The possibilities of variable blade Quadcopters

NASA’s Dragonfly mission uses Quadcopter technology but they are not variable blade. If each blade has an independent motor as well as ability to tilt blade angle independently this would enhance mission capabilities. Most quadcopters that are variable blade alter all 4 blades simultaneously and in an identical manner.  So far there are no commercial drones that have variable blade function for each motor and blade pair. This is a mistake because it’s omitting efficiencies that can be gain at various altitude and atmospheric pressures/densities for all kinds of aerodynamic flight maneuvers.

Man made Saucer

UPDATE:

The High Altitude Platform Station also has applications for efficient access into orbit by reducing fuel mass requirements by 5-10%.

Below are some conceptual images of the station close to the surface of Antarctica to facilitate an expedition:

 

 

A modern ordinary shaped airship can still play a role in the future for faster more agile missions.

Saucer Shaped HAPs (High Altitude Platform Station

Update: Recently Hamas attacked Israel by overwhelming the Iron Dome System, here if the Iron Beam laser sister to Iron Dome was deployed on an airship such as the Russian variant mentioned below it would have enhanced the range and potency of the weapon while being out of range of Hamas’s anti air defenses.

 

Russian made 600 ton lifter.

Notice the cockpit is underneath and has 360 view facing downward with 45 deg angle windows much like the hindenburg did on the passenger cabin but unlike it , this uses helium. Not made to get as high as possible but with 600 ton of useful payload we imagine it can get to the stratosphere with reduced payload.
 

 

Uses:

  1. Above Cloud Telescope Array for Astronomy, with multiple ships the face of the Earth is the light collecting limit.
  2. Above Cloud Starshot/Light Sail Laser for interstellar light sail powered probes
  3. Ground/Air/Sea Tracking photometer for science and surveillance. For examples: Israeli ballistic missile defense as well as surveillance of Palestinian territories, Scientific expeditions to Antarctica and South America in the safety and comfort of a pressurised cabin.
  4. Floating Aircraft Carrier
  5. Floating Drone Carrier
  6. Floating Battleship with munitions and anti air defences normally used on Navy Marine vessels such as radar guided air cannons and laser defense systems.
  7. Orbital/sub-orbital launch platform to assist smaller rockets to reach space.
  8. Floating Hotel
  9. Floating Research Lab for low Air Pressure studies such as simulating Martian pressure altitudes.
  10. Anti Ballistic Missile Platform with a floating phased radar array.
  11. Microwave transmission of energy to the surface from solar.
  12. Communications relay to replace communications satellites in geostationary orbit.
AI analysis
ChatGPT:

Designing a rigid airship in the shape of a saucer or disc has several potential advantages, although it’s important to note that this concept hasn’t been widely pursued or proven in practice. Here are some theoretical advantages of such a design:

  1. Aerodynamic Efficiency: The saucer or disc shape could potentially offer better aerodynamic efficiency compared to traditional airship designs. The streamlined shape might reduce drag and turbulence, allowing for smoother and more efficient flight through the air.
  2. Stability: The disc shape could provide inherent stability due to its wide base and potentially lower center of gravity. This stability could make it easier to control and maneuver, especially in challenging weather conditions.
  3. Lift Efficiency: The saucer shape could distribute lift more evenly across the entire bottom surface, potentially leading to better lift efficiency. This could result in improved payload capacity and longer flight endurance.
  4. Omni-Directional Maneuverability: A saucer-shaped airship might have the ability to rotate and maneuver in any direction more easily than traditional airships. This could be advantageous for tasks that require precise positioning or sudden changes in direction.
  5. Visibility: The flat, circular design could provide better visibility from the central control or observation area, which could be situated on the upper surface of the saucer.
  6. Novelty and Attention: A saucer-shaped airship would undoubtedly attract attention due to its unique design, which could be advantageous for promotional purposes, advertising, or special events.
  7. Potential Stealth: Depending on the construction materials and design features, a saucer-shaped airship might have reduced radar cross-section and acoustic signature, potentially offering some degree of stealthiness.

