Benjamin on the Button

I prostrate myself before the persistence and talent of the young men like Benjamin Biggs over in Australia who are pushing for drones to exceed 500 m.p.h. and with what they've already made assuming the mantle of the fastest electrically-powered anything on Earth.

The young piss on the old, as ad-man Paul Arden put it... and don't I know it?

(Over) Lap of Honour

A back-of-the envelope calculation showing how close-coupled overlapped airscrews still sweep a greater area than alternative installations. At the same time they allow for a narrower track (and watercraft) altogether and more efficient combinations of motor and propeller.

Though at most efficient when both spin in the same direction, it introduces a bias in steering that could be avoided altogether should they counter-rotate.

Plus the fact drone propellers come in clockwise and anti-clockwise sets, I suppose.

Cat o' Nine Tales

I visit a yard on an old munitions dump come industrial estate, where I encounter a cat sat on its haunches in the autumn sunshine at its centre... where any number of fork-lifts and trailers bearing forty-foot containers negotiate it as they have for over fifteen years. Nobody knew when it turned up but on three occasions the company relocated elsewhere, it went with them.

Occasionally cats are retained as adept mousers, one at a Scottish distillery chalking up some 29,000 over a 24-year lifespan. Not this old lady, basking in the morning sun while rats scurry by in plain sight.

Stream of Consciousness

Occasionally you'll see cirrus marking the path of a jetstream and driving south on the A1 ~ which runs north to south ~ these looked like evidence of a northerly jet across the UK. Which, it would appear from YouTube, was precisely the case. It's a question of staying awake.

Decidedly Sketchy

Here's what we're working toward however, the absence of booms meaning we can frame the pontoons with an 'H' arrangement having a cross-bar at either end that is unimpeded by the incursion of those booms. Incidentally it means, looking ahead, we can mount the motors and propellers at the leading edge as well as the trailing.

See what I mean from the picture below where our old friends the long clamps have stepped in to help. The timbers I have re-purposed from the previous build as with so much of my work, for greater love hath no drone than it lay down its life like this.

Those are 18mm square sections and so they stand proud of the laminated panels by a quarter-inch or 5mm, and I've used that to accommodate a bead of adhesive at either end.

The 24" cross-bars running fore and aft will be fixed separately, but for now notice how they form a slot that will retain each of the keels like a sort of dagger-board.

Notice too how thicker board would make for a more robust construction altogether besides adding more static buoyancy. In fact when my therapist asked me what I regretted in life, it was that I'd gone for 12.50mm instead of 20mm.

But then you just park it and carry on, don't you?  

Weight Loss Program

If you recall this was not going to be scaled because Türkiye ~ where I intended to do so by the seaside ~ does not do backer-boards because it's buildings are based on breeze-block and plaster instead of timber and plasterboard as are ours.

But it was also, to my mind, too heavy at nearly ten kilos (20-odd pounds) without motors and all that goes with them.

Accordingly I wondered if we could dispose of those booms, the art of design being as Steve Jobs often said being about what you can take away as much as what might be added.

So I take a hacksaw to them, and turns out we could.

Ed. What do you think? Turns out we don't care...

RAF (Un) Fairford

For whoever else feels small is beautiful, the US withdrawl of its strategic bombers likely reflects what drones did to similar assets over in Russia. The UK government has since declared the airbase safe... principally because there are no aircraft left for drones to destroy.

Welcome to the world of distributed warfare.