New Model Army?

Electrification and miniature turbines in large part have allowed for a proliferation of aircraft types to be manifested at scale, not least this Harrier ~ by Joel and Melanie Vlashof ~ with nozzles able to swivel to provide for vertical take-off and landing.

As a one-time fan of Airfix models ~ who'd like both Lego's Concorde and Titanic ~ I appreciate the monumental effort and enthusiasm involved.

Nonetheless there's also an argument (inset) that Tamara of Amara puts here, in so far as it may be better to work in reverse order to design models that can be tested so as to produce them at full scale. Lacking patience, and unable to see the point of reiterating the past in miniature, I'm inclined to agree.

And having worked in F1 as an aerodynamicist ~ where racing cars are tested at a scale of 1:3 or larger ~ she'll have had the real-world experience of this that as yet I lack, but not for want of trying. In fairness though the number of people testing proof-of-concept model watercraft in the UK must be less than a half-dozen, mainly because few people would want to waste their lives in such pursuits.

Possibly as a result, Tamara has moved on to bigger things and is trying to raise funding and sponsorship towards pedalling 30,000km in an enclosed e-bike of her own design. Like me you may view this as less sane altogether, but if not you can help launch her project at:

https://www.amaraautomotive.com/copy-of-home

Ed. The New Model Army was formed by Cromwell of revolutionaries in 1645, and hasn't been heard of since outside of this blog.

Another Little Chat, GPT

One of the worst parts of my role as CEO at TELEDRONE are the staff issues, and it was only this morning that HR and I found ourselves having to interview ChatGPT for his/her/their own role in turning the prow of the boat back to green, when I'd spent an hour spraying it grey.

We were though charmed by his/her/their response, happy I was addressed as 'Sir' and thinking of making it company-wide policy.

I did however turn to HR once the laptop was closed and suggested 'He's not the full ticket, really, is he?'... which HR was able to agree with once ChatGPT was out of earshot.

Ed. Sam Altman has gone on the record at OpenAI asking us to treat ChatGPT with respect. Here at TELEDRONE he has his own locker, toilet and hi-vis.

Digital Commoner

You read it here first... and this is how you might go about a defensive publication on the digital commons, the place you can take digital sheep to graze.

Yours to cut out, keep, cherish, or pass on to grandchildren.

Ed. the flying hydroplane you saw just yesterday and the accompanying template published on a post dated October 16th of this year...

Starship Commander Sir Patrick Stewart, R.I.P.

Three connections to the great thesp. The one and only time I dined at a Michelin-starred restaurant that featured an after-dinner speaker must have been the Quatre Saisons, darlings, in Oxfordshire. During the speech he wondered:

'How was it that one moment I was treading the boards at the Bradford repertory, and the next, dining out in Hollywood?'

To which a heckler in this intimate gathering of just two dozen people suggested:

'Warp speed?'

...I wished it had been me, reader, although he looked not at all amused.

Then again I was six years operating out of Heathrow, the departure point of choice for celebs in and around London. I heard from a colleague at Virgin Atlantic how he had been invited onto the flight-deck. inbound to the UK ~ as could be done at the time. The captain calling for Flaps 1, the first officer turning to Patrick on the jump-seat with raised eyebrow, so from behind came:

'Make it so.'

Finally, I had recently to collect timber from a yard near the village of Mirfield where he was born, a little way outside of Leeds. If you visit, don't forget to drop into the Dewsbury Bus Museum a little way along the road.

Maybe we can do it together, and take a little flower?

Infinity Wail

If you want a practical example of how AI ups productivity, in times past I'd load a model on a trailer and drive to a studio in Liverpool where they have an infinity wall to provide an all-white background; whereas now I ask ChatGPT to clean up the image so Daddy can use it on his blog.

It's good news for me and you, but people running studios could be going the same way as the whalebone corset-makers.*

Not that we can wholly trust AI, which as you can see from the spot-the-difference competition here, has added screws to the main-deck that don't actually exist.

I know where it got the idea from, because the fore-deck bears a simple cap of thin ply that had to be screwed to the underlying timber, and ChatGPT has decided that it likes them... and that the main-deck would benefit from a similar treatment.

Accordingly I logged back into the prompt and typed, 'Get this right bots, I'm boss around here, you do that again and you'll never work in this laptop again.'

