The logistics of three dimensional electric flight within cities.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4240578]

Yesterday's flying car thread went fairly well and got me thinking more about the problem. From a fuel consumption standpoint it's uneconomical, or at least so one of you claimed, even though helicopter taxi services for the wealthy are common in big cities.

But if what we're after is not long distance flight, but short hop commutes in a sprawling three dimensional city environment, wouldn't an electric craft suffice? Provided batteries that charge in ten minutes or less (already achievable with lithium titanate) short flights of fifteen minutes or less would be possible, from helipad to helipad mounted on the sides or roofs of skyscrapers, with a turnaround time fast enough to make the concept practical.

Electric airplanes and even helicopters are already a reality, like the Pipstrel, Yuneec and electraflyer. They boast between two and three hours flight time and are intended mainly to be used to train student pilots, as the fuel and maintinence savings for an airplane that is flown every day add up quickly and make for a much faster return on investment than electric cars. (One model even comes with a solar hangar for charging) However, I used the figure given for the Sikorsky electric helicopter to estimate flight time for an electric ducted fan VTOL:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD8TfjDMYT0

[Anonymous No.4240596]

>short flights of fifteen minutes or less would be possible
with power consumption? you'd melt and wear out the batteries relatively quickly.

>Electric airplanes and even helicopters are already a reality, like the Pipstrel, Yuneec and electraflyer. They boast between two and three hours flight time and are intended mainly to be used to train student pilots, as the fuel and maintinence savings for an airplane that is flown every day add up quickly and make for a much faster return on investment than electric cars.
the flight time is grossly over exaggerated. the same issue with decaying batteries is present here. it isn't practical. why another step through the conversion of energy?

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4240602]

Putting the props inside of a shroud solves one of the big problems of navigating in a city; The potential to mangle your prop and crash if you so much as brush against a building. With ducted fans, all that happens is a scraped paint job.

But what happens if you have lots of these things buzzing around? How do you manage them all intelligently so that there are no collisions? I think the best proposition would be a motion capture style tracking system of the sort used today for coordinating quadrotors:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-dkonAXOlQ

If buildings were outfitted with sensor/IR camera/emitter clusters or something similar it would permit, in conjunction with GPS, accelerometers, gyroscopes and altimeters, very precise (down to tiny fractions of a second) control of each craft in relation to every other craft. It seems like the only safe way to do this, imo. Manual control would kick in only in the unlikely event that the navigation network went down and every redundancy failed. On a normal day you'd never touch the controls, just climb in and tell it where you want to go. It would let you know what the wait for a helipad would be and then notify you when you should be ready for takeoff.

[Mad Scientist !!Q11PG81nz2n No.4240612]

>>4240596

>with power consumption? you'd melt and wear out the batteries relatively quickly.

Nope. Where did you get that idea from? You can precisely control the rate of discharge for each battery both in the controller firmware and by how you wire them together, so that no one cell is under a dangerous about of stress. There may be many problems with this idea but that is not one of them.

http://www.gizmag.com/sikorsky-project-firefly/15993/

>the flight time is grossly over exaggerated. the same issue with decaying batteries is present here. it isn't practical. why another step through the conversion of energy?

"Over exaggerated" is redundant. You want just " exaggerated", and no it isn't or they wouldn't have been able to pass NASA's stringent competition requirements:

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2011/10/electric-airplane-wins-1-35-million-prize-from-nasa/

Somehow I doubt they managed to fool NASA. Also, what additional conversion step are you referring to? Grid electricity charges batteries, batteries drive the prop.

[Anonymous No.4240625]

>engineering

>hard science

>2012

[Anonymous No.4240643]

>>4240625
>2012
>ponies
ISHYGDDT

[Anonymous No.4240686]

>>4240643
>>4240625

The cancer killing /sci/.

[Anonymous No.4240698]

>>4240686
>thinks that costanza is not /sci/ culture
clearly babby's first post

[Anonymous No.4240708]

>>4240698
It's /tv/ culture.

[Anonymous No.4240709]

>>4240686

>cancer

>dying from it

>not Jewish and knowing the secret because you have it patented and are sitting on it so you can give it to everyone through fluoride in the water then at maximum population density sell the patent to the pharmaceutical companies for royalties and property on the moon

[EK !EKFQOBUFnQ No.4240711]

>>4240708
>4chan newfag detected
reported enjoy your ban

[EK !EKFQOBUFnQ No.4240716]

>>4240686
are you new here?

[Anonymous No.4240717]

>>4240711

[Anonymous No.4240735]

>>4240717

Reported for meme that isn't GC enjoy your ban.

[EK !EKFQOBUFnQ No.4240740]

>>4240717
you mad? reported for NSFW.