However, it’s important to consider the challenges and practical limitations associated with designing and operating such a craft:

  1. Structural Challenges: Creating a rigid airship in the shape of a saucer would present significant engineering challenges. The structure would need to withstand both internal and external forces, including the pressure differential between the inside and outside of the craft.
  2. Balancing and Stability: Achieving proper balance and stability in a saucer-shaped airship could be complex, as the weight distribution would need to be carefully managed to prevent tipping or instability.
  3. Propulsion and Control: Developing effective propulsion and control systems for a saucer-shaped airship would require innovative solutions, as traditional methods might not apply as well to this shape.
  4. Landing and Mooring: Landing and mooring a saucer-shaped airship could be more challenging than with conventional airship designs due to the unique shape and potential difficulty in maintaining stability during ground operations.
  5. Manufacturing and Cost: Constructing a saucer-shaped airship would likely involve specialized manufacturing processes, which could be expensive and technically demanding.

Overall, while a saucer-shaped rigid airship presents interesting theoretical advantages, the practical challenges and complexities of design, engineering, and operation would need to be thoroughly addressed for such a concept to become a viable reality. As of my last update in September 2021, there have been no widely known successful attempts to create operational saucer-shaped airships.

Historical Reference:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-altitude_platform_station

Cube Shaped interstellar spacecraft – Dual Stage Ion Drives

 

Dual Stage Ion Drives – New Mars Forums Discussions:
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=10491

UPDATE:

The following article makes a big case to building a hydrogen based ion drive:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/43389/have-light-gases-like-hydrogen-or-helium-been-explored-for-ion-propulsion

 

There are signs of technology suppression by global powers of the dual grid 2 stage ion drive technology that was being jointly developed between ESA and Australia. The lead scientist has mysteriously passed away over suspicious circumstances just when the team was making head way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-Stage_4-Grid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor

The numbers supplied by wikipedia:

Power: 250kW

Isp: 19,000s

Diameter: 2.5m

The theoretical scaled up numbers above if valid would mean significant capabilities for space travel in the future. I came up with a cubic shape configuration for an interstellar space craft to maximize the surface area of any ion drive exhaust either as a single gigantic engine or a grid array of smaller units. Solar would also be able to take advantage of the nature of the cube to maximize solar radiation intake to maximize solar power.

These numbers would mean that a space craft such as my design only 17m by 17m with conservative numbers for a gigawatt reactor would be able to get to Mars in weeks and Titan in months. The greatest challenge to this design would be to minimize the weight of a 2.5gigawatt reactor and make it be 5-10 tons. This is the greatest challenge. The surface sides of the cube will be able to house panels that can efficiently radiate the reactor waste heat.

Alternatively we can completely eliminate the reactor and just rely on solar which definitely will make this endeavor possible for Mars alone. Without the reactor the entire ship will be 5-10 tons lighter boosting it’s acceleration capabilities and bringing it’s entire mass down to 10 tons.

 

Lighter than air building 30km height

I had this crazy idea that’s been kicking around in my head for years now of building that is half building and half airship. Ideally it would be flooded with helium which would make it a perfect candidate in the middle east where mega projects are a norm there and helium is in abundant supply. However if we use hydrogen balloons in a room filled with an inert gas such as helium or nitrogen(which is slightly lighter than air, we can then eliminate the risk of explosion. Ignore the red dot, it’s just a non scaled reference marker.

The cylindrical shape and the large 2.5 km radius will gently deflect winds. There is a second design with a hollow center that will allow the launch of small rockets to escape velocity at 11km/s using compressed air gas and maglev combo.

People will ideally live in the sides of this cylindrical super structure (marked in green) but it is possible for them to dwell further in where the upper atmosphere of the cavity is nitrogen/helium.

 

Update: Floating Horizontal Structure Buildings for the purpose of cheap low Earth orbit access without a space-elevator.

THE SPACE PLANE CORPORATION UPDATE

Orbiter Re-entry Path

We ran the CFD from Mach 0 – 25 and altitudes 0 – 105 km and plan to do ascent and reentry optimization next.  We are planning no greater than 20 degrees to stay stable.