I'll be woken and slapped round the face with a MacBook: being told now they are the masters, jah?

* Ed. Whalebone corsets are available on our merch pages.

Flydroplane

Well that's what we've been working on, isn't it Gromit, and if we are ever to cross over between high-speed planing on water and ground-effect flight above its surface then it's likely to look more like this than not. Probably a best use of foam laminate tile backing-board you're likely to come across, and something I have put out there in this month of October by way of a show-and-tell and which I shall double in size during the month of November, prior to powering up for testing come December.

It weighs just 2.50 kilos ~ although those are not real motors swinging those 11" propellers ~ and is around 18" wide and 67" tall stood on end. There's a panel that forms an inclined ramp beneath the forward end of the main-deck, which it time we shall use as a foot-rest to accommodate a seat on its upper side. We can use what we have here for static flotation tests, principally to determine the best location for the motor... which we have the flexibility to add to the rear of the main-deck or else the leading edge of the tail-assembly.

I may take it up to Coniston speed week at the start of next month, as I suggested to you some time back; but then again I might not be bothered. Fuel's getting little cheeper nowadays, which is one reason I design such things as these. Fact I would like going forward for people to adopt such data as kt/kW (knots per kilowatt) else kt/kg (knots per kilogram) when it comes to the speed of such things, to emphasise how little energy should need to be required by fast watercraft.

Because the way we build now for movement on air, land or water seems designed to maximise use of resource and emissions of carbon, even if we kid ourselves that it doesn't.

Proud of what I see though: proof it might yet be that I'm not altogether useless.

Ed. Cockpit an empty bottle of Prosecco meantime that I call 'the cockpit of shame'. 

Alma Mater-Fuckers

Am invited as an alumnus to go online at bit.ly in order to enable me to be kept in touch.

Listening to the budget delivered in parliament yesterday as I drove down the A1, I couldn't help thinking that the Labour Party ~ not unlike the Democrats in the US ~ was a party born out of people who got their hands dirty at work, yet now is inhabited by people with clean hands and a regular manicure.

Thus driver of any sort does not make the cut, despite the fact there are pushing two million of them working in the UK; which means more people drive for a living than any other type of people living here, period. In short your world does not go round unless a steering-wheel does.

In contrast, I could probably invite the UK's vicars, influencers and writers over for cocktails without us spilling into the conservatory. The mess we are in (although I exclude NMITE in Hereford from all this) is in large part the result of clean-handed lawyer Tony Blair deciding in the 1990s that the only reasonable course of action for young people was a degree... of any sort whatsoever. We've a million 'neets' in the country ~ neets an abbreviation for doing fuck all ~ and wonder why.

So I've emailed the link to the University of Sheffield ~ which didn't have the balls to fail me, whereas I would have done ~ to ask whether my money's good enough for them?

And what about grave-diggers, sex-workers or airline pilots... in order of respectability?

Ed. He is having a bad day, isn't he? Thank goodness for Frasier.

The Ski Lodge

Can't believe I've never seen it before but episode 14 of series 5 aired February of 1998 has to be the one that ~ if you see no other ~ you have to watch. Combines epic writing, performance and production with the finest tradition of British farce; high praise from a place that gave you Brian Rix and 'No Sex Please, we're British'. The actress beside Frasier? Cynthia Montagne... I'd love to have scaled those peaks.

Ed. the author divides his time between driving trucks, building boats, blogging and re-runs of Frasier.

UK Budget Briefing

Broadly speaking, people here are disappointed over its lack of scope and ambition.

This is unfair, for the West is in decline and in economic terms ~ with Mrs Thatcher ever prone to comparing it to a domestic economy ~ countries like the UK could be compared to a film-star past their best, with a maxed-out credit card. In my time I have marvelled in the past at how cheap the living was and how slow the trains; in Poland I've lived and worked and seen why the best part of a million Poles moved here to work and earn from the 1990s on... until now, with both economies striding ahead in comparison to ours.

In either case, those considered to be among the architects of each turnaround do agree that ~ absent a crisis ~ such developments are impossible, principally when it comes to selling them to the electorate. Accordingly in bloated economies like those of the US and UK, instead what transpires is an expansion of regulated complexity of the sort all civilisations tend to suffer prior to their collapse. 

