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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 02 2019, @03:53PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-gyro-pistols dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

It's 2019, the year Blade Runner takes place: I can has flying cars?

Welcome to 2019, the year in which Ridley Scott's 1982 sci-fi film masterpiece Blade Runner is set. And as predicted in this loose adaptation of a 1968 Philip K. Dick story, we have flying cars.

The reason you don't have a flying car was explained by author William Gibson, who famously observed, more or less, "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed."

If you're Sebastian Thrun, you've already flown in Kitty Hawk's Flyer, which is more flying boat than flying car. If you're not, chances are you will have to wait a bit longer to live your sci-fi noir transport fantasy.

Topics include flying cars, artificial pets, voice driven photo enhancement, the Voight-Kampff machine, ad-festooned airships, space colonies, artificial organs and replicants.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Spamalope on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:55PM (1 child)

    by Spamalope (5233) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @04:55PM (#781079) Homepage

    That Flyer (trying to trade on the Wright brothers zeitgeist? ) looks like it's practical like a jet pack but with the added safety of a surrounding curtain of spinning blades. That way it's not just a danger to yourself! Is it a boat because over-land use was banned?

    I don't see swash plates on the blades, so you can't auto-rotate for a power out landing. Hopefully they've at least programmed single and multi-engine out flying/landing modes and some way to detect and land with broken blades. In theory one of those chute recovery things would be neat, but I don't see how you'd use one without the shrouds getting into the props. (though very careful programming might work, but you'd need altitude and this doesn't seem like it'd be used high up)

    From arms length it seems like the attraction of this sort of design is that it's easy to do fly-by-wire to automate stability and nobody expects manual fail safes.
    If you made a fly-by-wire controlled electric helicopter and then added lots of automated stability systems to it I think you'd have something more usable. A much bigger rotor disk for power efficiency, that's above you for inherit stability and that can auto-rotate for a power out landing for starters. It might be easier to automate flying one of those than a car as you don't have idiot humans to worry about. You could do park and ride service air taxi service. Say in New York, from rooftop helipads to helipad with charging station at the airport for quick lifestyles of the rich an famous getaways. (assuming it'd need to be that to have an audience that'll gladly pay)

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  • (Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:02PM

    by Immerman (3985) on Wednesday January 02 2019, @06:02PM (#781106)

    Yeah, I much prefer the Blackfly octo-rotor "biplane", for both engine-out safety and aesthetics. Though the bit about staring up at the sky when hovering would take some getting used to. Grandma's not going to be carrying a pot of stew on her lap in that sucker.

    I would think though that engine-out scenarios would also be a LOT less likely in an electric aircraft - a motor generally has only have one primary moving part instead of dozens, and no liquids, lubricants, pressure seals, etc. An engine-out scenario is pretty much limited to a broken power cable or frozen bearing, both of which should be easily caught in routine maintenance. Even a damaged cooling system will only limit the output rather than eliminating it, and an efficient electric motor only needs to shed a few percent of the shaft power as heat, rather than more than 100%, as is normal for ICEs (even rocket engines are only about 60% efficient and they're leading the pack, most are firmly below 50%) And if the risk of an event occurring in the first place is substantially lower, you can get away with much less robust risk mitigation while still achieving the same overall risk profile.

    Of course electricity does nothing for propellor-out scenarios - but how common are those, exactly? And how many rotary-wing aircraft can handle even one wing being severely damaged? After all, a responsible risk mitigation strategy has to be based on the understanding that perfect safety is unachievable, and then start mitigating the risks with the highest risk to mitigation cost ratio until either adequate safety is achieved, or the expense becomes so great that the product isn't viable.