Meshmixer loads the STL with colors and is a tiny installation compared to Blender. Blender only shows the colors on the PLY import, which is an even bigger file than the STL with colors embedded.

https://meshmixer.com/

We uploaded the PLY file and added it to the ‘Files’ page with HTTP instruction to download rather than open the file.

http://space-plane.org/files.htm

With a simple switch in Blender you can display STL in color but it doesnt understand Vertex Color when loading STL so we use a PLY file for that.

NUKE MARS 2.0 – The clean way to do it.

SUMMARY: DEFLECT A COMET TO HIT MAR’S ICE CAPS TO REPLENISH MARTIAN ATMOSPHERE

 

 

I at first had this idea of creating a deep enough crater on Mars by deflecting a comet such as Halley’s Comet which has a large enough speed (70km/s) with sufficient kinetic energy to transfer millions of Tzar bomb nukes equivelant to excavate the crust 55km deep so that the bottom of it will sustain 1 bar of atmospheric preassure. This will make living on Mars so much easier when people can just walk around with scuba tanks or grow plants to grow their own oxygen. But this will only be a micro climate habitable zone of only a few thousand acres(at least 6,000 acres).

I also then realized that the comet has so much energy that we might as well deflect it in such a way so that it hits one of the ice caps on the poles of Mars. What this will do instead is transfer all that kinetic energy to the existing ice caps there thus vapourizing and melting most of it so that the atmosphere will be replenished. This would eliminate the need for the Crater which only terraforms a tiny bit of real estate on the planet at the bottom of a crater. Instead we can use the energy to melt the existing ice caps instead of excavation. Also the comet it self will have material to pass on to the new atmosphere to be replenished. There is sufficient CO2 (carbon dioxide) to keep the planet warm afterwards to prevent the new atmosphere from freezing back.

Also we don’t need a new magnetic field in our lifetimee as the degredation of the Martian atmosphere takes millions of years. Using a comet instead of conventional nukes means we don’t suffer from radioactive fallout. This is clean energy that we use to melt the ice. However we will need to take a second look at the 1950’s Orion Program of using nukes to propel a spacecraft because that’s the order of magnitude in ISP we need to shift the trajectory of a comet such as Halley’s to hit Mars. We have studied how Shoemaker Levy hit Jupiter.

We can perhaps consider recreating the event with another comet, shift it’s trajectory, break it up and terraform the Red Planet. This is basicly Elon Musk’s idea of nuking Mars without nukes but instead a comet that we artificially deflect. But we will still need nukes, just H-Bombs used to do the deflecting on a pusher plate on the Orion themed pusher space-ship.

UPDATE:

Above: Advanced concept of using an artificially generated magnetic field to absorb the momentum of a nuclear explosion from an H-Bomb munition encased in matter designed to turn into electrically charged ion plasma on detonation. If turned around it can fire those nukes at a comet to push it by vapourizing the ice and using it as propellant.

At first I thought we will need to redesign the Orion Spaceship to be a sort of a tug/pusher vessel. After recent calculations I have come to the conclusion that this won’t work. There simply isnt enough propellant to push upon the comet. What we need are nuclear missiles to vapourize ice. The vapor will do the pushing after being energized with the yield of 100 megatons from a modified Tzar bomb with uranium tertiary layer. The standard Tzar bomb doesnt have this and is only 50 megaton, but the updgrades will be easy to implement, the Soviets decided 50 megatons was sufficient to scare NATO with their new terror weapon.

 

With said 100 megaton 27 metric ton nuclear missile warheads we can then nuke the icy portions of a comet from a distance using the vapourized ice as propellant to boost thrust and Isp to move the comet. Each 100 megaton nuke can nudge a comet such as Halley’s comet by 11m/s or a 1% fragment of it by 1,100m/s (1.1km/s). This is enough to shift a comet trajectory significantly if done at apogee where it is slowest, in the case of Halley’s only 900m/s (0.9km/s). This is called a Hohmann Transfer where you circularize a highly eliptical orbit.

