It's a Sad, Sad, Sad, Sad World

Seven years since I investigated its feasibility, but now its reality... at least on social media. The takeaway in the first case being that it was never going to fly, and in the second that in the only way it matters nowadays, it's flying already.

The giveaway however in that latter case are the facts that (a) you don't want to be trying it out over the world's deepest canyon (b) those propellers should ideally be turning and (c) they do create 200lb's worth of downwash and last time I was there ~ unless they've cleaned it since ~ it was dusty.

Bear in mind however that to most of us, suitably sedated by the blue pill, it's real.

And what's Orwellian about it is not that any Big Brother has orchestrated the fact we no longer distinguish truth from fiction... but that we'll happily do it to ourselves.

Ed. Tho' if you think we're characters in a matrix, try telling it to a traffic cop.

Sharp Intake of Breath

Reading matter I chose whilst travelling recently included a book on the inevitable extinction of the human race ~ and not before time ~ and Adrian Newey's book on how to design a car. Or more specifically a Formula 1 car, the most researched and to my mind over-complicated type on the planet.

Rear-engined racing cars are nothing new, used by both Audi and Mercedes long before they were standardised, largely due the efforts of the likes of Lotus. They do though share a problem with turbo-propeller engines, which unlike an everyday jet is unable to draw breath directly from in-front, where the propeller is located. As for the race-car, it's the driver in the way.

When they first arranged an intake behind the driver's head it was three-sided like an inverted horse-shoe, which meant that the airflow was disrupted over the lip by interference from the driver's helmet. The solution was to separate the mouth of the intake ~ and the incoming airflow ~ altogether, as had been done with every turbo-prop engine out there since the 1950s.

Adrian however only introduced this standardised layout in the mid 1990s after... gazing out the window of an island-hopping aircraft in the Caribbean. Like me, tho' with success, he likes to fix design issues during flights and sketch the results prior to handing them to others to render.

So stay curious, look at how things are made and wonder why they are made that way and one day you too might be working for Ferrari.

At the same time, besides wearing sun-screen I would advise anyone wanting to get a job these days ~ when everyone else beside hordes of robots has identical skill-sets ~ is to see a project through to some kind of conclusion.

Few people have likely considered that a boat might fly itself from the shore to the sea prior to launch, and what was said about flight long ago still pertains: to dream up an aircraft is nothing, to build one is something but to fly one is everything.

Show people that you can do every part of that, including co-ordination of a team no matter how small, and people begin to see a way that you may produce revenue in the fullness of time by providing a competitive edge.

Which is how Adrian began, spending hours around the wind-tunnel at Southampton university and offering those skills to teams that once comprised barely a dozen folk instead of the eight hundred or more that each car requires.

For as comedian Jimmy Carr so often suggests: don't be the best, be the only.

Ed. The author's forthcoming TED talk will take place at the Cock and Bull in Cockermouth.

Look Up

I wonder how many nerds pass through security at Manchester Airport's delightful renewal of its second terminal, and are instantly transported to its 1960s heyday?

"Oh, what transports of delight..." I commented to one among its functionaries!

For here, and tastefully incorporated in a new artwork, were some among thirteen hundred lead crystal 'droplets' which formed the mise-en-scene at a place so loved by plane-spotters.

The original was installed by an emigre architect who had the royal seal of approval and died this century at the age of ninety-three.

Most we hope for nowadays is some or other piece of crap by Thomas Heatherwick.

Ed. Thomas failed to reply to one of his emails.

Take A Bow, Frank.

Stay curious. I spend a deal of time around sea-ports and what caught my eye here was the unusual profile of this pilot boat's prow. Inverted bows ~ sloping the wrong way ~ have a longer history than you'd think and this appears to be a combination of two types to produce what's called a 'wave-piercing' hull.

Such profiles drop in and out of fashion among large naval ships, but here the work (and the fabulous photo) is that of Frank Kowalski and his ship-yard in Ireland that appears to have sown up the fast and rugged boat market with innovative GRP hulls born of his own experience.

So take a bow, Frank Kowalski. The takeaway from all of which is that markets can be cornered by an innovative design stemming from the single-handed actions of a pioneer that will evolve to form a team involved in ongoing production.

