#materials for #flying rockets to #space
on 02026-09-06#Integza #video #toread with a variable #rocket nozzle for #flying.
on 02026-08-24#video #toread about radio-controlled #drones #flying with circular wings
on 02026-08-15Oral legislative history of #GARA and #flying #history. #toread
on 02026-05-05#history of #flying and #GARA: “However, towards the end of the 70s, during the period from 1978 to 1988, industry-wide employment fell by a devastating 65 percent. Aircraft manufacturing overall saw a massive decrease in new aircraft shipments, falling 95 percent (...) between 1983 - 86, Beech Aircraft defended itself against 203 lawsuits, each case costing them an average $530,000 to defend. Interestingly, while researching these cases, the NTSB found that none of the accidents could be attributed to manufacturing and design defects.”
And #Cessna had stopped making single-engine aircraft in 01986.
on 02026-05-05#history of #flying: general aviation manufacturing in #USA peaked in about 01978 at 18000 planes per year, but thereafter collapsed due to product liability, starting to recover after the #GARA of 01994
on 02026-05-05Pancho Barnes was apparently quite the character. #flying #history
on 02026-05-05#news: #Joby is now #flying electric air taxis since Monday
on 02026-04-29#history article claiming that #Goddard’s liquid-fueled rockets didn’t influence the V-2 program in #Germany. #flying
on 02026-04-28retrospective about #Goddard and #flying to #space and the #history of rockets
on 02026-04-28Tsiolkovsky published his rocket equation, $\Delta v = v_{\text{e}} \ln {\frac {m_0}{m_f}} = I_{\text{sp}}g_0 \ln {\frac {m_0}{m_f}}$, for #flying to #space in 01903, though #Goddard and some dude named Herman Oberth derived it independently. #history
on 02026-04-28#PDF scan of the Smithsonian’s orignal publication of #Goddard’s original 01919 rocket #paper “A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes”. The illustrations are much better scanned and the typoography is better than in NASA’s collection. #space #flying #history
on 02026-04-28#PDF with a collection of papers from the #history of #NASA and #flying in #space, including an abridged and poorly reformatted version of #Goddard’s original #paper, with the figures redrawn poorly and the plates omitted, where he seems to be unaware of Tsiolkovsky’s work on the rocket equation.
on 02026-04-28#video about Marshall’s ammonium persulfate as a dry oxidant for #flying. #materials
on 02026-04-27“#Artemis-II Heatshield Concerns” 18 pages. #space #flying
on 02026-04-09#Maciej predicts #Artemis-II might crash tomorrow. “It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?” #space #flying
on 02026-04-09#video #toread on #3D-printing variable-pitch rotors for #flying a large, high-efficiency quadcopter. #manufacturing #drones
on 02026-04-07the solid rocket boosters for #flying to #space that provided most of the #Space-Shuttle’s initial thrust
on 02026-04-06#video #interview with on #Ethan-Thornton of "Mach Industries", a 22-year-old making #weaponry called Viper, Dart, and Stratus, and who thinks that balloons will be the key to future air warfare because of their asymmetry: 100× more costly to shoot down than to put up. He’s the one that took Venom (which he calls Pike) from concept to flight in 71 days. He blames the names on the government. He is mostly talking about wars with “hundreds of thousands” of #flying weapons, perhaps unaware that Ukraine and Russia build millions of #drones per year.
on 02026-04-04Ken Shirriff points out that the #AI #slop claim “#Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway,” is false; it’s less than 1%, and 20% at the beginning of cruise. #flying
on 02026-01-06#AI #slop post about purported #supersonic jet startups #Boom Supersonic, #Astro-Mechanica, and #Hermeus. Falsely claims, “#Concorde burned 52% of its fuel just taxiing down the runway.” #flying
on 02026-01-06#video on #flying a hybrid between an #ekranoplan and a #hydroplane. #toread
on 02025-11-11#Xyla-Foxlin #video on #3D-printing a rocket out of some kind of carbon-fiber-filled filament and #flying it. On her third attempt she broke the sound barrier.
on 02025-09-27#video #toread “100% Blown Wing Powered Airplane” #flying a STOL model
on 02025-09-13#video #toread about nuclear #rockets #flying to #space (44-minute lecture with FEM output)
on 02024-10-17#video purportedly on #flying microscopic robots with invisible batteries (MIT Micro Bots). Video, from "AI Uncovered", is just a compendium of worthless irrelevant stock footage. Plonk.
