Open source, real ship design proposal

[AceSnoopy]

Greetings :g,

I'm an engineering student and long time wipEout worshipper here to propose an idea that may or may not be original, get some feedback and maybe recruit some talent. I want to work with people who, like me, want to see a low altitude air racing series in our lifetimes and maybe bring such transport to the masses. I think it's possible, so in an attempt to get some of you on board too let's get there via good ol' reasoning:



It's a tired point that we're now well into the 21st century without much in the way of flying cars. I suspect other fans will join me in deeming the efforts of Moller and Aerocar pretty disappointing and pretty far from the wipEout vision - and the reason to me is singularly clear: The transportation of the wipEout universe is not economical at this time with current technology.

This, however, need not be the end of the matter! As a society we do plenty of things which aren't outwardly "economical" in this crude sense - we pay footballers multi-million salaries and lay off healthcare professionals in "times of austerity", and we use Mozilla Firefox web browsing software to access PHP-administered sites using MySQL backends without (if we are savvy) paying a penny for the privilege of use of the software. Would somebody tell me how Red Bull sell so many cans of sugar they can afford to create multimillion-<currency of choice> cars every two weeks and fly them around the world to be paraded about? (Not an F1 hater, actually, but my point stands...)

By seeking not to ignore economics entirely (no happy endings there) but to carefully and deliberately do as much as we can to elegantly sidestep its dreary pull, we who by classical indication should be in no position to change the dire situation of airbourne transport can in fact work towards a better future. The keys as I see them, and as you've probably guessed are sport and open source.



I propose creation of an online community in a not dissimilar (but not identical) vein to the "GPL Giants", for collection of work for public domain release under a mission statement preliminary designed as below. From my own previous research, I deem this to be the only way of forcing progress in this direction and believe that, even if ultimately unsuccessful, some vary valuable achievements could be made. By working freely in the field, the group will also prevent companies from patenting relevant work due to prior public disclosure, opening up technologies to wider markets.

Now I've spent a while at this general idea so whilst my research is often in scraps of things in various places I have had serious thoughts about going about it from a technical standpoint. I realised recently (oh dear...) that my project management needed some added structure and thought... Now surely someone else would be interested in doing this with me? I know just the place to ask...

I have attached with this post 2 documents: preliminaries of a mission statement for the group i propose, and an outline specification for its primary prototype "flying car"/ship/whatever to be targeted towards racing. A third is also present, which is a slightly newer and more appropriate version of the specification presented in XML for those that can read it. Note that all presented documents are to the standard of notes only, don't expect anything professional from them or expect points for pointing out my lack of rigour over certain points! ;)

Change of plan! The forum doesn't like their size - see links at the bottom of this post...

Now from you, lucky and obviously enthralled reader, the following would be very much appreciated if you are interested in the project:



Feedback on the attached documents, to help create an inclusive but productive constitution for a workgroup with aims like those described in the mission statement.

Pointers towards open project management platforms that might be best for adaptation towards engineering more general than software development.

Ideas on the XML specification format, whose structure is drawn from some relevant management lecture notes and is presented by example rather than documentation. I can supply more information on it if it's a matter of interest to people.

Suggestions on the specification for what makes a vehicle sufficiently "wipEout reminiscent": Fanboys are notoriously narrow-minded on their preferences, and I include myself also, so are there any points you feel don't reflect a general consensus on a project to build a wipEout like machine? On a related note I found the series through wip3out and have conflicting ideas about actual scale of these things... The size of wip3out cockpits and windows makes the ships look pretty massive, but later games have gone much more compact: Anyone volunteer some representative lengths?

Does this community believe the fanbase of wipEout, F-Zero, similar games and the ideals of the transport described there in is _wide_ enough and _technical_ enough to constitute an effective, enlistable workforce? Though open source projects often hinge on a few core people their long term progress ultimately comes from the ideas of the swarm of tinkerers and techies surrounding them. Whilst the hacking philosophy is common in computer scientists, could it be transferred adequately to other fields?

