It looked good on paper

One of the most scary things out of an engineers mouth is "if money was no object". I'm beginning to think even the weirdest bits of science fantasy are only a couple of research grants away. Still nothing beats an out of control military budget looking for not the most effective weapon but the most sexy.

Now how many of you remember the cartoon show Johnny Quest? Though I think more people are familiar with its parody step child, The Venture Brothers. But some of those fictional ideas have real histories and out of fiction came the inspiration for things we take for granted today.

Something that came out of Dick Tracy's arsenal of crime fighting equipment became the real life the Pawnee Flying Platform. Six prototypes were built and they proved to be so noisy, so difficult to maintain and so impractical -they were one of the few weapons systems where the military said thank-you but no thank-you.

But who knows, maybe in a few years the domestic drone might be doing the job that Dick Tracy's Flying Cars were first created for.

Several years back I done some research on a feasibility study titled "The Atomic Bottle Rocket". It was the idea of having very tiny atomic explosions, only a few atoms at a time,  to provide thrust rockets and aircraft.  This was part of the proposal to build the Atomic Bomber, a B-52 with nuclear jet engines. It was like something out of Spy verses Spy. The Russians had purposely leaked a paper that "revealed" their plans to build such a plane. The Russians keep the rumors alive as the US government wasted millions trying to build it first. The Air Force did discover engines would create so much radioactive fallout that regular fights would make the planet unlivable and the crew would need so much lead shielding the plane would be unflyable.

But from that the military did develop the Atomic Grenade. The joke was the blast radius was much larger than any conceivable distance a person could throw it. So after the fact they made a special grenade launcher for it. It became the smallest tactical nuke in the US arsenal because the yield was so low it was wasteful and  made enough fallout to be seen as a terrorist weapon even to a bunch of ruthless strategists who were trying to make atomic warfare possible.

 I guess with designing weapons you have to be a bit more bombastic that if you were designing consumer goods.

Though I do wonder were we would be today without our version of the Star Trek communicator? Today there are several hundred million smart phones out there and manufactures project the world market can absorb 2 billion more in the next ten years.














So when your children, even the ones that are post college slackers that have returned home, are watching Cartoon Network or some other animated entertainment -don't stop them. They might be dreaming up the next big thing.

And while I'm working on my next project, who knows what turn up in research files. Today's science fiction could be tomorrow's science fact and yesterday's dubious science could be the next cautionary tale.

Anybody working on ray guns these days? Now that I think about that I wonder what would be the NRA's take on civilian ownership on Buck Rodger blasters?

                                        In The Mailbox

It's nice to be getting feedback from people reading the blog. On Building a better Main Street -part 4, I was reminded that the City of Paris use to tax real estate by the square meter. And that the Mansard Roof was an architectural answer to the tax code. Since attics were exempt from the tax the Mansard Roof  was a way of getting living space tax free.

 

Something I'd like to share with the readers of this blog. It's going to be an album cover for a up coming CD. What do you think?

Send you thoughts and suggestions here.