on 02024-09-24Mike Bell’s #video on #manufacturing the #Guinness winning #Peregreen-2 #flying #drones explains why they wanted inherent stability: so they wouldn’t have to waste differential thrust on stabilization. He explains the batteries were 48V, 12S, 1500mAh × 2, 160C (!!!). To smooth the transparent canopy they printed it from PVA (!!) and misted it with isopropanol for days. Apparently he designed the shape in Blender!
on 02024-07-31#video by #Nicholas-Rehm of dRehmFlight on #manufacturing a #flying ceiling fan nearly five meters in diameter out of insulation foam, Gorilla Glue, pine boards, and plywood, for the aerial combat part of Flite Fest in Ohio. Video sponsor PCBWay made the motor mounts by #sheet-cutting and bending 4mm aluminum plate. He’s using two 16000mAh 22.2-volt 15C battery packs to power its 15kW in 12 730KV Emax motors. He fried two Teensy microcontrollers because the power line to one of the four arms was hooked up backwards. Unsurprisingly it ran out of battery quickly; the battery packs were only rated for 10.7kW, and for under 4 minutes. He probably should have put some skin on his foam, because one of the blades broke lengthwise along a pine board after an impact, which would have been easy to prevent.
on 02024-07-31#video on Luke Bell and Mike Bell #manufacturing #Guinness winning fast #flying #drones called "Peregreen 2", in part by CNC-cutting frame parts out of a carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic sheet (#sheet-cutting). Because streamlining was a top concern, it’s sort of rocket-shaped, which they played with by printing a transparent tail and illuminating it from within. Their fake batteries caught on fire, their motor wires caught on fire, their motor wires desoldered themselves from the ESC, their ESCs caught on fire, their PID control loops went out of control and crashed the drone, their motors turned out to be anemic, rough skin produced excessive drag, etc. But finally they got it to go 133m/s average over 100 meters, 142m/s peak. They were using FPV flying with goggles.
on 02024-07-31#video on how 250g+ #flying #drones need to be registered in Germany and some other countries
on 02024-07-31#video from #Ukraine from three days ago, killing Russian troops with #flying #weaponry. Another “Terra” fundraiser video. This time they’re flying the drones from inside some kind of wooden structure rather than a basement, where they have a butane canister camping stove set up. I think they’re in a trench. Drones with arms made of carbon-fiber tubes again. They’re attacking a similar command-and-control center on the Russian side, in a house with its windows barricaded with sandbags. The first drone, a quadcopter, blows most of the roof off; the second one, a hexcopter, carries a heavier charge, a thermobaric warhead which looks like it weighs close to 5 kg and has tailfins for dropping from a plane. It sets fire to the building. The next drone seems to be carrying an RPG without a fragmentation belt, which they use to attack an IFV (so maybe the armor-piercing HEAT is indeed in play here). They claim the explosion killed all the passengers. The next drone, attacking a squad of three infantrymen on foot, failed to explode on impact, but did explode shortly afterwards, probably killing all three of them with shrapnel. The next drone attacks a lone infantryman, who futilely tries to shoot it down with a rifle. Then they kill another infantryman who was walking slowly because he was wounded. Then they launch another large hexcopter carrying a 3-kg charge to attack a trench; the infantry hear it and flee into the dugout, to no avail. Then there’s another hexcopter with the repurposed thermobaric bomb, which explodes in a trench. They’re apparently driving around Ukraine on the highways in an unarmored van with the door open. #politics
on 02024-07-02#video of Iran’s #Shahed 136 kamikaze drone servomotor. It uses an #STM32 with six power MOSFETs to control a brushless motor and read from an encoder; these motors sell for €20 in Ukraine. There’s a silicone conformal coating to protect the board. It uses a conventional 600μs–2.4ms PWM control signal. Interesting reverse-polarity protection circuit on the ground rail. Detailed schematic analysis, awesome. #electronics #hardware #microcontrollers #flying #weaponry #Le-labo-de-Michel
on 02024-06-26#video about #3D-printing a whole #flying drone, “even the motors”, using 3 kg of filament, but evidently they’re wound with regular copper wire and using steel cartridge ball bearings and steel nuts and bolts and, originally, a steel 8mm shaft and collar, which he replaced with (brass?) heat-stake inserts and a precision-ground steel shoulder bolt. The motor’s magnetic core is, however, 3D-printed using “magnetic PLA”. He’s also using (rare-earth?) permanent magnets. The dovetailed arms (evidently designed using #topology-optimization, and vastly overspecced) are held on with a very interesting plastic twistlock design. He measures the thrust as ≈3kg of weight (≈30N) using a US$8 load cell from Amazon, but the motor took 2½ seconds to spin up to full thrust rather than the 800ms for a much smaller comparable-thrust off-the shelf all-metal type. By #Michael-Rechtin. #mechanical #manufacturing
on 02024-06-25#video on #3D-printing a #flying radio-controlled model Orca tricopter (three ducted fans) from Command & Conquer with #topology-optimization and nylon powder “multijet fusion” which sounds like it doesn’t involve any jets at all. No notes on the electronics or software.