A consensus on one research topic: It's a pain pinning down the cost of roadways. I'm tempted to specify that the vehicle should require no special roadways and coexist with traffic (maglev coils etc) but think it would open up some more solutions to instead specify a limiting acceptable budget for road alteration per kilometre or something instead - thoughts?



Apologies for any garbled info here - it's difficult for me to judge the audience here and basically the entirety of the work presented is ongoing in whatever free time I find! There was also so much to put forward my attention has probably slipped more than a bit... I leave you with my opinion on eventual weaponisation: It's possible and could be beneficial, so long as it's implemented in a "laser tag" like or similarly virtual way rather than with explosives (except perhaps for special effects!), and a virtually weaponised racing series would catch the public's attention whether it flew or not! Unfortunately, it's simply not possible to sustain plasmas long enough or keep them viscous enough down here to provide shielding as seen in the games, sorry! :D

So please read, tolerate my ramblings and add your thoughts as I continue to think about these things... I reserve my own ideas on how to make the vehicle until a consensus could be arrived at as to what constitutes an acceptable candidate.


- AceSnoopy (Alex)

File links (on the decent first file hoster I could find):

PDF Prototype specification outline (draft):
http://www.filedropper.com/oshispec_1

PDF Mission statement (draft):
http://www.filedropper.com/oshimission

XML specification version:
http://www.filedropper.com/oshispec

Please let me know if any of the links break!

[AceSnoopy]

And then, as if by magic, he remembered the magic of zip compression...

:redface:

[Xpand]

That's a pretty nice idea! I've been researching some stuff on magnetic and ionic levitation. The one that looks more feisable is the ionic one, because it can carry loads, but it's very unstable.

[AceSnoopy]

Sorry Xpand,

Unless you've managed to find something I haven't, nobody's managed to make an ion lifter (or electrohydrodynamic thruster as they were called in some military stuff) that can even keep its own power supply in the air so far - secondary ionisation and the lack of electron kinetic energy recovery make the things pretty inefficient and current battery technology isn't enough to make up for it...

Dang it they look awesome though, being all solid state and all...

To be honest I think unless an reasonable way can be found to produce maglev tracks, which looks unlikely given the rising prices of most metals,I'd suggest a standard VTOL aircraft using fans within the main body with electronics stabilising flight and limiting altitude. It could look like the ships and behave like them too, but of course wouldn't carry so much of the "antigravity" spirit :D

Also I may be biased by a background in electronics and control... Hopefully will be completing and sharing a paper on different possible thrust sources including ion in the near future!


Relevant-licious: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/16/urban_aero_say_mule_test_imminent/

[Xpand]

What I saw was Ionocraft (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCknCIN82io). I know we don't have power sources small enough and powerful enough to make the craft fly on it's own.

I don't think propeller powered ships will be good enough to mimic the Wipeout ship flying behaviour.

[AceSnoopy]

So in your opinion what's necessary for mimicking the ship behaviour?

The problem as I see it is just that to most people props or jet turbines would just look wrong... Lifters are thrust providers just like props, except they don't have moving parts and suffer from a lower power to weight ratio?

I think for me what separates wipEout ships is their mostly fixed altitude and confined steering geometry, where the pilot's simple steering commands are automatically interpreted to roll and then pitch the thing to actually move round the corner...

Maglev could probably provide the same solid-state look?

[Copernicus]

Another consideration is noise and air pollution. Ion-jets produce ozone as exhaust (which causes respiratory failure in humans) but are relatively silent. By the sound effects used in high speed futuristic racing games we can assume vehicles are using jet engines. But jet engines produce a terrible amount of noise (and the exhaust could be toxic depending on the fuel used).
You want low altitude craft? The only way I can think of that is with magnet rails. One of the things that I always found impractical about high speed futuristic racing games is that, if they were really going that fast, there's nothing to stop them from pitching the nose up and flying through the air.