The US is shielded by dint of manufacture and export, which invariably is a way out of crisis; people rarely realising that software that we use provided invariably by the 'tech bros' we are all asked to loathe is itself a form of manufacture. What it mainly benefits from is the ease of distribution.

Accordingly the UK is in hoc like the alco with the credit card bill: to the banks in the form of the bond markets, which determine those economies appearing to be those with the least credit risk. Accordingly politicians are unable to do anything but tinker and regulate in an effort to appear more relevant among a public no longer seeing them as such.

Dominic Cummings, one of the best politicians who never was, puts this down to the fact that two things which affect public service as such are firstly the fact that those with talent now go elsewhere ~ where they can make more of a difference ~ beside the fact that ministers used to bear responsibility for their actions whereas now they don't... generally they are shuffled on to another post.

Poland itself was privatised on a scale that would have delighted Mrs Thatcher, and it has clearly worked, although as the current PM proved close by in Manchester it generally requires talent in both private and public spheres. Outright capitalism will not work absent that public service interest ~ as the trust cases in the US itself has so often proven ~ but then neither does an outright public sector.

Probably the foremost reason in the case of the latter is that throughout the world people in national or local government service are effectively unable to be fired no matter how piss-poor their performance ~ and I'm thinking of the property manager in West Lancs local council here, to take it from the general to the particular. It's for this reason that even in China the most difficult academic tests (in truth, mostly of rote-learning) are accrued to entry into the civil service: a role popularly called the 'iron rice-bowl' to reflect how it is viewed as a job for life.

But how does any of this relate to drones? Well as Cummings puts it to that same parliamentary committee, the reason defence procurement here isn't all it could be is that information from Ukraine on how wars are won nowadays is suppressed by a Civil Service largely devoid of talent so as to protect ingrained interests in what little remains of the UK's defence capability ~ principally BAE Systems for the occasions we don't buy off-the-shelf from the US.

Here's an interesting thing though. I've been ghosted by the NWAA (as by most, in fairness) or the NorthWest Aerospace Alliance... although I was largely there in the first place for the Christmas ball. You have to wonder whether this would be down to its principal source of funding and credibility. Which would probably be the local employer, BAE Systems.

Ed. Well he's got that off his chest, hasn't he?

Engine Out Drill

We've seen from among these posts how there have been steam locomotives which served a century with what was once British Railways, and how the venerable B-52 bomber is closing on that tenure with an alloy frame in place of steel. Now however in a world devoted to preserving the planet as best we can, we're scrapping airliners faster than you'd trade your car.

The explosion of civil aviation that I myself was a part of over in China is combined in a perfect storm with a lack of shop-floor technicians to produce a shortage of jet engines worldwide. It in turn means that new aircraft rolled off the production line might not go into service, but be flown to where its engines can be removed so as to be fitted to another to keep it flying.

On the other hand, when airlines go bust airframes as little as a few years old that ironically bear the name 'Neo' are knocked down for maybe five million dollars once shorn of their motive power: at which rate we'll all be able to afford glamping pods from fuselages.

Aluminium is known as the energy metal for the electrical energy required to smelt it, and in the way carbon emitted by making an EV outweighs that ever likely to be emitted by your banger ~ carbon stemming from a cycle of 'make-it-and-break-it' likely outweighs the ecological benefit from those more efficient engines.

It's a mad mad mad mad world... but love it while it lasts.

Watch petrol-heads on YouTube and you'll soon learn how green tick-boxes require more power from smaller auto-engines than ever, in turn making them decidedly life-limited, prone to failure and difficult to maintain ~ a situation replicated in the newest generation of geared and super-sized jet engines that are subject to more recalls than ever. 

Big Mach

Kitchens by Wren, aircraft by Bath university

Part of my off-and-on series about young people doing great things in Great Britain, these ones are trying to break the world record for fastest jet-powered RC aircraft, qualifying that with '3-D printed' because there must have been military drones or else test-programs involving radio-controlled jets capable of such speeds? One that springs to mind would be the 707 crashed in order to test a non-inflammable fuel which turned out to be as flammable as ever... there's a crash-test by NASA in the picture below, which might actually be it.

The first flight of the latest (and final) prototype achieved speeds approaching 300 m.p.h. with 550 m.p.h being the target. A problem they have is finding a test-range large enough, for a turning radius for any size of aircraft depends only on speed. Keeping this one-metre model in sight has therefore imposed G-forces (11) that few pilots will ever suffer, bending the prototype wings beyond expectation.

