My companion UFO nuts and bolts mind technology thread was closed! Nnnnoooooooooo!!! (shakes fist at an angry sky) Hopefully the mods will come around
on that. I guess we'll see...
Thank you to everyone that has replied so far, I think we're starting it off well enough. Allow me to ante up.
How about UFO's as weather balloons? No really, I mean it. There has been discussion of a fairly obscure project of using balloons as a piggyback for
space launches, very doable. There was a thread or two about it. I'll have to see if I can dig them up.
Along those same lines, I've always found merit in the hypothesis of black triangles as dirigibles or neutral buoyancy craft. I'm pretty sure some of
those models are being buoyed upwards at least in part by simply making the craft lighter than air. A little math calculating the volume of a
triangular shape and air densities at varying altitudes can yield some interesting results, if one knows what to do with those numbers.
A hot air balloon floats by being lighter than the air around it. This is because the heated air inside of the balloon's envelope is less dense than
the air around and outside of the envelope. The pocket of rarefied air within the balloon's envelope 'floats upward to the relative surface' of the
sea of air where the weight of the balloon's envelope and basket equals the weight of a volume of surrounding air equal to the volume of the balloon's
envelope and basket. The 'sea of air' that is our atmosphere becomes less dense as altitude increases, hence air density decreases accordingly as one
floats upwards in this sea of air. A submarine varies its depth in a very similar fashion, flooding or evacuating ballast tanks to equalize its
density as a unit with the pressure level present at the surrounding desired depth.
There are a number of approaches to making this concept work, all of which I'm pretty sure have been thoroughly experimented with by those with the
means and inclination to do so. This could be as simple as a heated envelope within or around a lightweight airframe, with a powered fan for forward
flight. I can't help but wonder how a tiny turbine integrated into a design like this with ducted exhaust to augment lift and provide vectored thrust
for forward flight and flight controls might help such a design function a little more nimbly than your average blimp though.
Other approaches to lighter than air flight include filling your envelope with a gas like helium instead of just regular heated air, or having
evacuated chambers wherein you maintain a vacuum or near vacuum by simply pumping the air OUT of a sealed chamber, leaving it as empty as you can
possibly make it with pumping and sealing. I seem to remember from old discussions that this vacuum approach is generally held to be one of the more
difficult ones, from an engineering point of view.
There are quite likely other more exotic technical approaches to rarefying the atmosphere within your airframe that I'm missing(microwaves? dunno),
but even without those this is definitely one of the technologies that is being exploited to fly some of these exotic craft. I don't think the black
triangles are just one type of airframe. There are probably like fifty or more different types of exotic triangular shaped aircraft out there flying,
at least a dozen different types, in my speculative opinion.
There's a nice little bit of brain candy for you then ATS. Hehe. Weather balloons. No really though! I'm serious!
edit on 24-2-2018 by
TheBadCabbie because: (no reason given)