of radioactivity can be measured from the test. Not a whole bunch is released from an underground test so it could be that Kim Jong-il and his boys are pulling a fast one. At any rate I’d like to think that this is the case. At least the new prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, visited China and has at least gotten them to agree that North Korea having nuclear arms is a bad thing.