Not always sure that's a good thing, as it requires me to do something about it.

Pilot boats are used to transport those with local knowledge of their own harbour to assist in the docking of altogether larger vessels.

Amphibian Ambition

Read with sadness how after 70 years the Land Rover ~ designed as a farming tool at the outset ~ is to be retired by the military, and how fifty were once adapted as amphibious landing craft.

And eventually rejected as unfeasible, since when there's never been anything like the DUKWs provided by Chevrolet during WW2.

The story since does however lend credence to Dominic Cummings' view (along with that of parliament) that UK procurement is not fit for purpose in peacetime let alone war.

Following Google's trail for instance I discover a competition from a few years ago in search of novel means of amphibious landing:

With a set of barely credible requirements ~ principally regarding range combined with speed:

Emerging from which are the safest bet, in the shape of 'the naval architects you know' who have previously provided pretty pictures of how ships might soon look:

Guaranteeing taxpayer funds to pay salaries whilst building a scale prototype:

And afterward going bust:

Leaving the only amphibious survivor stemming from the UK and provided to the US Marines by BAE Systems... as one designed and built by IVECO in Italy:

(Note suggested range in water is rather less than 350 nautical miles at just 12... coinciding of course with international waters.)

It should be me writing these tenders, few of whose clauses will ever be met.

They would include the following:

    *    Troops should also be provided red suits which squirt spider's thread

Fear I may be the last man here working on amphibious craft ~ albeit without those passengers about to get shot at.

Ed. The author apologises for any hurt feelings, pointing out God loves a tryer.

Saronic's No Hedgehog

And here is said Saronic, some among whose vessels are shorter than what's sat on my garage-floor, albeit with a greater displacement.

It's encouraging ~ I can't say it's not ~ and I like the fact they say it can be used for customer-defined capabilities, because it is most often the way innovation works viz. customers coming up with users that inventors never dreamt of.

I'm under no illusions and whilst these drones are nowadays the sinews of maritime presence, what make them useful is AI-reliant comms of the sort that BAE Systems produces.

But my boat brings all the boys to the yard and they're like, it's better than theirs.

(Damn right it's better than theirs... I can teach them, but I have to charge.)

YC/DC

Changing times, California's best known VCs migrating from apps that ensure pizza arrives before it goes cold migrating toward things that move over the sea at speed.

Fresh from Regent then there is Splash, which recently succeeded in an exercise for the Marines that involving delivering not much of a package to a beach in the Indo-Pacific ~ requiring the recipient 'not to get their feet wet'. Watching the footage the guy nearly did, whereas up and running the flat-cat should be able to fly it down the street to the nearest pizza parlour too.

Besides Regent's electrified wing-in-ground effect aircraft and Splash, YCombinator has also backed Saronic, as has the US Navy to the tune of nearly $400 million for the deployment of two dozen larger maritime drones.

Unlike the US however in the UK procurement operates on more of a 'who you know not what you know basis' as described by Boris Johnson's brain, which was known as Dominic Cummings. The only intelligent life-form involved with his government, he would be turfed out because Boris' girlfriend didn't like him: the way it's worked since Anthony and Cleopatra.

Nonetheless as Victor Hugo wrote, nothing can stop an idea whose time has come... even if it's in China instead of here.

Ed. He didn't add the China bit, we did that.

New Wave

Followed WIGs (wing-in-ground-effect) since the days of Janes Surface Skimmers, when the editor beside I and three others were the only ones who persisted in this strange obsession; the hopes for hovercraft having devolved to hobbyists who raced them at weekends for fun.

Accordingly I can sum up the eventual failure of WIGs by pointing out they were so like aircraft that you may as well as have the aircraft; or like boats to the extent it made you figure it was worth buying the boat instead.

For in each case airplanes and boats were more adaptable than WIGs, seaplanes evolved to the extent places like Alaska relied on them; and unlike WIGs did not crash on a regular basis due contact between wing-tip and water at speed.

Likewise boats that used airfoil sections in order to skim the water were a novelty when there were few waves around, but existing boats were usable in any event.