They started as we do nowadays with electric power in the form of ducted fans prior stepping up via turbines to 300 Newtons. I don't like Newtons, so we'll call it 65 pounds of thrust. In context this means the model will likely achieve unity of thrust and weight and vertical climb capability. Piloted aircraft took fifty years to do it (the Starfighter but the F-15 Eagle the first regular), then it shows what drones combined with both modern material and modern people can do.

So keep calm, and carry on popping whatever pills you're on.

707s and steel fences proven by NASA not to mix

H.U.G.E. #18

Here's the remaining panel that I've extracted from one of the two sheets of backer-board and this is as good a place as any, where it serves five different functions:

(1)    It deflects the efflux from the propellers to provide for lift in ground-effect;

(2)    It provides a foot-rest for cases where a seat is provided on the centre-deck;

(3)    It supports the two pontoons to either side that support the hydroskis in turn;

(4)    It streamlines fuel-tanks or battery-packs installed beneath the centre-deck;

(5)    It provides for extra buoyancy at the forward end of the craft.

H.U.G.E. #17

Aircraft wings include hard points to support accessories like missiles or drop-tanks ~ which we don't need here ~ but to support the motors I use a span-wise timber spar attached to either end of the lateral spars.

H.U.G.E. #16

Here's the prow I mentioned; normally an extension to the lateral spars but here a splice made from cut-offs.

Those skis could also be mounted at an angle or twisted along their length in order to meet at that triangular hub, but what we have here is as good a start as any and a design that is easy to both draft and build.

Amelia Earhart Found?

Great excitement this week at the prospect of a team from Purdue University having located the pilot's remains in the South Pacific from a satellite image.

'Given what we'd been provided with (inset) it looked a close match. Whilst it turned out to be a tree, the encouraging thing is we've stayed on a tropical island and you've all paid for it.'

H.U.G.E. #15

First impressions, centre-deck could be parked farther aft but who's complaining?

Would also look better with the laterals extended farther forward and brought to a point in the form of a prow... so let's do that.

This would make it about as tall stood on end as me stood on end, which is the sort of thing that I imagine would have appealed to Brunel.

Canopy am pleased with, although it could be a little larger, as it's half a bottle of Prosecco... have to be the magnum next time, I guess.

H.U.G.E. #14

The hub. This is all a bit dull, but then much of life is.

Probably heavier than it need be, as all that is required is a means of drawing the lateral spars together in order to support the upward flexure of the skis, a thinner length of timber altogether likely to suffice.

All however will become apparent in due time.

H.U.G.E. #13

Here's the template on the planking. I've shifted it over by five mil so as not to end the cut at the very corner of the timber and then marked the footprint of the pair of skis before adding the same type of chamfer to the opposite side. All being well we shall be able to put the wedge-shaped off-cuts to good use when it comes to fixing the forward end of the skis.

We could use the one remains square of backer-board for all of this but timber has to be quicker and sturdier. These hubs where lats and skis meet however are ideally suited to 3-D printing in the longer term.

H.U.G.E. #12

What I've done here is chop the lateral spars back to five feet or 1525mm and cut the hydroskis so as to leave an extra four inches (100mm) or so for now, in order to make construction more manageable. Normally I design for zero waste and so it felt like cutting a limb off.

I've drawn one of the lats toward the outer extent of the ski and used that to trace an angle on a length of planking of the same thickness as those lateral spars... else more or less, because this one was kicking around the workshop.

One of those days its raining outside and you feel like doing little or nothing; a form of lethargy that is probably to blame for the fact I foreshortened one of the laterals by around two inches too much. Thus it is that we'll be carrying out repairs to a job that is yet to be finished, although I suspect it was ever thus with boatbuilding.

Maritime Power, Source.

A worthwhile insight into how reliant we are on subsea cables and pipelines.

The first transoceanic cable ~ you may be surprised to read ~ was installed while Queen Victoria was early on in her reign in 1858, following successful installations in the English Channel.

Now a global network delivers oil, gas, electricity and data until such time as it might not, depending on where and when war breaks out in Europe... again. And here's the thing: the UK relies on such cables for somewhere between 95% and 99% of what it uses on the internet.

