The Invisible Flying Pod of Awesomeness

Introducing the Flying Pod of Awesomeness 

[Note: Updates and new notes are added to the end of the document. Will aggregate them into a new revision when it makes sense. -Michael Ajemian] 

Updates added (After Conclusion)

12/19/18 - gyroscope (interior), electronics (Tesla Coil), exterior shape (egg), engine function/rotation/position & direction.

Dad Was an Apollo Designer

My dad was a designer who worked on Apollo, among many other space/weapons program projects. He was one of a team of people who had freedom to work on or with any component on the project. I've never seen anybody work like him. He would work a million miles an hour, doing mistake free work that was pristine, always with a smile. He would verify the physics of parts, units, and engines, as well as find improvements to things like the Saturn 5 rocket engines. Or he designed how to power the Lunar Rover. He worked hard and had a mantra that drove him:

"One mistake, everybody dies." - Dad's Apollo mantra.

He taught me to learn & work fast with precision and accuracy. He also fostered an interest in me in flying technology. He passed away in 1974 and I often wonder what he might have accomplished had he lived beyond his 38 years. I also wonder if he and I might have had the chance to collaborate, as we were always working together.

 

"Even if you don't understand the text, look at the pictures. Things will make sense eventually."

Whatever he was working on, he'd share with me and encourage me to learn the science, physics, or other disciplines related to the concept. He was fun because he came at you like a fire hose, but always made every step and construct make sense as he showed how assemblies came together or how rocket engines worked.

 

I want to fly in an invisible flying machine. But, how?

The other day, I remembered an idea I'd had in the summer of 2016 that I'm pretty sure my dad might have enjoyed working on with me. Three years ago I'd thought of a flying pod and had designed a few aspects of it before getting side-tracked by ideas about physics that lead me to design new core bicycle parts that lead me to a new electric turbine engine design.

First, make something fly.

Dad was right, sometimes just looking at pictures was very effective. I'd been looking at jet & rocket engines for years, but not understanding why. In summer of 2016, a couple of radical ideas lead quickly to designs that came together for bicycle components and an electric turbine engine. It all came together surprisingly fast. In a matter of weeks, I'd sketched up a bicycle components and the internals for an electric turbine engine and for fun, sketched up a concept design for a flying bike that resembled an F22 Raptor. If I could have a flying bike, I'd want it to be fast and responsive. What kid wouldn't?

After it flies, make it invisible. Invisible? Invisible!

The flying pod was different because...it just was. Over a lot of years, I'd studied turbine & rocket engines & really not grown anywhere beyond what I'd already known, which wasn't much beyond what I'd learned as a kid with my dad. Coming up with a flying bike with new parts and new engine design finally seemed to get my mind airborne.

One day after designing the F22 Raptor Flying Bike I was thinking about how fun it would be to be in the air in a craft that disappeared. Maybe it was the video of the cloaked octopus that appeared out of nowhere that got me wondering. But cloaking a flying thing seemed radically hard, especially if I had to figure out how to cloak a plane like an octopus.

Start simple and let it grow.  What flies better than...a sphere?

But sometimes my mind wants to run on a problem, so I let it. I saw flying shapes in my mind and tried to figure out how to cloak them, but they were all too complicated. So I decided to start with a simple shape - a sphere, and see if there was a way to make it invisible.

My dad always said that finding the start of a problem made it possible to grow the solution well and quickly. He said the truth is the truth and once you find it, you can build on it. Once I had a flying sphere in my mind, it grew so fast I had to laugh.

I remember my thoughts went like this:

1. Start with a sphere
2. Make two layers of skins
3. Make an outer layer of aircraft grade aluminum
4. Make the inner layer of clear, structural glass
5. Cut a slit out of the outer shell, like for an eye.
6. Spin the outside real fast.
7. Because, once the outside spins fast enough, it disappears.

Probably been done, but I was pretty happy to come up with a solution to the problem of how to make an invisible flying craft.  Will work on weights and motors and other aspects to see if it's possible. But my inclination is to think that in this day and age, with all the advanced materials and small, lightweight, powerful motors, it's probably something that can be put together. If I had any resources available to me, I'd be working on a small prototype (I'm only working on this because the mafia hasn't finished me off & they took all my paperwork and designs for my other inventions).

Now that it's invisible, make it fly!

It took a minute to go from 1 to 7 and I was pretty shocked. I never expected to come up with any solution and here a disappearing flying sphere pod thingie was flying around in my head. It made sense though, because as long as the exterior rotation was fast, the refresh rate of the exterior is faster than the eye, and because of the slit from top to bottom, the exterior disappears.

Thought Experiment: The view from 5,000 feet. So cool!

I did a thought experiment. I imagined standing with my "son" inside a small pod 5,000 feet in the air with the outside standing still. I was inside a glass sphere enclosed in a metal pod in the dark. I imagined the slit opening, the exterior spinning, and the exterior disappearing until we were standing in a see-through glass pod in the air! I saw blue skies and clouds and the ground way down there and a completely unobstructed view in all directions.

I was pretty excited. I stayed excited even when I realized I was imagining flying a machine that didn't have a flying shape or any engines and had probably been designed a million times already. If not, I can't even protect the idea, so I'm just writing it.

I realized the electric turbine engine I designed might provide a good starting point. The weirdly disorienting thing about the shape is that it would fly like a ball, and the spin could be used to stabilize the craft by essentially turning it into a gyroscope (Prob not, but have better idea, see update at end of doc - prob have internal gyroscope so load on exterior isn't significant). If the engines were attached to a non-spinning part/base and the spinning-exterior-as-gyroscope stabilized flight, it might just work with well-placed engines and without wings.

