Virginia school board learns a hard lesson... and other stories Welcome to this week's gallimaufry of gaucheness, as we present a selection of daft stories to make you glad that you're not that person. Virginia school board gets thoroughly schooled We begin with a cautionary tale from the US state of Virginia, where a member of the Henrico County school board fell victim to one of the …
Another good video on the ekranoplan and how it was discovered can be found here.
An interesting concept, to be sure, but its use is limited to bodies of water that have no waves.
The Caspian Sea, or the Mediterranean are viable areas for a ground-effect transport, but I doubt the Atlantic or the Pacific are calm enough to see this kind of vehicle survive.
If DARPA wants an ekranoplan for the Great Lakes, fine, but it won't be transporting troops from San Fransisco to Hawaii any time soon.
Then again, if you don't try, you'll never succeed.
An interesting concept, to be sure, but its use is limited to bodies of water that have no waves.
They're not likely to find much use in built-up areas, certainly, but they' be good for crossing salt flats, rocky deserts, some marshes ... anywhere that's basically flat.
If your ekranoplan is big enough all waves are small. Interesting question is then: power from Sun scales as linear size of ekranoplan squared: how does drag go? If it is less than squared then it is possible to make an ekranoplan which can fly for ever over the oceans. If not then obviously will just need suitable nuclear power I suppose. Will start work on scifi story about vast generation-ekranoplans flying over oceans for thousands of years, probably because land has become uninhabitable due to unexplained catastrophe to be revealed in next volume of story.
Edit: curses this seems to be close to Charlie Stross story mentioned in comments.
Well the bigger problem is that rogue waves can reach heights of 20+ meters even in relatively calm (i.e. not a big storm) conditions and higher in a storm which a big slow craft could not outrun or steer around.
So this craft between have wing surface areas measuring in square kilometers, at least, if it wants to make the math for the ekranoplan work.
An aircraft enters ground effect ~1 wing-length (1/2 wing span) from the surface. The bigger your craft gets, the less sea state matters (albeit flying at 30metres in storm conditions poses it's own challenges, even if you're notionally clearing the waves). Launch/Recovery becomes the main challenge because sooner or later you have to drop back into the water (unless you build a runway down to the water's edge to enable land-based operations, but that brings its own challenges).
Nonetheless, Brittany Ferries are investigating a coastal-travel oriented passenger model from Boston-based REGENT for cross-Channel services. 180mph, no airport security. Certain Mediterranean operators are also expressing interest for island hopping.
> is limited to bodies of water that have no waves
Bathtubs...
Seriously, it seems to combine the limitations of a plane and the limitations of a ship, without having any strong advantage over either of them. There must be a reason the Soviet (and later Russian) military dropped the project, isn't it. I think they might have had some reasons to drop them after building them and testing them for decades. (Not lack of money, they had enough to keep all the other stuff.)
But well, new and shiny. Probably served with AI on the side.
"Wing-in-ground-effect" rather suggests lithobraking, or at least lithosteering.
For fans of Ekranoplans, see Charlie Stross' Missile Gap – Yuri Gagarin on a monster, nuclear powered Ekranoplan exploring a huge world in the LMG with multiple copies of Earth on it.
why the caspian sea monster failed is because the Soviet navy said "Its not a boat" while the Soviet airforce said "its not a plane"
However , it must have been very appealing to the Soviets to have a sea monster loaded with 50 anti-ship missiles approaching a US carrier group at 250 mph at 60 feet and then firing.....
Well, it looks like the beastie in the video only has 6 missile tubes on its back, though that's enough to spoil any individual ship's day.
I think a(nother) major factor in the technology being dropped was the problem of salt water corrosion on the airframe and in particular the engines.
a sea monster loaded with 50 anti-ship missiles approaching a US carrier group at 250 mph at 60 feet and then firing.....
Might have been halfway feasible at the time these were developed, but even then I'd expect it not to have been their primary use case. Carrier groups in a war zone tend to have patrol aircraft up. Those would spot the ekranoplan(s) hundreds of miles out, allowing attack aircraft to get airborne, or just getting sea-to-sea missiles launched in their general direction. And ekranoplans are way less maneuvrable than fighter jets. They would probably not even be a match against the better WW2 carrier based prop planes, given their respective speeds and lack of defensive armament on the 'plans.
My guess is that they would primarily have been used for anti-submarine action and softening up land-based defences that they can get within missile range of.
That's two Lockheed C-5 Galaxy flights. And C-5's are faster and can go to many more places.
It's always amazing how people tout cargo capacity of some wondrous flying machine without comparing it to what's already out there, or simple ground transport. I'm looking at you, "modern airship" developers.
A lot of substances fluoresce. It doesn't seem very likely that there would be an evolutionary advantage in these wasps producing some compound specifically for its fluorescence. It's more likely to be either something produced for some other reason or simply a waste product and just happens to fluoresce.
My 2nd best forum prank. An old guy on an Edinburgh forum said he couldn't watch The Simpsons as it was just too obscene and blasphemous. I told him there was a new cartoon show he'd like instead, made for people like him, and quoted the opening lyrics to Family Guy. He said that sounds much better, thanked me and he'd be sure to watch it.
I have THE perfect solution, the ekranoplan(e) itself would be preceded by a fleet of b-52 converted into flying veg oil tankers. They would then spray oil ahead of the path of the ekranoplan, in order to quell the rough seas. Alternatively, an up-side variant: F-104s shooting rockets (ask the Soviets, they know!) to disperse clouds that generate adverse weather conditions that generate rough seas. Alternatively, instead of one bigass ekranoplan, make 1,000 micro-ekranoplanes small enough to dodge individual waves. As to landmass and the irritatingly rolling terrain, a mass para-drop of cat-dozers would do the trick, really simple solutions to really simple problems! Or, thinking out of the box, if the waves are too much of a problem, how about gliding BELOW the surface, huh?
how about gliding BELOW the surface
I can't remember which game it was, but there was one computer game where the programmers hadn't allowed for daft settings so the best strategy was to attack with your submarines 50 feet up in the air and your aircraft 50 feet below water thus making them both totally undetectable as sonar doesn't work in air and radar doesn't work in water. [Or something of that ilk.]
It would be potentially very difficult to manage a reasonably long sea crossing (say the atlantic) while being able to guarantee that you wouldn't encounter any waves over four feet during the crossing. But that isn't the biggest potential problem. The biggest problem would be encountering seagoing vessels.
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