This is rubbish. 1 kilowatt of electricity to accelerate a 1,000 kg mass at 0.66g for as long as the electricity remains on. That would mean a portable 1kw diesel generator such as you could buy out of the local hardware store could propel a car sized spacecraft to ridiculous velocities. 4 Hours of thrusting for example (the wee tank on those things lasts a few hours generally) would produce about 93 km/sec, enough to reach the moon in about an hour and mars in about a week. This is enough to see that the thing is bs. The amount of diesel in the tank of a portable generator doesn't contain the energy to do even a fraction of one percent of this work. Even if a magic device capable of 100% conversion of electricity to force were devised, 1kw still wouldn't be anywhere near enough.
Yes, there's something wrong there. Either with the report of 30kN of thrust from 1kW of power or my calculation. Or both. Edit: I just looked up the GE J85 jet engine for comparison...it's got 22kN of thrust. There's NO WAY that's going to come from 1kW of energy.
I think when I read parts of the paper, it said that this ridiculously high amount of thrust was only static thrust, i.e. when none of the thrust is converted into kinetic energy of the vehicle. But I don't care enough to look it up again.
But the guy from Nigeria who emailed me about this swore up and down that it was real, and if I'd just send him a little seed money I could get rich.
Um... yeah. Nacelle. The word "nacelle" doesn't automagically mean exclusively these things: Dunno what you're ing about except that maybe you didn't know that.
The technology for flying cars has been around for decades. However TPTB have a vested interest in keeping private civilian aviation from going mass-market.
TPTB have a vested interest in keeping everyone out of flying cars for reasons other then money. #1 People can barely drive in two dimensions and you want to add a third? #2 People barely take care of their cars and you want them to have engine failure at any altitude? #3 People can barely follow the rules of the road and you think they will follow the rules in the sky? Until flying cars can fly themselves by computer there will not be any mass exodus for flying cars. And that's a good thing.
I can just picture the shrill bitchery. "I can use my cell phone while I fly my car if I wanna! it's no worse than changing the radio station! Stop interfering with my freedom! "
I always point out that the "zomg you wanna add a third dimension and people can hardly drive as it is" thing is overblown because it ignores the fact that flying cars have orders of magnitude more "personal space". Roads consist of extremely narrow ribbons of space within one two-dimensional plane, carrying vehicles in opposite directions at extreme proximity, if one were to apply aeronautical standards. Cars passing on the highway are closer than planes in formation flight by professional air display teams. The great majority of the space in the 2-d plane is not taken up by roads, but by buildings, industry, parks, fields, or other terrain that is of no use to vehicles. In the air, that's removed. The entirety of any given 2d plane is available to vehicular traffic. Already you've got a great expansion in vehicular personal space. But this is combined with the fact that there are thousands of 2d planes stacked on top of eachother, each with its entirety open to the aerial vehicle. Even with idiotic drivers, statistically mid-airs should be a lot less common than road collisions, if there was a flying car for every surface car out there now. Obviously this logic breaks down a bit in urban areas, where, due to the tight proximity of the ground points that people are trying to get to and from, there would be a lot of closely spaced traffic. Particularly in the first few hundred feet above the ground. Anyway, getting away from that; if you ask me the real reason TPTP don't want large scale private civilian aviation has less to do with safety or money, and more to do with the game changing effect on government - citizen relations. Gov'ts would have much much less control over movement. Aside from fuel range as a limiting factor, rivers, lakes and seas would not be the barriers to travel they are today. It would also be much much harder to hide things you didn't want seen from prying eyes. Walls and fences would be obsolete as barriers. This goes for personal privacy as well, of course. Sunbathing in the buff in your secluded back garden would be a thing of the past, with people passing over in their flying cars gawking at you... yeah.
Maybe less common, but a mid-air collision means you've very likely got some fuel-soaked wreckage falling from the fucking sky, which I personally consider more of a problem than a mangled honda on the side of the road.
Hmm I see what you mean. I guess it could be a bit unnerving lying in bed at night not knowing if some boy racer was about to mash into his friend a thousand feet above and come plunging through your ceiling.
No fucking teenagers piloting flying cars. Not ever. That's the kind of shit I'd become a mass murderer just to prevent.
I suspect that when (if) flying cars become a reality, they will be largely automated. They will operate in skylanes where there are large horizontal and vertical separations between vehicles. Collisions will be a non-occurance. The technology for flying cars does NOT really exist right now. People have made cars that can fly like airplanes, and airplanes that can be driven like cars, but none of these are workable. The vehicle has to be capable of vertical take-off and landing to be useful in an urban setting. I wonder if pulse-jets might be an option for the future...presuming, of course, something could be done about the god-awful amount of noise they make...
And you'd of course be absolutely wrong. As usual. Do you think they will allow cars to just fly anywhere they want? It would be mass chaos. No you will have "sky lanes" that you will have to adhere to. Going north? Follow this "sky lane" and do not deviate from the lane. Changing from north to west? Follow the procedures for getting out of the north sky lane and into the west one. They will not be allowing people to fly over people's houses or businesses. There won't be more personal space. And you destroy the upper argument with this one. Thanks for doing all the work. Oh they will figure a way to keep you away from the government secrets. They already do it for spy satellites. And again until the technology is there no one is going to have flying cars. You can try and make excuses all you want but the technology for automated flying cars not to mention the flying cars themselves don't exist and probably won't for a very long time unless we have a miracle breakthrough.
The boys at NASA tested it and while they didn't get the numbers the Chinese did, they got enough to warrant pursuing the technology. More at the link.
From the abstract: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140006052 That suggests very very strongly to me that they are overlooking some conventional factor which is producing their small results.
Hopefully, the NASA guys are as smart as we imagine they are and have eliminated any external cause, but, I agree with you, this seems like they may be overlooking something. A few micronewtons is not a great deal of thrust.
