A Cool Billionaire Toy Flying Car Design

[RE]

Generally speaking the whole flying car thing doesn't interest me much and I seriously doubt we'll ever see them cruising the canyons between the skyscrapers  in various vertically organized traffic lanes like you see portrayed in a few sci-fi movies.  Just another Billionaire toy for the most part.  However, the design on this one is so cool I just had to share it.

The video here is a CGI promotional, they haven't actually built this thing in full scale yet.  The article says they have scale models built, but they don't show any vids of those which is suspicious.

The energy questions are obvious.  You have at least 4 healthy size electric motors and all the batts you have to lift off the ground along with the two passengers and the body of the vehicle.  Then there are those cool rotors with all the tilting wings on them.  That is a lot of surface area spining at high speed, lots of friction with the air.  Those winglets would get quite hot I think.  I at least need to see that design work on a scale model to lift the thing off the ground.

Anyhow, even if the rotor design does work, the energy demands of this vehicle are enormous.  How much flight time could you get with the best currently available Li batts?  30 minutes maybe?  For all of these flying cars which mostly are just scaled up drones the flight times are always under 1 hour.  Speeds usually under 80 mph so the range is very limited before it needs a charge up.

So, even if it works, best case it's just a toy for billionaires.  It sure looks cool though.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/electric-vehicles/meet-blackbird-a-flying-taxi-that-spins-and-moves-in-any-direction-thanks-to-new-propulsion-system

RE

[K-Dog]

I can't watch the video, I tried.  Looking at that thing made one of my brain wiggles do some unconscious math which generated a gut reaction of strong revulsion.  Having to do with battery energy density considerations and energy flight requirements.  The thing would make as much noise as a jet taking off.  A hundred of them would cause a city to go deaf.

Tech wont save us but it is a essential ingredient in our delusional soup.  Guy Debord studied real world material facts.  'Philosophy' not needed here, this is not a matter of opinion.  Tech delusion is promoted by capitalism.  Being deluded makes good consumers.

Tech provides, and is part of the spectacle.

In dystopian novels where industrial tyranny defines life, such as Orwell's 1984 being only but one example the world portrayed is dark and miserable.  The reader can feel the tyranny.  That is the point.  The author makes you aware of the tyranny.  Reality is different.  Feeling tyranny would cause system failure.  In a successful dystopia you do not feel tyranny. You become an instrument of tyranny.  Lost in the bubble of your fantasy world you leave reality behind without a second thought.

[RE]

I can't watch the video, I tried.  Looking at that thing made one of my brain wiggles do some unconscious math which generated a gut reaction of strong revulsion.  Having to do with battery energy density considerations and energy flight requirements. 

Too bad.  There's other stuff besides the obvious energy density problem that would at least raise an eyebrow, if not make you gag.

The vid begins with the "Blackbird" leaving out of the Garage of a suburban house.  The designers didn't even put it on wheels so you could taxi out of the garage to open space and then lift off.

Now, can you imagine the backwash of air bouncing off the ground underneath the machine then further bouncing off the walls of the garage? Anything not bolted down inside the garage would be flying around like pieces of roof flying around in a hurricane or tornado.  The vehicle itself would be buffeted by the air blowing around in all sorts of crazy directions.

Basically, it is pictured as taking off like an imaginary anti-grav type shuttle from sci-fi movies.  The rotors are pictured working like Iron Man style Repulsor devices that generate propulsion without action-reaction in violation of Newton's 2nd Law.  Even if it flies, there's just no way you could take off from inside an enclosed garage like that.

Besides that, the complexity of those rotors with the pivoting airfoils is astounding.  Each of those little winglets would need its own little servo-motor to change its angle of attack because they're all spinninbg at high speed and only connected at the hub of the whole spinning assembly.  How long before one of them fails?  If just one of those blades is at the wrong angle, the vibration would about instantly cause the whole propeller assembly to break itself apart.

I would find the whole design more believable if the designers dropped hydrogen fueled mini jet engines for those rotor thrusters.  As I mentioned, it's suspicious that they don't even demonstrate a scale model.  You can make anything magically fly in 3D virtual space, the sci-fi movie industry has been doing that since Buck Rogers.  Building real world VTOL aircraft that can hover is a tad more difficult without the magic of anti-gravity and/or disregarding Newton's laws of motion.

RE

[K-Dog]

I watched enough.  No need for leaf blowers.  Send them to your neighbors pulling off your driveway.  With a noise louder than a helicopter.

   

The Society of the Spectacle: Annotated Edition

   

        View the annotated edition of Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle below, or Download the PDF (2 MB).    

   

Or, if you prefer the spectacle Debord made, behold:

I had one year of French at a time when my focus was elsewhere.  With help from google translate I was able to to translate much of what is shown as subtitles and quotes.  I took about four hours stopping and slogging through.  Periods of excellent heterosexual scenery mad the slog easier.  I may get interested enough to make a proper English subtitled version.  With help from someone who speaks French well to generate a proper transcript to work from.

People like to shit on Debord.  He was a total Marxist and no You-Tube video can exist in 2024 without kicking the shit on the Marxist man-can down the road.  I watched several videos about his book.  Now I will go through the book.

Debord hate has an amusing aspect to me, but I don't expect it does for many.  Most I suppose, jump on the bandwagon without noticing a thing.  It is the social thing to do.  But the hating  is transparent to me, obvious and clear.  Being as I am into Uncle Karl.  It gives the weaknesses and biases of the presenters away.