Dickensian Britain

A fellow in my running group divulges the fact we've re-introduced telegraph poles with which to furnish the communications network, presumably because it proves to be cheaper, easier and in many ways more long-lasting than burying cables under the ground where they've to compete with every other utility.

I'm all for it, being altogether the more eco-friendly solution on the one hand beside restoring a nostalgic feel to town and country. The lowest portion of pole features a coat of bitumen to guard against the deleterious effects of canine urine, and there's a label too and a set of steps within the reach of a ladder.

My childhood was peopled with telegraph poles, and on one occasion walking home from primary school and desperate as a canine to relieve myself, I was letting rip on the pole at the same moment one among my teachers drove past and clocked me. I think it merited a mention next day, but in truth it is something I'd largely forgotten until such time decades later that BT restored their fortunes.

Ed. Miserable bastards will be suggesting that the pole did not stretch to Dickens' period, though in fact the telegraph was invented in 1855 and was rapidly slung along railway lines (internet 2.1, internet 2.0 having been canals) on such poles as these. The author's last work appeared fifteen years subsequent, and this author nearly visited his childhood home in Portsmouth recently, except that it was closed. 

HM Costguard

We can't leave the south coast (although in reality we have) without reflecting upon the SAR or Search and Rescue aspect of the UK, can we? (Ed. actually we could).

I learned to fly at RAF Finningley, which had been a nuclear V-bomber base but by then hosted navigation training in the form of the HS125 or Dominie; along with an SAR service comprising Sea Kings beside Westland Whirlwinds and Wessexes. I was offered a ride in the middle one, held out for a flying lesson cancelled due weather and thus missed out on both... the story of my life, if not those of One Direction.

Since then SAR in the UK has effectively been privatised and offered to Bristow, whose founder appeared at a mess dinner at the same airbase; speaking afterward about the ongoing wave of labour disputes back then in ways that might have made Margaret Thatcher blush. Bristow was though a UK success story and like all of the others, was sold to the US. So as with all else, we are paying foreign shareholders for what we used to do ourselves.

What caught my ear recently was news that the people running the service have asked crews ~ the dangling ones and not the pilots ~ to provide services for free, presumably inspired by the RNLI or lifeboat service. Difference being though that the elderly want to leave their savings to the latter, but few would consider doing so for the former.

The way forward would appear to be more extensive use of aerial drones like the 'cam-copter' from Austria seen above. They've four of them now, and prices aren't quoted as ever with taxpayer-funded enterprises, but suffice to say the Thai Navy spent over $18 million investing in a couple (tho' they come with a broader package of add-ons).

The argument for maritime drones meanwhile, without wanting to appear the sort of single-issue nut-job that people's cyberspace, is that extended range aerial drones are likely to remain prohibitively expensive in future ~ albeit a fraction of the cost of using the sort of helicopter seen alongside ~ whereas a network of drones loitering at sea provides broader coverage at a fraction of the cost.

And they could, anticipating the counter-argument that they don't provide a birds-eye view, deploy an aerial drone of their own... self-deploying types already already on the rise.

Figuratively and literally.

Strip Show #9

Am tee-ing up the first keel here, although prior to doing so I've had to shave some 20mm off the forward end of each deck to suit. In the US when you're buying 4' by 8' sheets of anything they are likely to be the stock measure. The use of metric tho' in different parts of the world means that there are endless variations on the perfect match of 1220 x 2440mm.

I've used the backer-board (aptly) to back the keels, whereas the decks are topped with ply. The latter conforms to that conversion metric, the former does not. In fact it measured 600 x 1200mm at the get-go, hence the required adjustments this morning. Elsewhere I have seen sheets 2500mm long by 1250mm wide, so what I do is to treat it like a box of chocolates, as Forrest Gump would.

Go With the Flowcopter

This thing is gaining traction and rightly so, although off the bat it looks unwieldy for a drone with distributed electrical propulsion (DEP)... and that's because it isn't.

The motor looks to be from Hirth, a venerable German company that dates back I think to circa WW1 but more recently turned to powering ultralight aircraft with 2-stroke motors.

Details are sketchy, but so far as I can see it drives a hydraulic pump that in turn is distributing pressure to each of the motors; except that those motors are not your regular pressure-driven actuators but digitally-controlled pumps themselves derived from the aerospace industry.

I can tell you that whichever airliner you fly, 'hydraulics' is a sizeable chapter in the manuals as it conventionally provides for practically anything that moves around its outline: landing gear, flight control surfaces, every other surface, generators etc.

These actuators are relatively cheap, decidedly light and super-responsive as you'd expect from a century or more of development. Turning back to drones, which to be able to fly require rapid adjustments to the RPMs of the propellers in each corner, it would appear that this is what they do viz. adjust the underlying hydraulic pressure supplied at source.

It's not the most efficient and pales when compared to a simple drive-shaft; but it is actually an arrangement that is everywhere in the modern world. Look at the fields, and those tractors with skinny legs and wheels to negotiate the crops use systems like this, as do any number of cranes manoeuvring containers around the docks.

What it does here is to provide a reliable means that far exceeds the state of the art when it comes to battery-come-motor solutions. Effectively the only way DEP allows for the range and endurance as such a vehicle as this is to turn it from a helicopter into an aeroplane for the cruise and back again for the landing.

Which is altogether more complicated to do than what you see here.

So well done. I'd offer to do their PR but am too busy doing nothing.

Face Off... and On Again

In a moment of epic import on a par with that of Odysseus, I too have returned after ten years sojourn: but to Facebook if not Ithaca. Needless to say the profile needed updating to reflect the advancing years ~ but not overly so ~ and I have settled for this delightful AI render.