[Oryx Crake]

the thing you probably couldnt replicate from the WO universe is the wall hits. at the speeds it says it flies a direkt hit with a wall would pulverize any craft built from materials we use today, not to mention the pilot would be crushed by inertia.

I guess really what I mean to say is that speaking as a leyman the one thing that would be physically impossible it would seem is to make the craft as sturdy and as damage resistant as they appear to be in the games. I mean we speak of certain ships as having paper shielding but they cant take a heavy punch compared to real machines

[Xpand]

Well, yeah, there are a huge amount of problems with making an AG ship.
One of the biggest, besides the damage, and assuming that we achieved stable levitation, is the absence of any drag or significant braking force that makes the ship stop like they do on Wipeout. Maybe a thrust reverser would work.
And even so, there's no drag to make it turn on it's own. We either use TVNs (Thrust vecoring nozzles) or we turn the ship more than 90 degrees to make a tight turn.
Now, the stable levitation could be achieved by using computers to monitor the altitude or any abnormal motion of the ship and use the "levitating platform" to counter those movements. If we think of the levitating thingy attached to a moving platform it seems feisable in terms of sideways movement. The vertical motion could be controled by changing the intensity of the levitator, but, of course, that would mean we had to find a levitator that created a max force greater than the weight of the craft.

As Copernicus said, there isn't a way to stop the engine's thrust being pointed straight upwards and make the ship just fly away, but let's face it, no one's going to make a track like the ones in WO. :blarg
Even so, any imperfection on the track, or an uphill section could be enough to make the ship airborne.

And this poses yet another problem: Aerodynamics.
We have to maintain a balance between lift and a downwards force to maintain the ship at the same altitude.
We could use the fuselage's shape to provide lift at certain speeds and help the levitator a little. If it creates too much lift the ship will become a plane, if it creates too little we may end up with a high altitude ship on any uphill section or bump on the track.

[AceSnoopy]

Pollution (@Copernicus)

A very important point, and it depends somewhat on how the project is approached: My own proposal would be to get the necessary groundwork done to launch a racing series and then continue freeware development as well as team-based technology development in order to adapt the vehicles to a viable commercial transport mechanism. In other words, as in high end motorsports air and noise pollution could take a role as secondary design considerations when developing the first specifications and then become subjects of primary research later on – in the way that Formula One imposes progressively stricter regulations on such things to drive research which team owners and sponsors later utilise in their road cars.

I would never say that pollution be insignificant in such a race vehicle design though, and firmly imagined it to be an integral part of the research to be undertaken in the project as (possibly poorly) indicated in the 'Design Principles' of the original mission statement draft. My point is that by organising this research within a freeware project framework, rather than everybody idly googling the same phrases once in a while, we could actually share what we find out much more effectively.


Interia (@Oryx Crake)

Irritating fact of life I think - you only have to look at military aircraft info to see that in all sensible cases weight optimisation is considered so important that generally being shot at is an indicator that you should be flying away faster rather than relying on any resilience of the airframe.

The speeds wipeout likes to imagine are clearly ridiculous and I'd expect capability more in line with modern aircraft from a real world counterpart, which wouldn't seem slow so long as the tracks were suitably smaller scale than their massive virtual equivalents. Overall, though, you could make the structure more resilient
by adding weight to it and sacrificing some energy efficiency – and if enough effort was made to ensure the integrity of the main pilot enclosure (like in a standard racing roll-cage) you could still produce a viable race series, it would just resemble Formula One more than contact-heavy touring cars...

I would expect that initial maintenance of pilot safety would be a league specification issue, but development of strength to better survive collisions would be an optimisation issue for teams unconnected with the proposed initial prototype – you would probably end up with teams like Icaras that aimed for lighting fast with some Qirex copycats who built their ships like tanks just as in the game.


Flight dynamics (@Xpand)

That lift platform's the right kind of idea I think – If the league authority provides the lift maintenance system (or even just the lift control and feedback systems) then it can make sure teams are locked to a single ride height and leave them to develop their own airframes and forward thrust providers to go with the basic kit.