on 02024-06-25in April 02022 #DJI quit Russia and #Ukraine over the widespread use of the Mavic as improvised #flying #weaponry. Supposedly also Starlink was crucial to streaming FPV footage from drone crews to artillery crews until March 02023, at which point they blocked their service in Russian-occupied territory, over water, and at speeds over 100km/hour, claiming that the purpose of providing Starlink was humanitarian, not military. #video
on 02024-06-25#video #toread where #USA drone operator describes his experience #flying #weaponry, specifically the Puma drone
on 02024-06-25#video of #Ukraine bomb-dropping #flying #weaponry killing Russian soldiers. Fundraising video for “Terra”. In Ukrainian with English subtitles.
on 02024-06-25#video from two weeks ago of #Ukraine kamikaze FPV #flying #weaponry killing Russian soldiers. Fundraising video for “Terra”. The first drone they fly is a hexcopter, maybe a surveillance drone; the first kamikaze they show taking off with a metal cylinder zip-tied to its bottom is a quadcopter whose arms seem to be round tubes, maybe GFRP. It's using three-bladed propellers and has a fairly oversized battery pack on top. The Russian targets, which they refer to as “cockroaches” (like in Rwanda!), are holding a previously Ukrainian trench; the first drone blows up in the trench, though the actual death is censored on YouTube. The squad is operating the drones from a concrete-roofed brick basement close to the front lines. The second and third drones are used to disable what looks like a turtle-tank-armored IFV, and the fourth kills a Russian soldier in the trench who is attempting to shoot it down with what looks like a shotgun. The fifth kamikaze drone launches carrying what looks like an RPG, which is zip-tied to it and thus unable to fly on its own; not sure if it has a shrapnel belt. It’s pointed horizontally, so it wouldn’t be useful for HEAT; instead they detonate it over the head of a fleeing Russian infantryman, killing him. A sixth kills another fleeing infantryman with a fragmentation charge, and a seventh is launched carrying another RPG to pursue the last infantryman, but opportunistically attacks a “Bukhanka” vehicle poorly hidden inside a hangar instead. An eighth is used to set fire to the building some other troops fled into. Because some other troops fled into a hangar, they launch a heavier hexcopter kamikaze drone with a larger charge (4 kg of PVV-7, later described as 3 kg), whose arms are carbon-fiber-reinforced tubes.
on 02024-06-25#video of an Irish FPV pilot from South Side Dublin, nicknamed “Irishman”, with Ukrainian parents, in the “Terra” FPV unit of the third “storm brigade”, #flying drones into Russian D-30 (122mm howitzer, perhaps US$3 million) and D-20 #weaponry in #Ukraine from what seems to be a stone vaulted basement; they said they knew the first one wasn’t a decoy from observing artillery fire the day before, though later they identified a decoy from the FPV video. They destroy a whole artillery unit (six artillery pieces, or maybe four, or two, it varies). He came in through the Internatsionali Ligion (my transcription). Mostly interviews with the four soldiers in the unit. A Russian FPV drone finds the bunker where they’re piloting from but doesn’t find them. They’re uploading the videos to raise money for more drones on social media.