Engine Placement

This is kind of off the top of my head, but there could be four engines placed around the central horizontal axis, or the base, of the craft. I imagine the inside maintaining level with the horizontal, even as the outside can rotate to position the engines for elevation and directional motion (for engines attached at the base). Going to do some quick sketching of this, because I've been pretty enamored with the idea and hadn't considered engine placement until just now. I saw it going up and down like the Apollo Lander and want to go sketch up engine placements.

Coming Soon: An animation to show how it'll work. Maybe. My computer is kind of old and slow, so it may be I build a simple animation to show the rotation turning the vehicle invisible.

 

Powered by Magnetism?

One of the reasons I hadn't considered engines or engine placement was because I'd seen in my mind's eye a possible way to power this using magnetism. I know that sounds strange. It sounded strange when I thought of it, but the solution I came up with is novel and powerful. The design of this concept is pretty out there, but I'm positive it's possible. Would make it possible to fly at reasonable altitudes, too.

There's one really hard problem to solve, for which I have a solution. But I'm kind of fuzzy on the physics, so I know that it'll work, I'm just not sure how and as this is a pure R&D project, know that it could take a while to put all the parts together and make work. I really am pretty sure it'll work and it probably wouldn't take more than 1-3 years to make and prove.

It'd be pretty fun to make it possible to fly from ground to space without rockets and I think the idea that's running through my head might make it possible to do just that.  Would be something else to just run up to space and pull down junk or launch satellites with a high-degree of stability and safety.

Mundane Designs First, Then I Go Maverick

But, now that I'm seeing two solutions, a mundane and an R&D project, I'm going to work on the mundane solution and the math to balance engine location and thrust/power with physical stresses of normal flight to show if/that the mundane design will work, even if flying in a hurricane.  It'd be cool if a small pod a) could work (obviously) and b) was more stable than a C-130, because then an Invisible Pod of Awesomeness could be geared up and flown around weather events to collect more data and visuals.

It'd be a cool kind of weird if the flight path would have to be calculated by adjusting both the engines thrust & direction and the rotation of the exterior, to compensate for e. g. wind direction and velocity.

Bonus: Safety Built In

The thing that struck me about this craft, if it really is capable of flight, as it seems, is that it might be possible to incorporate more safety features than a standard airplane:

1. Parachutes
2. Mars-lander-style airbags for max shock absorb, even at terminal velocity
3. Flotation built in, so water landings don't involve exiting

 

Types of Pods

This is just a quick section I'll expand on if the concept starts getting traction. The IPoA was initially conceived while imagining my "son" and I flying up to 5,000 feet & having the world open up to view as the exterior started spinning. So the first concept was something small. But, if it could be made to work, it could be a mundane craft for commuting & travel. And it could be a craft for science exploration. If it could be scaled, it could be used for shipping materials. If the engines were modified, or could be altered in flight, the device could conceivably be made to safely submerge and used for a range of purposes underwater.

Conclusion

Well, that's my overview of the Invisible Pod of Awesomeness.  If my dad was alive to see it? He'd laugh and we'd build it. As it is, I have the mafias of the world doing their best to literally bury me, like I went crazy & couldn't care for myself, with a work ethic that's at least as good as Bruce Springsteens (verified). Bury me for? 30 far more polished and extremely valuable inventions going back some 25 years, plus Bible writings. Sounds weird, but they hit me in the head to blind me to life, then milked me like a cow & made sure none of my work saw the light of day.

So the Invisible Pod of Awesomeness may be left to others to build. I mean, somebody might already have done something like this, I just don't remember seeing it & have been riffing on the design a little here and there. Still, it'd be fun to build, even a prototype, so not being able to do any work on it or any other of the ideas God has blessed m with makes me kind of really a lot of sad.

Updates

12/19/18   

1. Gyroscope
2. Electronics
3. Egg-shaped exterior
4. Engine function/rotation/position

Gyroscope

Rethought having/using/making the exterior as gyroscope and realized it would be preferable to have a gyroscope within the interior of the craft. A really powerful one. I like the idea of having a gyroscope that could stabilize the craft, while positioning and matching engines to perform motion in 6df.

Just read about NASA's "reaction wheels" in orbital telescopes. That's kind of what I'm thinking about, but have to look at the physics once the weight of this contraption is estimated, in order to see if it's feasible.

Electronics

Would be interested to explore integrating a Tesla Coil into the design of the craft to power electronics. A big one, too. Right up the vertical axis of the interior pod.

Egg-shaped Exterior

Was considering shapes, and the two shapes I'd be most interested in exploring would be:

1. Spherical
2. Egg-shaped

The egg-shaped exterior might be extraneous, but it might have advantages with regards to physical stress accomodation and aerodynamics.  If the craft can function without wings, simply by gyroscope and engines, then the slight elongation of the body might allow for better flow through air and/or water.

Engine function/rotation/position

This thing might fly like a lunar lander. Or a knuckleball :-)  Actually, I think it might be possible to make it fly and be responsive. Strangely.

The shape offers some (apparently) interesting geometry options with regards to directional power. Wanted to add this here, as I'm thinking about a couple of engine placements/positions and whether 1/2/3/4 engines are provided.

Vertical thrust - if gyroscope concept works, vertical thrust would provide a stable base to level the craft at fixed elevation for a hover. Possible engine placements/locations: at base or in optimal location based on structural test, luck, golden mean, finite element analysis, and/or performance test. If positioned above the base