Thrust vectoring is certainly an option and limited capability is one of the requirements in the spec from my first post to provide a braking force – but from the games it seems that most of the turning force is supplied from the lift platforms in the same way aeroplanes turn: bank then shift the balance of lift towards the front to move the nose around. So long as a strong enough lift source were used...

Again, I proposed augmenting lift at high speeds with aerodynamics in the original spec! I know I ramble but there's some gold in there for those who look...


General Stuff

I want to just reiterate something I may have stumbled over before: When I started this thread it was to share an idea for a project. I know as well as the readers here that there are very good reasons wipEout is a video game rather than a reality, but think that together we could work to find new solutions to problems like control, pollution and airframe fragility – I'm not suggesting that research be carried out in this thread, since they're pretty crappy collaboration tools, but that we should isolate what people see as the defining aspects of wipEout which have to be maintained in order for the general feeling to be preserved.

I'm suggesting that by taking the time ourselves to find out how a ship such as these could be made in the real world (no small engineering challenge, noted), we could raise the bar of public domain knowledge to a point where it becomes commercially viable for companies to produce racing ships without needing to spend vast amounts of money on initial research. If you present manufacturers with a complete ship design to work from, and a league specification to set limits, then I still believe you could get enough interested to form the makings of a real race league to start from even if you started with something resembling a restricted version of this (http://vstol.org/VSTOLWheel/Lockheed-MartinX-35.htm).

[icarasDragon]

I remember exploring topic once, I was thinking all the civilian ships were a standard airship design, but the WipEout craft were huge electromagnets, adjusting their field and maybe a few vector nozzles to turn while they use a normal thruster to push themselves. Then mount the cockpit, computer and weapons rack on a magnetic chassis which you can push electricity through to change the field. You'd probably need a Fusion reactor to power it all though. :|

[AceSnoopy]

Hey if I remember the careers-y guy from JET (http://www.jet.efda.org/) (see also ITER (http://www.iter.org/)) correctly they've actually managed to convince some test reactors to output the amount of energy required to run them now I think haha! Just nowhere near enough to make them commercial :g

Of course, you could always go down the industry route and design other subsystems around whatever fusion or other energy technology you assume will exist by the time you're done, but i wouldn't hold my breath!

Could always go with fission instead?


Oh and there is one thing i've been forgetting to bring up... Beamed power, anyone? 50% efficient at best at the moment, but gets rid of all this unpleasant weight and gets better as you add receivers!

[Copernicus]

If I were trying to design something, I'd try working with scaled-down models. Companies manufacture jet engines and turbo fans the size of a pop-cans for model jets. Building a magnet rail track for vehicles only a foot long is more practical than trying to start out with a 10 meter vehicle that weighs several tons, and cost millions to build. You need a proof of concept that can be shown to actually work before scaling it up and getting investors involved.

As for the piloting: do the vehicles have to be manned? The air-force already has drone-ships. I'd prefer to have a camera installed in the vehicle, while I sit in a room somewhere and control the vehicle remotely while watching from a TV screen (like playing a wipeout game).

[AceSnoopy]

Well after extensive searching of the internets I've found Redmine (http://redmine.org/), which seems to be the best candidate for a platform (unless anyone else has any ideas?) so hopefully in the near future I might get butt in gear and get a production server up and running it instead of just my laptop :D

Considering UAVs sounds like a good idea - maybe for prototypes even if not a final product. I know I wouldn't mind the extra degree of separation between my fleshy carcass and the flaming wreck of a first attempt! :g

Scaled down prototypes definitely a must, but the main problem from the people I've heard from in taking engineering open source beyond software is that software is the only prototype people can really "make at home" for free, so it can be a major bottleneck... I guess an approach might be to simulate designs with some free CFD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_fluid_dynamics) or similar? You never know, a decent game might even come out of it! :P