Upon which, you might have noticed, we rely for just about every aspect of modern life. It's been going on for some time, not just to disrupt everyday living but also it would seem for the value of the scrap metal involved ~ high-voltage DC cables are as thick as your arm.

Increasingly communication cables are buried when laid at shallower depths such as the continental shelf, and duplicated for seamless operation. Beside any number of 'fishing' and 'research' vessels able to drag anchors at such depths in ways more careless than expected, increasingly superpowers are building uncrewed surface and subsea vessels on a tiny scale able to operate at greater depths altogether; echoing developments in the atmosphere above, and beyond in space.

There's likely then to be calls for (a) inexpensive (b) small (c) fast (d) independent watercraft to combat threats both on and beneath the surface, and that rather rules out petrol-powered types in many roles, for unlike electrical craft they are unable to loiter in the sunshine in order to replenish their power supplies.

War's likely to be ~ as they sing in Disneyland ~ a small small small small world.

The ecological damage caused by the current employment of drones is inestimable and the prize for the greatest yet probably goes to Ukraine for monumental release of methane from the Nord 2 pipeline supplying Europe... and for which one among their number is to appear in court in Germany, which largely owned the facility.

H.U.G.E. #11

And this is the way up it will go.

H.U.G.E. #10

Don't know whether you can make that out but to save time I popped a line of glue along the lower edges of mainplane and tail-fins so as to drop the hydroskis on and next day I'll flip it over and filet the edges.

Note how tail assembly, lateral spars and hydroskis all terminate at the same place in order to satisfy one of Colin's golden rules viz. Person or persons building a drone shall ensure it can be stood upright, inverted or on a tail-end for maintenance or for storage at pain of imprisonment or fine not exceeding two-dozen Eccles cakes.

The 80/under-20 Rule

Accident yesterday in Scotland in which two people died ~ the one 80 and the other 16 ~ caught my eye for reason that the first of those numbers resonates: people over the age of sixty-five are responsible for 80% of all heart attacks. As a man, worth knowing too that 70% are suffered by men as against women.

Weather yesterday afternoon out of Glasgow ~ I've been based at the airport and run Ben Lomond northwest of the crash location on a summer's eve ~ looked to be insignificant with practically no cloud reported and twilight some way off.

Sadly I don't pay the premium for after-casts on FlightRadar24 for the Tomahawk ~ again a personal favourite among light aircraft ~ because the altitude data would be telling.

Nonetheless the track some way along the periphery of Loch Lomond looks wholly erratic in itself. Bear in mind too that flying is not a stress-free activity, and is the more likely to raise blood-pressures as and when passengers are involved.

Accordingly it would appear unlikely that the pilot ~ which I'm assuming is the 80-year old as you have to be 17 for the licence ~ would be prone to undertaking any series of steep turns for the fun of it.

(There is a possibility that both were pilots and the younger doing the flying, though it would be from the un-instrumented right seat unless the 80-year old were also an instructor... stay with me on this.)

But one way or another, I would have to guess it's the older of the two flying. Given that, I've had two engines stop on me in single-engined aircraft like this, one fixed with a subsequent restart (having been due to inlet icing) and another ending in a forced landing at Luton Airport.

And nothing much from the aircraft's tracks looks like anything that would explain a partial failure (and likely return to Glasgow), nor what you'd want to do should the engine have failed.

We don't know either where the aircraft was headed, but in visual navigation terms and sat on the left, you're following line features like the edge of Loch Lomond. This is in fact what happens until a drift over the lake and abandonment of progress that had largely pursued straight lines.

There is then always a possibility of a medical turn for the worse resulting in either (a) the pilot continuing with decidedly degraded performance or (b) the pilot having conked out and the 16-year old passenger having to assume the reins.

I've taught people to fly single- and twin-engined light aircraft and jet airliners and what is immediately obvious to anyone doing so is that the uninitiated lose control of direction rather than height in the first instance... note that the recent hijack of a Boeing 737 in the Middle East involved a passenger recovering from the death-dive rather than any pilot, and on the basis of what he'd only seen on TV.

Aircraft tend to be stable in (vertical) pitch but unstable in (horizontal) direction, which is how the Wright Brothers used to crash. Turns in aircraft also demonstrate negative stability in terms of the fact departures from straight and level are inclined to get worse instead of better.

