Ploughshares Into Swords

As we move toward power-up I repurpose the IKEA dining-table with a remaindered door from the lumber-yard that makes the perfect work-bench. With a rubber-foot at each juncture it can be substituted in a trice, so that at one moment you can be building maritime drones, the next hosting dignitaries for a fish and chip supper.

I view it as doing my bit for war-time Britain, though MI6 have warned me it marks me out as a natural target and that I may get home one day to find that my knob's been Novichok'd... which honestly is something I normally have to pay for.

New Wave, Old Dog.

Maritime drones appear to be gaining traction, and I'm indebted to YouTube channel  'One Wingspan Above' narrated by a New Zealander (?) with a voice that's ideal for drifting off to if you're struggling. He highlights three newish projects among many that are falling over themselves to ensure the sea is littered with drones as well as land and sky.

Top left is Levanta, who've invented what they call the 'hover foil' or hydrofoil with a dome-shaped outline into which they pump air to raise it to the surface. Though it's an imaginative leap and does what it says on the tin, I would suggest that hydrofoils do anyhow get craft up there fairly sharply once underway. They also suggest theirs is the first float-fly-float drone ever, though quads with floats for alighting on water date back practically to Roman times. Nonetheless, wish them luck and Godspeed.

Also out there in the US is Poseidon, at bottom left, based in San Fransisco instead of Missouri and counting among its staff any number who've worked on Amazon's delivery drones... and therefore not to be sneezed at. They are pioneering more of a regular seaplane that could nonetheless be controlled by computers to stay within the regime of ground-effect in order to do more for range and endurance. There is nothing new here besides, but often that's the key to success: Regent's sea-glider has been pranged from time to time endeavouring to manage the hairy intersection between hydrofoil lift and aerofoil.

Finally there is Airship, which draws upon the reverse wing layout pioneered by the same guy who did the same for delta-wings during WW2... but which like so many other WIGs (wing-in-ground effect and not the hairpiece) never took off, or at least figuratively.

The number one reason I can see for the failure of ground-effect efforts in the past is that (a) if they were boat-shaped they only worked on smooth seas and (b) if aeroplane-shaped, kept catching a wingtip on the waves before crashing... which seaplanes and flying-boats have done since time immemorial.

The one thing I want you to take away from this being that this is why my boat is boat shaped, but boat-shaped in a way that does not exclude flight in ground-effect due the potential to make it a fraction of the weight of traditional watercraft, beside enjoying advances in electrical propulsion ~ print that out and put it where it can be seen when you wake each morning.

But back at Airship ~ suspect PR as it instantly conjures up images of people falling to their deaths from a burning Zeppelin ~ the takeaway from this is that the private sphere works best in the US, but only really the public sphere in Europe. What that means in effect is that in the former small teams of individuals can develop projects and then source funding from VCs for a leg up, whilst in Europe they are destroyed by regulation and bureaucracy before being sold off like Lilium and Volocopter to the Chinese... who also know how to develop and industry.

Accordingly Airship is a cross-cultural effort amongst a variety of universities around Europe, funded by the EU over cappuccinos in Brussels. It is unsurprising then that unlike Dr Lippisch's clean-lined prototypes, it looks like ground-effect-by-committee.

So meantimes we plough our lonely furrow here, don't we Gromit?

And now if you'll excuse us, we've a toilet to fit.

Flash Mob

The cat in the car-park (above) and on holiday (below). Too nice a day to forego a quick check in water, and fact it floats level saves me from having to build a test-tank in the garden. It will of course be able to run on ice, as I intend for the local rink in due course.

And with no opposition from anglers or locals I withdrew my threat to block access to the pond, which in my view has a great future.

Shock and Awe

In the days leading up to a photo-shoot and possibly after reviewing CCTV footage, operators of the local playing-fields imposed a height-restriction at the entrance of the car-park that the platoon had identified as the perfect drop-zone for a PR shoot.

Taking a leaf out of Napoleon's book at Austerlitz, Gromit and I rose before dawn to load the vehicle and raise it to working temperature before departing in a cloud of AdBlu. Within minutes and in sight of the entrance, the 4x4 scaled the grassy knoll alongside like a Panzer unit in the Ardennes. With not even a dog-walker defending its ramparts, we had successfully invaded the car-park.

Ed. The author's grandfather and great uncle served in Gallipoli and are turning in their graves.

Let's Do the Space Warp Again

The timber yard around the corner sells a set of flags like this with which to stylishly pave the back garden... a circular table at its centre perhaps for the glass of Pimms in the sunshine. 

This tho' is the heat-shield from the top end of Artemis 2, adorning the ass of the uppermost capsule that contains the astronauts and which they rely upon during re-entry.

The figure to remember should anyone ask you about re-entering the atmosphere from a trip to the Moon is twenty-five. You'll be travelling at 25,000 m.p.h. and the temperature of that surface will be around 2,500°C... and what lies between you and that super-heated sauna is 25% plastic.

What most strikes you about space-flight is the level of near-perfection required in its attention to detail. The far depths of the oceans and farthest reaches of the sky are as unforgiving in physical terms as anywhere on the planet; as the losses of the Titan submarine and Columbia space-shuttle attest.

I always figured these tiles were ceramic, so that for future commercial off-the-shelf builds you could drop by Home Depot to search among kitchen and bathroom tiles.

What they are instead is a sort of cake-mix of epoxy resin, plus glass microspheres and silica fibres. These are popped into a form of baking-tray in the shape of a steel hexa-comb like honey-bees make, and then popped into an autoclave on low temp while you join friends at the pub for pre-meal drinks.

Artemis 2 (crewed) was preceded by Artemis 1 (uncrewed), with which they would experiment with a single-skip entry to Earth's atmosphere ~ like a pebble on a pond ~ with which to help reduce the speed. Except what it meant was that gases crept into the seams of the tiles and expanded upon re-entry to blow parts of the tiles off.

What they told the crew prior this month's re-entry therefore was that they'd go for a 'ballistic' or full-on entry instead. Which is one reason why what the astronauts do is sit down with the kids and the household paperwork, explaining what to do with it should tiles designed to a 1960s recipe fail.

Incidentally the difference with moonshots is that unlike a return from orbiting the Earth, there's an extra 8000 m.p.h. to dispose of; and the best way of imagining it is that the gravitational pull of the planet acts not unlike a coin-vortex. What you're on is effectively the solar system's biggest roller-coaster, because it's all uphill for a small part of the way leaving the Moon, and accelerating downhill for the remainder.

Used to tell my own child at amusement parks how coin-vortices were ideal means of visualising the warping of gravitational fields as suggested by Einstein; he turning to me as often as not to say "Yeah right, loser."

Completely Floored

They said it would need adhesive but as I said to the vicar, it fit like a condom.

On the strength of replacing this toilet end-to-end I have bid for the upgrade to the facilities on Artemis 2, which failed spectacularly only recently.

The bid required a name and they accepted 'Moonshine' only after rejecting my first suggestion, which was 'Moonshite'.

Transferable Skills

Used on the drones for many years since, an ideal way to drive holes through dodgy sheet material like alloys or carbon-fibre... or indeed vinyl flooring. To make holes for the piping, pre-drill a block and centre it over another before driving a spade-bit through. Access for pipes enabled here by running a Stanley knife from the edge.