WIGs like hovercraft therefore proved that jacks-of-all-trade were the better choice, despite not being the master of any one in particular. WIGs meantime were masters of flying over water that was not too choppy, and not much else*.

For sadly the sea had a habit of being wavy, with only one way to get over it and that was to build at scale... which becomes so expensive as to limit such craft to inland seas, where as often as not they are eventually beached.

The problem Regent have in building such drones for the US military is that, being small, they rely upon scaled-down waves of the sort nature only occasionally obliges with on the day: all photos of either the Soviet or US experiments appear in photos in which the sea looks like it does on the airline safety card.

The fact WIGs may yet exceed escape-velocity in the case of electrified craft in the current (!) age, however, is that (a) multiple motors are not so expensive to fit and operate and (b) wave-height computers allow for surface-following to substitute for the previous resort to sheer scale.

This combination of factors means Regent craft can operate slowly in displacement mode, faster on hydrofoils and fastest in ground-effect flight over water.

The alternative too having the resources (and energy) available to Regent is to draft a craft that appears it can plane at a variety of speeds, besides eventual elevation into ground-effect as and when sea-state permits.

At the same time we're banking on a further USP that derives from the fact that a 2-D form of catamaran can be scaled for a fraction of the time, effort and cost that is required traditionally to enlarge the sort of craft appearing up top.

Bear in mind in all of this too that the greater part of military activity being pursued at the time of writing... is being pursued in parts of the world where seas really are generally that glassy.

All things considered, it might appear that perhaps WIGs are finally coming of age?

* Flying taxis have a similar problem, electrified or not, in that cars can be parked anywhere beside getting you there in the first place.

Mobile, Launched.

Ride out with the new tail-gate adapter... only narrowly escaping when I detected we'd been locked-on.

Dire Straits

The objective, to draw on allied support to assist the mightiest naval force in the world to sustain access to a waterway vital to their power and advancement of their broader war aims.

Terrain bordering the straits elevated and rugged, and thus decidedly difficult for an invading force to occupy and defend in the aftermath.

The opponent in these lower latitudes Islamic in religious preference and doggedly determined in the defence of their nationhood, to the point of wholesale sacrifice. 

The invaders led by a man sympathetic to the Russian's cause... stubborn, strong-willed, freely criticising those seemingly unable to see the superiority of his logic.

Yet eventually losing countless ships to mines, torpedoes and projectiles launched from foreign shores, besides devastating losses of infantry and naval personnel.

All eventually leading to his removal from office. 

Who, where and when?

Winston Churchill, Strait of Gallipoli, 1916.

Tuning Up

Sign off purchase of tins of tuna with which to sub for motors as we progress toward shakedown tests involving transport, besides PR shots for the website.

As a matter of fact these are almost indistinguishable from the real thing once they are sprayed up, and make for a tasty snack for your teams afterward.

Motors are mounted (from forward left, clockwise) to turn in directions CW, CCW, CW and CCW.

Or as per photograph: Soy & Ginger, Lemon & Thyme, Red Hot Chilli, Soy & Ginger.

Back to the Future #25

With the decision made on transportation viz. directly mounting at the rear of a 4x4 in preference to use of a flatbed trailer, a hard-mount is affixed to the underside of the cat in order to facilitate the operation. Note the addition of the struts previously posted, which serve to stiffen the rear end of the hydro-skis, which as you will recall are in this case made of lengths of extruded uPVC ordinarily used for skirting board.

Weighty Matters

Big day because I've to decide whether or not to give the go-ahead to the second prototype that is dedicated to hover. A while since we did this, but it's back on the scales for one of the four power-packs comprising ESC, motor and battery-pack. This comes in at a rounded .75 kilos, of which .35 belongs to the motor itself.

Meantimes the boat weighs in at a rounded 5.00 kilos, so we're looking at an all-up weight of around 8.00 kilos or about eighteen pounds... not bad for an eight-footer.

Turning to the tables provided by T-motor themselves ~ invariably optimistic ~ the section on the 280kV motor appears below. This is the slowest variant of the motor and it produces 280 r.p.m. per volt, whilst the alternatives provide over 400 r.p.m.

This requires the largest recommended prop turning slower, which is more efficient at the cost of needing more torque and overheating the motor... in the table every combo lists a working temperature except this one, which simply says 'HOT'.

