Apr 102011
Kinda unavailable just now, so here’s a quick blog post with a couple of images sent by a blog reader wanting to know more about this. I’ve not seen this before. To me it screams of Colani-esque levels of engineering FAIL.
Clearly, *somebody* devoted some amount of effort to this. A college project? The data indicates a “Professor” was involved. But a professor of what?
26 Responses to ““What the hell am I looking at??” Part Deux”
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The caption says it’s a “moba-type powered dirigible balloon” — in other words, an aerostat — “for fast transport of goods on short routes”,
I read that as, “…for the transport of heavy goods on short routes.”
with this tiny Ballon, a heavy good lift ???
would be fascinating to watch this thing in real time operation.
The guy who designed it gets mention in this, as well as a Gunther de Temple: http://www.mcilvainecompany.com/Decision_Tree/subscriber/Tree/DescriptionTextLinks/ExpJoint/DeKomteCase.htm
Pretty harsh reaction to what must have taken quite a bit of hard work.
Helikite aerostats are another interesting piece of work.
Maybe it was intended for a planet that has less mass.
The oblate spheroid is the pod that contains the negative-mass matter. Note that the main fuselage is hinged, allowing the vehicle to change configuration during flight.
Boy, they sure know how to do good engineering on zeta Reticuli d.
A lamp size version would make a cool looking lamp.
They Do It With Magnets
“This is your captain speaking. I’d like everyone on board to think happy thoughts so we can get airborne.”
Bruce, it looks to me like it’s made outta a lamp.
Its Galactus’ bong.
Looked at Colani’s other stuff on Youtube and thought some of it
rather bizarre but yet cool looking myself. I first saw the design for
the Russian ekranoplan (the big one with sort of a goose neck) on
darkroastedblend.com.
It looks like Dr Suess doing aerospace design.
> Pretty harsh reaction to what must have taken quite a bit of hard work.
The amount of work put into a project has no correlation to how good of a design that project is.
Not a Colani fan I take it? I met him at Art Center back in the late eighties when he gave a talk and brought all his vehicles and models. Burt Rutan was also there, I have both their signatures in Colani’s book. I studied Idustrial Design at CSU Long Beach and Art Center College of Design in Pasdena, Ca. I like his work, especially considering how it looked 25 years ago. Yes, most of the designs aren’t feasible, but that’s not what he designs.
I love Google’s logo today…go ahead call me a commie…oh well!
> Not a Colani fan I take it?
Not especially.
> most of the designs aren’t feasible
Something that should be quite clear long before most of them get even as far as the model stage. Taking an infeasible design any further along than where it was when you determined it was infeasible is not just bad engineering practice, it’s unethical.
Y’know, that might not be a totally unworkable design … if it had been intended to be a submersible craft that would not allow its crew or cargo to come within 50 meters of the water surface or travel faster than 3 kph.
Why anyone would want something like that, though, is beyond me …
Entwurf eines manöverierbaren ballons vom typ moba für den transport schwerer güter auf kurzen flugstrecken.
Draft maneuverability balloons of type MOBA for the transport of heavy goods on short flights.
If it hadn’t been designed almost a decade before the institution’s founding, I’d guess it had been intended for MOBA — the Museum of Bad Art.
Bill Higgins wrote:
Bruce, it looks to me like it’s made outta a lamp.
Bill, I’d rather have something made out of this lamp thingie. Do you have a spare that I can borrow?
“Yes, most of the designs aren’t feasible, but that’s not what he designs.”
Out east we have things called science fiction, art, and design. And they sometimes mix. Doesn’t have to be practical to be worthwhile, although I would argue that hypothetical designs have their place in the industry – sometimes you have to let your brain wander and think about new ways to do things. That may not work if you are basically doing tool and die work for an aerospace firm (but on a computer so it looks important and difficult.) I am talking about top-down design of machines and structures.
Some fun rocketry related reading that isn’t totally practical:
http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Space-Through-Models-Apogee/dp/1896522866/ref=sr_1_65?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302917107&sr=1-65
http://www.amazon.com/Saucer-Fleet-Apogee-Books-Space/dp/1894959701/ref=sr_1_43?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1302917093&sr=1-43
http://www.amazon.com/Spaceship-Handbook-Jack-Hagerty-Rogers/dp/097076040X/ref=dp_cp_ob_b_image_1
Out west we have this thing called “recognition of the difference between imagination and unrestrained fantasy.”
> sometimes you have to let your brain wander and think about new ways to do things
Sure. But if your mind wanders away from the feasible into the realms of the physically unrealistic, then you are not engaging in anything of practical value, but pure “art.” Which is fine, so long as you are advertised as pure art.
Design unconstrained by the bounds of the physical world is fantasy. Which is fine if you are JRR Tolkein, George Lucas or James Cameron, but if you are pretending to design for the Real World, you are merely a mental masturbator. It might be fun to think about lighter than air vehicles that require lifting gasses with negative densities, or deep-sea submersible hulls made out of warm butter or sniper bullets made out of frozen tap water, but the excercise is not some wonderous expansion of human possibility. It’s just… screwing around.
NOTE: If you are a theoretical physicist or the like, such mental experiments may well be more than meaningless skylarking. But in this sort of case, the “mental experimenter” goes to the actual effort of running the numbers. Any idiot can “assume a warp drive.” It takes a whole hell of a lot of work to show that such a thing may be possible.
Zero imagination is great if you want to make an increasingly good model T forever.
> Zero imagination is great…
It’s a common belief among the self-deluded that an unwillingness to engage in imagination unrestricted by reality is, in fact, a lack of imagination entirely.
Please, do us a favor and point to an automotive development *since* the Model T that was based on ideas that, when work on them began, were in violation of understood physical laws. Like, say, all those terribly successful cars that run on water or antigravity or the limitless power contained within ghost traps.
Actually there are plenty of cars that work on water. Antimatter may present a form of anti-gravity but that is not known just yet (research in it is important because it may be the source of so called dark energy.) But certainly that is not going to make cars float around any time soon. A magsail craft could levitate if sufficiently dense high-temperature superconductors are ever developed, and indeed it looks like they could even be used to launch payloads from the surface of the Earth into solar orbits. But that is far in the future if it ever works out. Limitless power does not exist (although there are plenty of external sources of energy which are nearly limitless such as nuclear fission and fusion.) But I am off topic now, into space exploration and topics that you must already know about (one hopes since you act the expert when criticizing others.)
Experimentation with car prototypes has been going on for a long time. Many of them are never even made in real life. They are mind experiments that are useful among creative people. You may not be involved in creating new and interesting ideas, so this may not be of any use to you. Product design is a huge industry, because it works. You also probably hate science fiction, and art, and professors and liberal scientists who waste their time on things like “transistors.”