The original car was a pile of shit in terms of weight, speed, reliability, etc. but was fantastic in one respect: Looks!

Anyway, they’re now in production again in the USA, so for around $60K you can have a new one!

By tinkering with a petrol engine he’s managed to increase the efficiency of the engine to 38% (usual is around 9 / 10%) without sacrificing performance. Unusually he doesn’t want to sell his technique, he wants to win an X-prize with it and have it available for the world as an aftermarket product. He’s afraid if he sells the technique, it’ll never see the light of day.

This electric car prototype will do 0-60 mph in 3.07 s – and they expect the production car to be a whole load better.

I hope they manage to get the gearbox to hold up!

These modellers are a bit crazy, but the model aircraft are really nicely built. They have jet engines and some of the aircraft have cameras installed as well. The link has a huge gallery of these beautiful hand made replicas as well as a movie

Strange one this. A man had built his own flying car, described as “a go-kart with a propeller attached” and crashed it into some powerlines. The future is now!

ESA PR 15-2008. Jules Verne, the first of the European Space Agency%u2019s Automated Transfer Vehicles (ATV), a new series of autonomous spaceships designed to re-supply and re-boost the International Space Station (ISS), was successfully launched into low Earth orbit by an Ariane 5 vehicle this morning.
It’s around 3 times as large as the US resupply ship and is the most complex European spacecraft built to date.

ESA Portal – Europe launches its first re-supply ship %u2013 Jules Verne ATV %u2013 to the ISS

Cyclogyro’s fly by rotating wings as though they were the paddles on an ancient steamers. The idea is old, but no prototype has ever flown, untill now. Very bizarre.

The car door dissappears by rotating underneath the car. A totally different way of getting out of the car. The youtube film is nice.

This very cool looking BJ will hit speeds of mach 1.6. It can fly without a sonic boom over populated areas at mach 1.1. This will be the world’s first supersonic BJ. Due to it’s handling charecteristics and size, it will also be able to land on just about any concrete airfield.

These guys used to run a gym and have created a fighter style aerobatic jet that does the business. You buy it in kit form for $800,000.

This guy has used stock parts to upgrade a Chevy Impala from 250 to 800 horsepower and decrease it’s consumption to 25 mpg.

He’s now planning on a Hummer Hybrid where a jet engine spins up the juice. He reckons he can make it go from 300 to 600 hp and get 60 miles per gallon.

OK, well it’s more of a flying moped, but still, it’s nice to see he’s finally got the M200G Volantor in production. No it’s not the skycar thing, it looks like a flying saucer. It flies 3m off the ground and goes around 50 mph. They’ll cost around EUR. 50,000 which isn’t too bad for this technology, but god knows how countries are going to require you to be licenced to fly one or if they’ll let you fly it everywhere.

This is the link to the corporate Moller website, where you’re confronted with the thing (the M400) everyone has been begging them to build since the 1960s. Nope, not yet. But the flying saucer thing is still cool.

The Sonex is powered by 80 lithium polymer batteries and has a flight time of 45 minutes. Sonex / AeroConversions expect to be able to extend that to an hour. It seats two and will be “vastly less expensive than other things out there.”

EADS showcased a model of it’s airplane looking space rocket, which they hope will fly in 2012 and take passengers up at EUR 150,000 – 200,000. They see a big market in this and want some of it. Very coincidental how the pricing is similar to the Burt Rutan Spaceship One / Virgin Galactic prices.

This ship is designed to have its deck sink allowing goods to be floated on and off.

The 2 stage rocket is designed to compete with all current operators of satellite launch platforms and be 10 times cheaper than them. There is not so much emphasis on bringing people into space, making this probably commercially more viable. Their first launch was a flop, so they were happy that this launch lasted untill 200 miles (in around 4.5 minutes!) before telemetry data was cut off due to osscilations at altitude. They expect this problem to be easily solvable and SpaceX was happy enough with the 95% successful flight. YouTube has the videos.

If you’re looking to buy a business jet, ex military jet aircraft, propellor driven aircraft, aerobatic planes, world war one / two replica’s, etc. there’s a good chance you can buy it on internet.

Globalplanesearch is a meta search engine for adverts

Aircraftdealer has a large listing

as does Aviatorsale

Ugo Conti is an old man, which is his excuse for making this thing: he’s at the end of his career and he has nothing to lose if it doesn’t work out.
His concept for a ship is to have flexible legs acting like shock absorbers on small hulls which carry the mass of the ship out of the water, meaning it doesn’t have to go through waves, but slide over them. It can also be used in very shallow water. The prototype is crewed by two and can carry two tonnes of cargo.

This guy has been approached by NASA to give a talk about how he’s going to build a flying saucer – something the engineers haven’t been able to do yet – by using upwards air pressure between contra rotating rotors.
He’s not an engineer, in fact, he’s a construction worker with a serious can-do attitude. If he can raise another $40K the world will know if his ideas for a full scale version can be realised. Considering the low cost compared to other aerospace projects, I’d say it’s a steal for an investor.

This is one hell of a printer – you feed it with concrete and gypsum, you have one single operator, and like an inkjet it prints out your house, speeding up the construction time by a factor of 200 and dropping costs by four fifths. Anyone can become an architect and because bricks need to be layed in a straight line, architecture should flourish as wavy lines become easy.
The US has one they hope will be online in April, the UK one will take a few more years.

And they’ve just managed to launch 4 satellites. Now they’re going to see if they can recover the space capsule.

Following the succesfull first flight of their vertical liftoff and landing vehicle, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin is looking for more people to help them go to space. The site has video from the launch on it – good to see more and more successes in private spaceflight, even if it is in the form of baby steps.

The Tokyo National Maritime Research Institute’s Advanced Maritime Transport Technology Department has thought up a system that allows ships hulls to be surrounded by a blanket of bubbles, which keeps away the water from the hull, reducing friction and drag and accounting for the efficiency increase of moving through water. In 2003 > 90% of all goods were transported by ship – which means that this could be a massive environment and fuel saver.

These brakes stop your car in half the distance and will last longer. Be careful of the car behind you!

I’ve seen these on motorcycles, but not yet on cars – looks cool, but what about overheating problems?