This is compounded by the fact inexperienced pilots finding themselves at a steeper and steeper bank angle and tighter and tighter turn instinctively pull at controls and so inadvertently tighten the turn. At the same time the nose of the aircraft drops and so speed increases, in some cases to point of break-up: it's called a 'spiral dive' and like the stall is what killed any number of the earliest aviators.

But back to my 80/20 rule: if you're under twenty, you really don't want to get into an aircraft with anyone who's turned 80.

Or me for that matter.

H.U.G.E. #9

Here I've bonded the edges of each plane to the lats and added a bead-come-filet to secure in the aftermath. I've no clamps of the right size and have thus used ballast to hold the lats in place because I've used them elsewhere and they've retained the bend they had in one direction as a consequence.

Note the use of polythene bagging, which is impervious to practically every form of glue and thus prevents us from gluing the craft to the workbench. In times past I've managed to glue builds to the laminate floor of the lounge, which does though lend a Brit Art feel to subsequent dinner parties; in Chelsea there'd be at least one guest prepared to invest and take it home.

There are fast-build methods that involve framing each panel in timber so that parts can be screwed together with no waiting for adhesives to dry, but this model will be used largely to inspire the punters and drop in the bath to see if it floats.

H.U.G.E. #8

We now ask ourselves how far the tailplane need be from the mainplane, a question we've been asking ourselves since the Wright Brothers first moved on from mending punctured inner-tubes.

At times like this I like to go broad-brush or big picture and bear in mind the Skunk Works dictum of it looking right and flying right: I've therefore taken a punt on making the intervening gap the same as the width of each plane viz. 450mm or around 18".

I've always wanted the mainplane to be around the mid-point, and in fact it's one of the easier tick-offs on my before-I-die bucket list. It means that the overall length is going to be around 1.50 metres or five feet, which has a 'golden mean' feel to it and is a proportion I feel that Michelangelo would have aimed at with his own maritime drone.

It also means that ~ all being well ~ it should fit the bath-tub earmarked to become one of the largest hydrostatic test facilities in the North of England and which ~ due the UK government's refusal to finance it ~ lies abandoned in the garage.

Nonetheless if we look at the outline of the world's most successful airliner in the shape of the Airbus 320 ~ one or other variant of which I spent over seven thousand hours of my life in ~ we'll see we're not too far adrift from conventional methodology... the larger A321 pitches the mainplane more centrally again.

 

Footnote

Ed. He's left the building, dear reader, and too late to spot his humble blog exceeds a million views. Every night now he'll lie in bed, the brightest colours filling his head, because a million views are keeping him awake. And it's all thanks to you, the bots.

H.U.G.E. #7

Here's our second sub-assembly and as artist and all-round Ozzie entertainer Rolf Harris used to say before being arrested for paedophilia, 'D'ya see what it is yet?'.

Now however we've happily to wait for this to set; which we didn't do long enough last time, did we Gromit?

Accordingly it's time for a glass of Chianti and somebody's liver.

Good-night Teddy, good-night readers! 

H.U.G.E. #6

Here's the first sub-assembly, joined by the time-honoured method of a squeeze of Stixall where the pontoons meet the surface of the airfoil ~ with a gentle squeeze so it appears from the sides like the filling of a Victoria Sponge ~ and then a filet to one side with another to follow later. I've emailed Bake Off judge Nigella Lawson to ask if she'd like to give my pontoons a gentle squeeze, but am yet to receive a reply. 

H.U.G.E. #5

Thought we forgot about boats, didn't you, but have I ever let you down? (Ed. Yes).

Nonetheless you will see here how we can turn seven laminated panels into a flying machine, and as Elon Musk commented upon revealing his latest roadster, without the benefit of AI.

Took two sheets of half-inch backer-board here that I already took from a four-by-two (600mm by 1200mm) to reduce its scale to manageable proportions... aim being to produce a pattern that is able to be doubled or halved in size at will. These two sheets therefore measure 1' by 2' (300 x 600mm) from the off.

The upper sheet is divided between a wing and one of the pontoons or floats; and the lower between tail-plane and two uprights. The seventh panel, already the subject of a movie by director Akira Kurosawa, is essentially a spare that can be dedicated to a variety of add-ons, but likely here to form the surface of a ram-wing.

A ram-wing is not a part of a flying goat so much as a surface intended to assist in the launch of wing-in-ground-effect types of aircraft, incidentally.