on 02024-06-25#video of Russian soldiers on a speedboat on the Dnieper shooting down a #Ukraine FPV drone #flying after them, maybe with a rifle. A second drone covers the boat with shrapnel from an air blast, killing four of the seven soldiers; the other two, unable to control the boat, jump into the water as a third drone arrives, killing them as well. A seventh remains unaccounted for. A fourth FPV drone blows up the boat. #weaponry
on 02024-06-25#video from #Ukraine of an FPV pilot repeatedly buzzing a squad of soldiers #flying #weaponry
on 02024-06-25#video #toread of #flying over a landfill in an ultralight paramotor
on 02024-06-25#BrandonMitchell #video footage from Donbas of #Ukraine FPV drone pilots #flying a small ducted-fan quadcopter in the house, then showing off a larger non-kamikaze quadcopter US$700 “Lucky Strikes” drone which apparently drops NATO and Polish grenades. Then they show multiple workshops and weapons including with improvised contact fuzes and tailfins (made by #3D-printing in some cases) installed on these grenades. The famous fragmentation sleeves on RPGs are also shown. They even seem to have a HEAT anti-tank warhead rigged up with 3-D printed tailfins to drop from quadcopters onto tanks. “FPVs are very effective against [sic] destroying armor. (...) NATO munitions are difficult to convert. So many safety mechanisms.” Footage of drone making. #3D-printing around the clock. Also shows FPV-driven remote-controlled cars for laying mines, with wheels and wheelbase similar to a four-wheeled push lawnmower. The radio signals still seem to be direct rather than relayed. Mentions a friend of his who nearly got killed three times because she didn’t know she needed to “anonymize” her Mavic drone (apparently something you have to do in these workshops). Lots of discussion of logistics, timescales, repair pipelines, parts shortages. He says, “We're losing the war. It's not lost, it’s far from lost, (...)”. Lots of discussion of how to raise funds on social media for the war. #weaponry
on 02024-06-25#video about #flying the amateur rocket “DIAMOND-X” with waypoints. Arduino, it looks like, with an SD card and an RS422 bus onboard, and servoed tailfins. But his “waypoints” are up in the air near the launch site, not far away on the ground. Largely made with #3D-printing; he regrets having made the parachute connection with carbon-fiber-filled PLA instead of nylon. No code shared, sadly.
on 02024-06-25another #video #toread on #PPDS #Slaughterbots #weaponry in #Ukraine #flying
on 02024-06-25#video from 9 months ago on flat-pack waxed cardboard drone #weaponry in #Ukraine “destroying Russian jets”; the airfoils and the rest of the bodies are assembled with rubber bands and tape and can be repaired with a hot glue gun, cardboard, and tape. Looks like there are some wooden rails (dowels?) for mounting the airfoils. Mainly powered by a single #brushless motor and propeller. Brands printed on the body are “Tanglewood Group Ltd.”, “SYPAQ Australia” (who exhibited it at a military trade show this year), and “CORVO precision payload delivery system” ("PPDS"). There’s what look like laser-cut balsa or other hardwood spars in the kit, at least in some cases plywood. SYPAQ’s Michael Partridge is quoted as saying a laptop allows you to “mission plan and launch” it, so presumably it’s not FPV, though FPV seems to be the main approach used these days. “About a shoebox size [unassembled], can carry roughly three kilos. (...) we've delivered over 600 of the PPDS into Ukraine.” Has been supplying “100 of these every month since March”. Mentions a strike at an airbase at Kursk destroying “five fighter jets, a missile launcher, and an air defense system,” then another attack on a Russian site a few days later destroying two cargo planes, also probably with these cardboard drones. #Pricing quoted at AU$5000 per drone. #Slaughterbots #flying
on 02024-06-25#video on how Alan Zhang got his #eVTOL actually #flying at last, for 3.28 seconds on its maiden flight and 68 seconds on its fourth, after redesigning it to be 90kg and more rigid (though still far too rectangular). He’s hoping for a 70kg payload, so it maybe falls short of being a flying car.
on 02024-06-04Matt Chasen’s Hexa Lift #eVTOL 18-propeller 195-kg single-person #flying machine, actually flying. The batteries clip directly onto the motors. #mechanical #video
on 02024-05-11Fred Rash’s electric circle plane #flying #video #engineering using a 10mAh battery and a tiny propeller. It’s carbon-fiber rings, polyester film stretched over them, and balsa wood. No control surfaces, I think. The video has it flying around inside a roofed football field; the battery lasts a couple of minutes.
on 02024-04-05self-propelling ionic wind #flying wing #video (well, not quite self-propelling if we require lift; it rotates a mobile containing itself)
on 02024-04-03#Nighthawk solar-powered noodles in #flight (#flying?) Mentions Bovine Aerospace’s painter’s-plastic balloon (plástico para pintores, 8μm), which he throws a handful of fine charcoal powder into to get sunlight absorption. Due to not having a giant sealing machine he lays a board across some sawhorses, masking-tapes the plastic to it, and tried sealing it with a clothes iron! Which didn’t work, so he used adhesives, specifically doublestick tape from a craft dispenser. He suggests soot from a fatwood fire might be a better alternative to the charcoal powder. He incorrectly states that water vapor is heavier than air. #video
on 02024-04-03