[Anonymous No.4240802]

>Ducted fans
>Battery-electric
>Fifteen minutes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_loading#Power_required

[Anonymous No.4240806]

I'd been thinking of this as a way for orbital solar power stations to beam energy down, using plane chassis as antennas. Planes would be able to fly around without the weight of fuel, carrying a minimal amount in case of satellite power loss, ie, going beneath a cloud.

The trouble is this makes lightning strikes a danger: the chassis is no longer a metal conductor (or faraday cage) to ground, but a resistance. So... yeah, not good.

Limiting power reception to light alone might work, a solar cell receiver could be placed behind a transparent isolator to keep lightning away from circuitry. Power planes with laser light, basically.

A ground based laser would probably be better than an actual satellite anyway.

Or just covering a plane in solar cells, no lasers used, just sunlight. That works too.

[Anonymous No.4240820]

>>4240806
Or we could get serious about solving our energy independence problems and global warming via IFR, LFTR, and other nuclear reactor designs.

[Anonymous No.4240823]

>>4240806
>A ground based laser would probably be better than an actual satellite anyway.
Ya think?

[Anonymous No.4240835]

>>4240823
reported for redditor enjoy you are ban

[Anonymous No.4240842]

>>4240835

Reported because report-jokes are funnier and easier than real jokes. Enjoy your ban.

[Anonymous No.4240844]

>>4240820
A working Thorium reactor will be cheaper, as you basically only need a shovel to get fuel, but Solsat is a serious idea.

[Anonymous No.4243249]

bump.

[Anonymous No.4243290]

>>4240602
Levels of flying, like car lanes but vertical, and possibly coordinated GPS systems.

[Anonymous No.4243321]

Ducted fans are EXCELLENT on small vehicles. They protect the blades and increase performance, stability, and ground-effect height.

also this nigga
<
http://www.hover-bike.com
personal flight vehicles are quite feasible

[Anonymous No.4244353]

Did anyone reply to my mention of blimps in the last thread?

[Anonymous No.4245901]

>>4243321
>They protect the blades
Yes
>and increase performance, stability, and ground-effect height.
Rarely, no, and no.

As a general rule; as soon as your VTOL becomes too large for kinesthetic (weight-shift) control, then ducts simply aren't worth bothering with when you can just increase rotor diameter instead.


Also, if you fools are having visions of these things flying around close together in 3D lanes all stacked right on top of eachother, you can forget it. Mixing wake turbulence with vortex-ring state is a terrible idea.

[Anonymous No.4245909]

>implying putting violent simians into a flying car will keep them from destroying themselves
>implying violent simians won't destroy themselves before flying cars are invented

[Anonymous No.4245917]

>>4245909
>>Before flying cars are invented
Flying cars already exist. The first one was in the 50's, but you had to stop and attach the wings and tail before you could take off.

Newest one I could find with 15 seconds googling is a VTOL jet car
http://static.ddmcdn.com/gif/flying-car-m400.jpg

So they totally exist. They just aren't economically viable yet.

[Anonymous No.4245919]

>>4245917
of course, because economic viability is what's important to violent simians hurling through space on a rock exchanging green pieces of paper

[Anonymous No.4245924]

>>4245919
Violent simians put a men on the moon. You give humanity too little credit.

[Anonymous No.4245926]

>>4245924
violent simians almost blew themselves up trying to go from one rock to another

[Anonymous No.4245927]

>>4245919
Hey, if you wanna blow your life savings on a silly little gimmick aircraft, that's fine with me. Noone's stopping you.

[Anonymous No.4245929]

>>4245926
They made it. 6 times.

[Anonymous No.4245933]

>>4245929
exactly 42 years after human flight was first achieved
it's been another 42 years since then, how far have we come since then?
>having funding cut to spend on more violent simian warfare

[Anonymous No.4245934]

>>4245929
Six outta seven ain't bad.

[Anonymous No.4245937]

>>4245933

[Anonymous No.4245938]

>>4245933
you shut up or I make you

[Anonymous No.4245939]

>>4245938
>violent simian making violent simian threats against violent simians while posting violent simian ancestors

OK, I can't keep it up any longer. What happened to that violent simian guy anyway? Does he still show up and cause a ruckus?

[Anonymous No.4245946]

I missed the other thread, but I'm just not seeing the appeal of flying cars versus conventional methods. Flying cars are amazing, but the alternatives seem better in every way.

[EK !EKFQOBUFnQ No.4245992]

Look, the average joe, although boasting about his skills like he's some Trans-Africa rider, isn't even halfway decent driver, and you mostly concern yourself with two perspectives.

I just don't see a swarm of some mini-copters being piloted by people. Sure, maybe 5% would be able to navigate reasonably well - but that ain't much. I'd say that when such things will be an every-day thing, the constrols will be almost fully automatical (people even lean towards full automatical control of cars, which sucks TBH).