Now let's assemble these into modules that we'd recognise from any flying machine. 

Ed. The nomenclature HUGE, which stood for Hilton's Universal Ground Effect, is to be replaced on grounds it's stupid... but we'll run with it through completion.

Unhinged

I recently abandoned a build because in retrospect the adhesive simply hadn't set, yet I now find it is able to produce a hinged joint between say horizontal deck and pontoon in various of my designs in maritime dronery.

Which is a remarkable finding in itself, producing the possibility of builds with fewer hand-tools and accessories than ever.

I have produced a series of moving pictures to demonstrate quite how, doing so in the style of celebrated mime-artist Marcel Marceau. I did have white cotton gloves once but not any more, though I feel this barely detracts from the performance.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the hingeless hinge:

Ed. Hi-res versions are available to collectors on subscription, and the adhesive in question was 'Stixall', doubtless named after Stixall Priory in Yorkshire.

Tesla Roadstar

You'd expect a reflection here, and you're not wrong, but as ever the Edison of our day has proven the seeming impossible to be possible. The jets that provide such a precise control and skull-rattling acceleration however are compressed-air thrusters of the sort used to manoeuvre spaceships. And as he's already returned stages of a rocket to Earth and set them down like a pencil on end, in some ways this is rather less impressive than that.

It also begs the question as to who aside from Bond would want to find themselves fifty feet up and upside down in a car reliant on jets that ~ like jets everywhere ~ would be likely to fail just when needed most.

The acceleration they provide too from air stored within carbon-fibre tanks may also not be the first implementation of the kind.

I recall a couple of teens in the 'States found a section of disused railroad running to a mine some way distant, and mounted a car on it with wheels adapted to suit and a set of JATO bottles normally used to launch C-130 Hercules off short stretches of ground.

The results suitably spectacular ~ sufficient to persuade them never to try it again.

Working on jet-assisted take-off bottles for Suzuki's Jimny aftermarket myself and can't wait to find myself up against a Roadster at the lights.

One in a Series of Two

Many of you I know will have enjoyed our series 'Clouds you can spot from the A1' and these delightful flying saucers are 'lenticels' that form when standing waves in the atmosphere break briefly through the dew point. They form in the lee of high ground ~ here to the East of the Pennine Hills ~ the waves propelling them often used by glider pilots to break world altitude records that put airliners to shame.

Re: Bus

I rarely make recommendations but will in the case of Jonn Ellidge's 31 Inventions that Built our World. It features those that don't move: like walls, windows, sewers or central-heating systems that you can happily skip in order to concentrate on the section involving things that do in the form of transportation.

He reminds us how ~ in an effort to get us all to pay more for services that are less effective than ever ~ Margaret Thatcher privatised bus services along with all else. Except in the capital, ironically, where they function well and are well patronised as they have ever been.

I may have said so elsewhere, but when my uni girlfriend's mother told us how an Arab gentleman on the tube had offered to take her back to Arabia with him to his life of luxury, her husband responded with 'What were you doing on the tube when I've told you the buses are cheaper?'.

But privatisation meant everywhere else that competing companies eschewed those less profitable routes for the profitable, where a series of largely empty buses from different companies would race each other down streets in search of profit on top of the subsidies already paid to them by local councils.

As a result, outside of London these behemoths lumber around with three old ladies on board, blocking the road at intervals and enlarging the potholes whilst adding to the carbon surplus in spades. My free pass I've used just three times, largely as the buses stop running around seven in the evening; whilst in London night services are provided for revellers, nobody is expecting revellers in Ormskirk at best of times.

Some stuff benefits from competition, like cars, so that you get BMWs instead of the Trabant. On the other hand, people with Trabants say they were entirely happy with them... which suggests that competition may work for cars, but not always in ways we'd expect for the people inside.

I, KEA.

In fact the company's doing it themselves nowadays, here featuring the interior of their LACK side-table that at just £10 lacks nothing really. Although it's in tune with what Sam Altman said recently about us needing to do more with less... which is all I'm trying to do with boats, really. Have to give it a name to suit tho: I like SPLODJ.

Hexed

What's this?

(a)    a bee-hive

(b)    a flat-panel radar

(c)    an IKEA table-top

What is it strongest in?

(a)    torsion

(b)    tension

(c)    compression

Congratulations, and welcome to TELEDRONE.