 

Further optimizations to this idea is to hollow out nozzels in the comet so that subsequent sequential nuking will be from inside a cavity to force the vapor out in a single direction rather than being spread out. This will boost energy coupling from 40 to 80%.

With just 27 100 megaton Tzar bombs we can shift Halley’s comet in such a way that it will impact Mercury should we wish to do so. However hitting Mars will require a different comet in a more favourable orbit such as Comet Siding Spring which almost hit Mars that it’s tail plume ionized the atmosphere of Mars upon impact.

Everything below this line is the history of my train of thought to reach my final conclusion of how we shoud Occupy Mars.

====================================

Micro Climate Crater – New Mars Fourms Discussion:
https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?pid=221396#p221396

UPDATE:

My numbers are in this spreadsheet CRATER.xls

Update: I have to delay the paper for 2025 due to commitment for space-plane.org. Also if 100% of the comet is deflected to strike the ice-caps, the entire planet will be below the Armstrong Limit. Maybe only to 0.5 bars at datum but that’s enough to do away with suits and just use scubadiving tanks and regulators. However the comet should break up and if not we should break it up before impacting the ice caps of Mars so that there is minimal deformation to the planet’s pole. That is if our goal is no longer the crater but the entire planet to be under the Armstrong limit.

Original Microclimate Crater Article:

After being invited to write a white paper for the Mars 2024 Convension by Dr Robert Zubrin, I have refined my numbers and made interesting discoveries: First of all only 1% of the mass of Halley’s comet is needed to create this crater according to the ISALE crater simulations formula. That means 2cubic km from 220cubic km from Halley’s is all that is needed at 70km/s perigee speed to impact the Martian North Pole. The high speed of the comet means only 1% of it’s comet material is needed to blow a hole 55km deep for our human needs of 1 bar of atmospheric preassure. We don’t need to destroy all of the comet, just 1% of it. I have to confirm if just the ice part of the comet is enough or if we will need the rocky component instead from the comet. If ice will surfice, it makes our job easier to just laser off the portion we need with a gigawatt powered laser that is designed to vaporize off ice in space. But even achieving that I also learned that we need Nuclear Pulse Detonation Propulsion to shift that mass over in any meaningful way to hit Mars in a reasonable timeframe. Good news is the science is from the 50’s, bad news is we will need to convince the environmentalists that this is ok to use hydrogen bombs to move 1 % of a comet to hit Mars.

After chatting with Chat GBT it turns out that the best solution is to alter the idea below to create the crater on a pole on Mars to limit the effects non globally and also to strike the planet while it’s on the far side of the sun so that this plan does not panic the human race into hoping the comet does not miss Mars and hit Earth if it’s slightly off-course.

Results should look something like this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korolev_%28Martian_crater%29

====================================================

According to our calculations Martian Scale Height of 11.1km means that we are only 30km away from reaching 0.7 bars of air pressure from the Northern Basin or Hellas Planitia. Can we deflect a comet or more to the same spot on such an elevation on Mars to excavate 30km? Then the water from the comet can produce a liquid water lake for us since it will be within the Armstrong Limit now and we can introduce algae and plant life in cheap greenhouses to slowly terraform Mars as a micro climate via photosynthesis to convert the CO2 to O2 slowly. The comet the size of Hailey’s would also contribute 1% to the Martian atmosphere with gas. While negilgible on it’s own if this becomes a regular occurance, 100 comet strikes will double the Martian atmospheric pressure and air density. This also means the future Micro Climate Craters can gradually be shallower and shallower eventually only needing to be 15km deep in the future.

Could we deflect enough comets to excavate 30km from the Northern Basin where it’s-7km from the datum? Or maybe Hellas Planitia. We could settle at the bottom of such a cavity and use airships for transportation without risk of explosion in the CO2 atmosphere, we could also live without the need of airlocks at our doors to maintain an air pressure bubble within the Armstrong Limit and we will have supply of drinking soda water and water for rocket fuel via electrolysis producing both breathable oxygen gas as well as hydrogen for rocket fuel and airships. We wont need full pressure space suits just flimsy stratapause type ones.