Nonetheless we'll be burning these babies in a do-or-die effort to get this thing off the ground, even if it means throwing more volts into the ring. Indeed the figs here relate to 24V packs and we've only 22V, so there's capacity in hand to up the stakes with bigger battery-packs (whilst I'm loathe as ever to part with the cash).

Accordingly pick up your tables and we'll go through them together, if I could ask Gromit to assist please with the laser-pointer?

First off, my friends at Axis Aerospace recommend the motors run around 65% to provide room for differential thrust in hover. Nonetheless in ground-effect there's an element of stability anyway, as motors nearest the ground during any tilt provide the greater thrust and essentially correct the situation... I like to think.

As race-director on the day however I'll mandate use of 75%, for which the figure in the table is a mighty 3300 grams of thrust. Dividing by 24 and times 22 (as life is linear) we still clear 3025 grams. Thus with four motors we're looking at twelve kilos of lift for eight kilos of boat... in fact even at 60% we should have lift-off, Houston.

We're therefore cooking on gas and all eyes turn to me (both cats!) as I green-light the project, and the room erupts in whoops and hollers that I pre-recorded on the laptop for the occasion. The question for the next bored meeting (stet) is whether I ask my electrical engineering friend to wire the motors for a NASA-style static thrust test... or go straight to Axis and get them wired for flight as well as sound?

I like 'Plan A' as the entertainment value is through the roof, not least because of the pond there too where we could conduct static flotation tests. As doughnuts are finished off and the last of the coffee is drained, however, our moon-shot must turn its attention to how we get the cat from A to B in either case.

It ain't going to be easy, and if any one of you is feeling the need to drop out at this stage then see me afterwards and I'll knee you in the groin and wish you well.

Struttin' Our Stuff

Realise the second prototype (to be dedicated to hover) has uPVC skids that look too flexible altogether at the back-end, unlike their timber counterparts on #001.

They look to need stiffening with struts, and at first I was afraid ~ I was petrified ~ but now I hold my head up high recalling how the prototype Hawker Hurricane and Me-109 needed struts at the tail-end too!

To do this I've a couple of old fibreglass tubes which I've cut down to 350mm, and afterward squirted filler in either end to provide purchase for a pair of wood-screws.

One thing I've learned as I've got older is firstly always to use sun-screen, but also to avoid nuts and bolts wherever a simple screw will do.

The problem with droopy members is they'll sag in the hover, springing upward if submerged.

Nonetheless a search on that term at sharing site YouTube has put me in touch with a Dr. Nora Hayes, who says she can fix anything for just $300 per hour.

Great... and who knew an MD would be interested in maritime drones too!

If anyone is interested in an annual strut-meet where surviving Hurricanes and Me 109s are flown in for me to try out while owners get to sit in my drone, contact me. 

Proto Typing

Not all plain sailing, as I hoped to build a cat round this bod to hang in a small boat collection somewhere; but turns out the knockdown paint I bought for a pound a can is not all it seems. Far from the matt 'NATO Green' it appears on the tin, it does so as 'Kermit the Frog' gloss.

Clue was probably the tin featuring a ride-on lawnmower, of dubious use to NATO.* 

Nonetheless it was an excuse to consign it to the bin, not really liking its proportions and having altered them for each prototype.

It did impress tho' by resisting all efforts to dismantle it for disposal: centuries from now it will be unearthed by robots, one asking what it was and another replying some loser's flying boat?

As Basil Fawlty said, however... Well that's cost me, hasn't it?

* Currently the UK does provide these ride-on lawnmowers in support of its allies.

Beasted

I'm loving this race down the Californian coast between the home of Mr. Beast and an unnamed restaurant, and while I don't have a reservation I do have some that relate to taking a Jetson instead of the car?

Firstly, as is apparent from the arrival there are few restaurants I know in the UK willing to clear the car-park of revenue-paying customers and barricade the public (beside upgrading the home insurance) in order to facilitate one of them landing. 

What happens subsequent (at least where I live) is the diner would spend less time worrying about Mr. Beast, and more about whether his ride has been stolen or vandalised ~ intentionally or unintentionally by all those selfies. The restaurant will though have someone keep an eye on it, likely soon a robot, as happens already at those restaurants that charge sufficient to attract only the wealthy?

