Posts by Clive Mitchell 18 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Mar 2008
These expanding "content breaks", the EMC one in particular are about to drive me away from El-Reg. Article pages loads but as soon as I start to scroll (using wheel), the add expands. The ad then scrolls rather than the page until eventually I get to the rest of the article. With the EMC ad in particular, it's often longer than the article itself and you I completely lose any continuity.
Reading El-Reg is now an exercise in frustration and I don't need more of that in my life.
"And unless the lift fans can tilt even a little, forward air speed, and low-speed low-altitude control (you know, takeoff and landing, the most dangerous parts of any flight) will be even more interesting."
Making the fans movable just adds weight and complexity when all you actually need is for them to be individually controllable. Want to move forward, increase the rear fans with respect to the forward ones and tilt the whole aircraft If you look at the photo you'll notice that alternate fans spin in the opposite direction so by varying the speed of the CW fans vs. the CCW fans you can even control yaw at low speed.
"both the lift and the drive fans are not shrouded; that thing's not roadworthy"
It's a development vehicle FFS. The patent diagrams clearly show shrouded fans.
"the fuselage appears to have a very narrow cross-section. I do hope that the designers paid close attention to the internal bracing"
No, clearly they don't know what they are doing. Perhaps you should give them a call.
"speaking of structural integrity, what's it supposed to be made of? Batteries are heavy. "
Please direct me to the part that says it's battery powered.
"a headwind of even 10 knots will radically affect the effective groundspeed."
Yes. It will affect it by 10 knots and over an hour it will cover 10NM less, irrespective of whether we're talking about this aircraft or an A380.
"Depending on the maximum airspeed that thing can attain (which won't be much, not with those tiny pusher fans, not unless they're Really Fast Fans(tm)) ... how well does it glide, when (not if, when) the batteries die in mid-air? Not very well, I'm guessing, not with the drag from the fans (too small to even think about autorotating) and not with those pitiful main airfoils."
I would assume those "tiny" pusher fans are capable of generating enough forward movement to generate the required lift from those "pitiful" wings. Cake, eat? Once again, I'm sure they'd welcome your input.
....that $84,000 a month is a typo! $1.08m a year for doing nothing is just too unbelievable,
Sadly, in todays world where greed is king and members of that closed boys club regularly award each other obscene salaries while looking down up the rest of society with complete contempt, where the humble taxpayer foots the bill when these modern day Gordon Geckos, wallets burgeoning from selling things they don't have while contributing nothing to further our society, finally knock down the house of cards which we laughingly call a financial system.
I have a problem with the whole concept that this patent represents. Effectively the programmer has used a set of tools, the programming language, the OS, etc, and put them to the use that they were designed for.
Seems to me to be akin to having a hammer and wanting to patent the idea of using it to crack walnuts. It's a hammer, hitting things is what it's for!
With all the talk on mirrors and other reflective surfaces as an effective / ineffective countermeasure... it will surely have to use some form of optics for beam tracking, slewing the whole installation will not be effective in tracking missiles etc. Is there not some correlation between being able to use optics for aiming and being able to use them as a counter measure!
Secondly, won't it just be a self designating target?
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