I asked it to drop the 'northern trucker' vibe for a look that says 'Here I am in my vineyard in the Napa Valley on a summer's evening entertaining billionaire friends and enjoying the fruits of my labour designing and building not so much rockets for Mars as bits of polystyrene I can sit on out at sea.'

As a young man about London Town I'd be told I had the look of Rick Astley about me, although nowadays ~ as I just saw in his book ~ he still retains a quiff whereas I do not. Nonetheless you can be whomever you want to be on social media!

The alternative being that seen below, which frankly still has its hat in the ring.

Big Day Out: Portsmouth

It would be churlish to depart the South Coast on such glorious summer days with no excursion around the many museums that illustrate the history of our foremost naval port since the days Henry VIII lost his flagship thereabouts: it preserved here too, or what's left of it.

(A positively Proustian sentence that has left me exhausted.)

Sailing in you cannot miss one of the two carriers the UK possesses, looking with its marquees like it's being prepared for a tea-party, though it's attributable here to its ongoing maintenance. A problem with conventional navies is that at any one time a significant portion of its inventory is laid up in this way: a dilemma drones will go a long way to rectify.

The best overview of the harbour however comes from atop the Spinnaker Tower, the UK's tallest observation tower (although that at Brighton might elevate the eyes that bit higher).

At the various museums that comprise the historic naval dockyards (available on a single ticket that lasts a year, even though everyone knows you'll never be coming this way again), you can see HMS Victory along with the spot upon which he died in a kiss-me-quick-Hardy hat.

More impressive perhaps is HMS Warrior or the first iron-clad sailing-cum-steamship that was built in 1860 and could fire cannon-balls over the horizon at a range of five miles and as a consequence was untouchable. Most intriguing perhaps was the fact it appears to have within its bowels a spare propeller-blade, seen top row third left.

Alongside we've moved on to the Submarine Museum over on the other side of the harbour and without leaving the car-park there's an exhibit in the shape of one such propeller adapted for such vessels. These have to be as undetectable as possible, so they feature any number of bizarrely-shaped blades designed to reduce cavitation whilst they turn at a lethargic pace.

In the 1960s there were apparently sixty-two subs harboured here, and now there are none beside a fascinating post-war relic that you get to do a tour of, and which served in both the Far East and afterward the Arctic as the War got Colder. We've now a handful of nuclear submarines instead based in Scotland, and some of which will be undergoing maintenance (see earlier comments) at any one time. Worryingly when one of these test-fired one among its Trident missiles, it didn't work properly.

Check out however that first pic on the bottom row and tell me whether you've ever seen so magnificent a set of push-rods?

We've mover on however to the Munitions Museum at neighbouring Gosport, that is renamed 'Explosion!' in the hope of attracting the younger visitor. Worth a visit in order to get the set if nothing else, it includes fabulous exhibits like a wooden model of a design of naval gun that sadly would only feature on-screen nowadays, touched only by way of a mouse.

It's been a jolly day out as ever though, and topped off by encountering this 1930s steam-wagon on the high street beyond. Fully restored with local naval engineering expertise it ferries passengers around from pub to pub in the sunshine... something I imagine happens to us when we get to heaven.

And to cap it all off, a two-seat Spitfire is doing the rounds of HMS Daedalus if you are able to afford the £3,250 required for a quick-ish spin; although you can settle for a cup of tea and a Victoria sponge-cake as I did on the day. Daedalus is in fact an airfield and not a ship, naval personnel calling anything that moves or does not a 'ship' for reasons best known to themselves.

This constitutes the 1500th post appearing in the blog, which overall has attracted a third of a million views and as many as 3,000 in a single day. Recently I suggested its apparent success might be attributed to AI bots scraping it for material and this appears to be a clear and present danger. Accordingly the next 1,500 posts will be about how the moon is made of cheese, so Google offers it up to genuine enquiry.

DC Comic

Probably said so before but this is among the most popular of my uploads to Digital Commons, where it goes by the tag of Drone for Human Carriage. It's true that the tag alone might have acted as clickbait, but I think there's room to consider it might be the long-term feasibility of the arrangement that attracts 116 of this last month's 163 downloads for example.

The premise as ever was flat-packability but the main attraction was the fact PAVs or personal air vehicles of the kind simply grow in weight. HEXA for example over in the US was supposed to conform to a regulatory 250 pounds of (basic?) weight, though it would be relaxed by 200 pounds by the FAA at last count. For prototypes designed to fly all have a thing in common ~ they grow in weight.

This seems to be true even as the underlying tech moves in the opposite direction, for electrical aircraft that hover like these all suffer from lack of range or endurance and whenever batteries and motors get lighter, more of them are simply added so as to redress the balance.

This here then was an attempt at a drone that could lift its weight into position and have a pilot step into the resulting space; the harness doubling as a platform able to mount flight controls. This would have been drawn up to waist-height like a pair of underpants (to use the technical term), or else would have been open at the rear in order that the pilot could step into place and strap in. It also serves to bolster the uprights in support of the weight overhead... and those are 10-kilo weights you see.

Hope it happens some day but I had to abandon the proj in favour of boats because they were simpler, safer and ~ critically ~ cheaper to prototype. You would have to add too that it would be altogether easier to pioneer in the US, China or even other parts of Europe than here, where so many of us are employed in regulation and are tasked daily with finding things to regulate.

Proud of the pic though, and as the pioneer of rocketry in New Zealand was to point out, it does not matter so much if something proves not to work in practise so long as it works as art...

...as it does here.