The sad fact is, most of the Michelin-starred restaurants that people who can afford a Jetson are likely to visit are in places like London, which were designed for Roman carriages. You do get the odd one in the nearby countryside where the people who complain about helicopters live: the reason the one between Heathrow and Gatwick was shut down.

Furthermore, the people travelling to them ~ as I did once ~ will be doing so from Wimbledon, where they've room for tennis courts but neither room for helipads nor the council's permission to use them ~ and that's dead in the water, even if you are not after flying the cliff-line.

For the problem plaguing every form of personal aerial transport has been just this ~ the last mile ~ and only recently the VFS forum has been alive to the fact that the longer it takes to travel to a 'vertiport' to take a flying taxi, the less people will be inclined to use one at any cost.

And then as we pursue actions that ensure we'll be loathed by adherents of one sort of religious or national affiliation or another, there is the question of security.

Few of us need stand in line to get frisked prior driving to the restaurant, but the attraction of bringing down high-value targets like flying taxis (Concorde withdrawn this way, no matter the excuse) might spoil the evening if the handbags' contents have to be decanted from the get-go.

Which brings us to the Jetson, which is a DIY kamikaze pilot's dream and able to be steered at whichever high-class target with high explosive aboard and few fears of interception. And as often as not, the people inclined to do that will be the ones with petrodollars to pay for it... as they generally are at the best London restaurants.

And so we love the dream, we really do, and I'd rather be in a Jetson flying down the coast to meet Mr. Beast for eggs Benedict instead of sitting here in bed eating toast and marmalade with my stuffed Paddington bear.

But you and I know that ~ like fucking Sabrina Carpenter ~ it ain't going to happen.

Ed. note to lawyers, that's 'fucking Sabrina' active and not descriptive... and if Sabrina's reading, the author says he's willing to travel.

YASA Dabba Doo

Jet engines are notoriously thirsty at ground-level and I used to marvel at how the APU (which provides ground services to an airliner prior start) required a tenth of the fuel in the cruise that it did prior departure.

Accordingly this motor will allow airliners to taxi prior take-off or after landing with engines shut down. It was an issue at Heathrow ~ then the world's busiest ~ where we'd sit in line for upto forty minutes prior departure.

That's the good news. The maybe-less-so is that the Oxford academic who invented these axial-flow motors sold the company to Mercedes, not least because these things can turn out 1,000HP quite happily.

Ed. Bear in mind Germany does invest in manufacture and has the funds to do so, whereas in the UK we prefer property or gambling.

Get Realis

The UK has off-loaded the assessment of drones to a Canadian company, not having covered itself in glory the last time it tried: see the AAIB's report on an excursion of one such into the commercial airspace surrounding London's busiest airports.

Again too, as we offshore everything else... then if you can't beat them?

Carrier Advice

As the UK ponderously dispatches a carrier to the Gulf while imploring neighbours to provide the sort of escort it would need in order not to be sunk, the nimbler-footed are going for altogether smaller and more flexible means like this: among the first purpose-built drone-carriers, or at least in Europe.

Launching and landing fully-sized fighters (costing nowadays $100 million each) has always been problematic, and while it is for drones too there is less egg-on-face  ~ a significant concern in the West ~ if you lose one in the circumstances.

The UK lost one such mega-death jet when it dropped off the end of the carrier on take-off... because a foam plug had been left in an air-intake. It is always going to happen, yes, but need not always cost so much.*

Ed. Roughly, as Google's AI says. Governments rarely publish acquisition figures as (a) they're funded by taxes (b) are usually embarrassing and (c) nobody cares.

It Do Mean Jack: REACHR

Am sent encouraging news from across the water, where at North Carolina's State University a team is developing an amphibious maritime drone; so the pathology I suffer from is not wholly unique. It's designed for rescue operations in the aftermath of hurricanes, which is not so urgent a need here in Lancashire as it is there.

It is also designed to do more flying than sailing whereas my own efforts are geared to sailing with a touch of self-launch or surface-effect on the side. 

