laudablepuss wrote:

Entropy Stew wrote:

laudablepuss wrote:

Note that I'm not asking about UFOs or aliens. Perhaps this is not a new conclusion or a surprising one, but I'm absolutely convinced that flying saucers are real and completely man-made technology. I'm reading a book called "The Hunt for Zero Point", and while much of what this book says is a bit wacky, it supports my contention that disk-shaped flying vehicles of all manner have been and still are being produced.

Problem number 1: You're quoting a book with the phrase "Zero Point" in it. This is outright grounds for dismissal.

Dur? Then forget I mentioned it. What the fuck?

I had seen shows about g-loc and wondered about ways to increase a pilot's tolerance to such forces. I understand that the head-up posture is bad because all the blood is forced out of the head into the legs, while the reclined position assumed by astronauts is better and allows for higher G-tolerance. Anyway, I wondered if there was a way to, say, make a plane where the pilot was lying on his back or belly in the cockpit instead of sitting upright.

The problem with high-G turns is inertia - your blood want to continue going in the same direction you were flying instead of where you're turning. In the case of classical sitting-upright type aircraft, this translates into centripetal force moving all the blood to your feet (and, more importantly, away from your head). This leads to blacking out in high-G turns. To combat this, G-suits were developed that squeeze your body at key locations during high-G manuevers. Even with these suits, a 9-G turn (easiliy achievable by modern fighters like the F-16 and Mig-29) can only be tolerated for a few seconds. Orientation of the pilot won't really alleviate these problems that much because your blood is still going to rush to some odd location in your body during a turn. The astronaut argument is also moot since they only experience around 3 Gs max.

YES I KNOW THIS, THANK YOU. Blood to the legs, I think I mentioned that. Are you saying that lying on your back relative to the G forces is no better than sitting up relative to the G forces? I assume I don't need to draw a picture here, but the blood is being forced from the front of your body to the back, instead of the top to the bottom. I'm not a doctor (duh) but surely lying down makes it easier to sustain the G forces. And while the astronauts are only under 3 Gs, how long are they sustaining that? A whole hell of a lot longer than the typical high-G maneuver in an aircraft. Minutes, not seconds.

Then I saw another show that offered photos and a documented design history of disk-shaped flying wing aircraft in the US Air Force. This was fairly late, say the 60s or so, and there was nothing special about the propulsion. But I suddenly realized that sitting in a central cockpit in an aircraft that could rotate and thrust in a different direction altogether would allow for massive high-g turns while still providing good g-tollerance for the pilot, even though he was sitting upright still, since the force would be front to back instead of top to bottom. This seemed like an obvious conclusion and I would be amazed if governement and private engineers had failed to grasp it. (I'm not that smart, after all.)

Suddenly altering direction at Mach 2 would probably liquify the pilot (or, at the very least, break every bone in his body). How's that for improved tolerance?

Uh, again, what the fuck? Now you're talking about 100 Gs or something. Let's try to concentrate here. OBVIOUSLY we don't want to LIQUIFY THE PILOT. But if we can get the pilot to handle 12+ Gs (some people can already sustain that much for short periods with special flight suits) or even just the regular 9 but longer or without the extreme exhaustion associated with trying to keep your head fully stocked with blood, isn't that an advantage?

The notion of a "radial flow gas turbine" engine that utilized the entire disk surface for the jet combustion of fuel only adds to the attraction of such a shape. But you don't need anti-gravity or other exotic forms of propulsion to reap some benefit from the design, IMO. Anyway, it was worth building some actual flying prototypes in the 60s, so there must have been something to it.

I believe the prototype you were referring to was just a glorified hovercraft, minus the skirt at the bottom. It was highly unstable, didn't move fast, and operated at a low altitude. It was scrapped.

No. That was the Avrocar or whatever. Sucked. What I'm talking about are viable subsonic roundy round airplanes. Very conventional in all respects except for the disk shape. It was on the damn History Channel for fuck's sake, with photos and everything.

I always get irritated when UFO sightings are described as performing maneuvers that "no earthly plane ever made could achieve!!!!1" The only thing limiting our airframes from making 20g turns is the person inside. There are structural conerns, too, but the main thing is the pilot. An airfram can be constructed to handle extremely high g maneuvers, I have no doubt of that. It's just an engineering problem, the kind that people overcome all the time. So I'm sure a pilotless craft could do lots of the wacky tricks that people claim to have witnessed UFOs perform.

Actually, no. Not the zipping around and suddenly stopping, then reversing direction type shit, anyways. Vectored thrust is a huge fucking bitch - the Harrier is the hardest plane in the world to fly because of it. Lifting bodies are even more of a bitch, they require computers to stabilize them in level flight, let alone during circus acrobatics. I've seen an ABM payload that was a sphere with thrusters at the 6 cardinal points that could achieve that sort of maneuverability - nothing else comes close.

If an aircraft could perform a 20 G manouver, it would look just like a sudden right turn, like Automan or something. Higher G turns would be even more impressive. Dunno about the hovering aspect. I'm not talking about lifting bodies. Who mentioned lifting bodies?

I'm even fairly sure that the sightings by allied pilots in Europe were real and related to wacky Nazi experiments, but I'm not as convinced of that. Certainly some of the stuff in that Hunt for Zero Point book strongly indicates this. I'm referring to actual quoted sources in the book (which presumably I could verify) as opposed to the conculsions the author draws.

As previously stated, lifting bodies are hoghly unstable. No-motherfucking-chance of the Nazi's developing a spherical one.

Cool. Not what I'm talking about. Disks are not lifting bodies. Lifting bodies are not disks. Disks are modified flying wing-type things.

Anyway, anyone have opinions on this subject?

Yes, you're an ignorant faggot.

-/ES/-

Well, thanks for putting me straight! YOU ROOLE!