Gizmag looks at concept art for a flying ocean cruiser:
The more things change, the more they stay the same... Just as readers of science magazines in the 40s and 50s liked to read about how jetpacks and passenger-carrying deep space rockets were right around the corner, so do today’s readers like to believe that car/boat/plane/helicopter hybrids and extensive underwater resorts are something they’ll soon be seeing.
Yes, very good. The only problem is that in the old science magazines the predictions were, based on the science of the time, technically feasible, not fantasies born of too many hits on the hookah pipe.
3 comments:
The bad thing with the hybrid (or should I say "crossbreed") vehicles is that they usually are bad in both their designed tasks.
The problem with "underwater resorts" is that not only are they dangerous, but also that below the sun zone, there just isn't much to see. (The USN's Sealab program and Cousteau's habitats proved both back in the Sixties.)
As for Pauley's "concepts", I'll buy the hydrofoil, although I think he'd find that a "tripod" design like the old U.S. Navy PGHs would be more stable in anything but a millpond.
As for the idea of it "flying", I didn't notice any explanation of what was supposed to be holding it up. (Although the wings looked distinctly like they'd been pinched from Thunderbird 1.)
As Douglas Adams might say, this is the point at which gravity glances sharply in your direction and asks you just what in the Hell you think you're doing.
cheers
eon
I could totally go for an underwater resort. 100' in the Caribbean, there's still plenty of light to see by (and enough pressure to get well and truly narced breathing air---but that's a different story). Right breathing gas, enough warmth, scrub out the moisture so the insides don't get filthy with mildew, and then deep-six the food and oxygen in pressure-resistant packaging and do something about the black- and graywater waste other than discharging it next to the airlock... um, why are we down here again?
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