Nonetheless the team have garnered $4,000 from a crowd-funding campaign, and benefitted from ten times as much by way of a NASA grant. We don't have anything like a NASA in the UK, although it's the name I give to my wallet.

Like me they participated in the GoFly Challenge commencing almost ten years ago, which goes to show that if you engage in this form of madness you're in it for the long-term.

But well done guys... keep wet and carry on!

Elevator Pitch

Time to start setting our ducks in a row, and as I'm back early from the day job it's into the workshop for some C of G calculations. And afterward it's a bottle of red, cheese straws and salami during write-up: aerodynamics is fun if approached from the right angle.

Accordingly I park the 'Black Ops' drone on a length of tubing, which shows that the centre of gravity is around 7" aft of the forward bulkhead thus:

This I knew from prior builds, the excess weight of those booms and the skis they support pitching the prow down. I'm reluctant to foreshorten these however as they are going to be necessary when it comes to tackling rougher sea-states. Here tho' is what happens when we add the power-bank at the rear:

This pitches the C of G nicely central, the motors acting as a counterbalance. We've much practise at counterbalancing in Europe, for when we built the cathedrals some thousand years ago the bells that weighed several tons apiece had to be able to be swung by someone like Quasimodo. If you don't know who he is, incidentally, in the words of Will Young I think you better leave right now.*

What follows from this is the fact that the lift-motors being equidistant from that C of G, they ought to have no material effect on shifting it. It in turn means I can use tins of tuna instead, as I'm running out of motors here:

This is what fellow aerodynamics refer to as either the sweet spot, or dog's bollocks, because it means that if it launches into the air off the crest of a wave it is literally disinclined to pitch either downwards or upwards.

We're having to design for flight as well as planing on water here too, and note that for hovering flight from land to sea, what we want for a quadcopter is the mass of the craft to be pitched at the centre of all four corners of lift... and fuck, if it isn't here?

The bad news ~ and there's always bad news in life to counterbalance the good ~ is that for the 'lift' prototype we are going to need ballast at the rear to maintain this status quo. This however is standard MO for aircraft, so for instance if you remove a radar from the nose of a fighter jet you may need to fit a lump of lead in there in order to sustain the trim.

Broadly speaking aircraft designers are years ahead of marine architects, who have mainly to figure out what goes where whilst keeping the ship on an even keel. This is why fast boat design has become a bit shit in the 21st century, for whereas the Italians used to pitch motors centrally in their superior power-boats, now it's about hanging heavy-weight outboards on the back-end and having to build longer, heavier hulls to suit.

US excels at big and Japan small, whilst as ever the Brits are born to compromise. 

* Ed. Don't, it's the wine talking. Bear in mind The West Wing was powered by cocaine.

Vertical Flight Society

Renew my subs in order to keep my hat in the vertical ring: Sikorsky's a homburg, mine a flat cap in tribute to legendary local steam-head Fred Dibnah.

What the Hex?

Set the airframes out to dry over the weekend and was discombobulated by a knock at the door from the local PD who'd reports of witchcraft from more than one of the neighbours. Eventually they agreed they could remain there so long as I didn't plan to dance around them naked again.

The black drone is to be fitted with lift-motors to raise it into hover, and the grey solely with pusher-propellers to evaluate its ability to plane on water.

Not happening in a hurry unless the men in black appear, though subsequently each config will be combined toward self-launch and skimming flight clear of any surface.

Spot the Difference: TELEDRONE BOX

I realise in the small hours that sub-consciously all I have done is to take a design I optimised by trial-and-error, and made it the basis for a boat instead.

Adolf Hitler and Margaret Thatcher are said to have been people who went to bed wondering how to invade Denmark or the Falklands, and wake with the solution.

On a happier note Paul McCartney ~ who lived not far from here ~ is said to have woken one day with 'Yesterday;' fully-formed, to the extent he could not believe it did not already exist and had to be persuaded otherwise.

Ed. Yesterday his previous drones seemed far away, now it looks as though they're here to stay.

Spot-the-Difference: LIFT + CRUISE

I'd challenge anyone to guess, but one of these is the original and the other me-too configurations of LIFT + CRUISE ~ to the best of my knowledge.

Earliest to the table and resident of fondly-remembered Mountain View in California is Wisk. This venture is a collab between Boeing ~ who know an aircraft when they see it ~ and one of the Google twins whose attention was drawn many years ago to the prospects of eVTOL machines.

They set a trend that every other air taxi project has followed since, in that it began life as an array of lift-motors that was soon superseded by prototypes with a pair of wings and lift-motors that could be vectored so as to provide forward thrust. Those connected with conventional aviation knew that pure lift from anything less than the sizeable dimensions of a helicopter rotor was both expensive and inefficient, though like teenagers the newer entrants to the field had to learn the hard way.

There was considerable argy-bargy when Archer (at left) appeared to have copied the design, not least because many of its employees had been poached from the prior effort. Again there is nothing new under the sun, as Fokker did the same to the UK manufacturer Handley Page when they turned the Herald into the decidedly successful Friendship.

They have however kissed and made up, which leaves the only UK entrant standing in the form of Vertical Aerospace (centre), a recipient of the bulk of taxpayer funds in this field despite its founder having coined it in our broken energy market... and you thought the Russians invented oligarchs?

Ed. what the author is trying to say is that he wishes the project every success, and is fully prepared to eat humble pie on livestream as and when you meet in court.

Limbache (stet)

I chance upon a video produced in Ukraine by a man who does engines and his wife who speaks English, who together get to tear down the engine from a Shahed 136, notorious in its use both there and in the Gulf; to the extent it has been reproduced by the US on the basis that 'If you can't beat them...'.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the performance of their engines in WW2, the engine is a Limbach 550 produced in Germany, but with parts like bearings originating in places as far away as South Korea and Japan. A truly international effort, parts that adapt it to fitment in the drone are sourced from China, India and even Europe.

The vloggers point out that these parts vary greatly in quality, and assembled in a way that suggests whoever does so has little or no knowledge of how the engines work.

The wooden propeller is around two feet in diameter to suit the RPM of the motor, which is set to the maximum of around 7,500 rpm. An electrical generator is fitted, although as the ignition is self-sustaining by use of a magneto, this is presumably to keep those batteries powering the electronic components responsible for navigation and target acquisition.

Limbach themselves do not advertise a price, but other websites do so for drones in particular and charge between $17,500 and $20,000. The manufacturer is reticent and advertise the two-stroke engines for sport, recreational and experimental use... adding the following rider:

If you would like to implement projects in the fields of aerial observation, surveying, aerial photography, telecommunications or environmental protection, simply contact us – we can present interesting solutions jointly with you and our partners.

Whether or not agents in either Iran or Russia contacted them to say "We're minded to use your engines to take out random targets at a distance and would very much like to work together on a solution to our mutual satisfaction. Needing thousands."

The engine in the video has its serial number milled out to conceal its origin, though increasingly it would appear the units ~ given numbers required and PR fallout for its manufacturer ~ are now reproduced in home-grown versions to an altogether lower standard, as might be expected in the circs.

They are in all fairness only expected to last an hour at most, and I doubt anyone is returning the goods with the original packaging should they fall short of this (or any other) target?

Black Sabbath

Six lengths of stripwood transformed by the addition of a tile-backer centre-section and what's left of the uPVC skirting used as skis; these are more flexible than the wood on the water-borne prototype, as this airborne version is ideally a little lighter.

Accordingly it features 18mm square-section booms as against 21mm beside those lighter skis, and as a result this chassis weighs in at 10.50 pounds instead of 13.00.

I've gone for black in this case as it's what you'd expect of an experimental quad, in view of the fact the pusher-props and motors at the rear will be omitted for testing. I also had a leftover can of matt black, though it expired long before it was empty ~  something old cans of paint are prone to do and generally when hardware stores are closed, just to piss you off a little more.

I've one more centre-section to dispose of that will feature vectoring rear props, so that it needs only four motors in total. It will though be destined for a museum of our choosing rather than be developed at this stage, as separate lift and cruise motors are easier to implement.

These need neither actuator nor flight-controller, as lift-props sub for collective and pushers an element of conventional cyclic in driving things forward.

Ed. the post's title stems from the fact it is (a) black and (b) Sunday.