I was reading news today and found a nice little pearl about possible next gen (space?)flight hull design. The company is SmartFish and the future looks pretty nice :) The company looks to revolutionize the flight industry with new concepts, but I'm thinking in a bigger scale. When I first time saw the conceptual image of this design the first thing that popped into my mind was "Hey I have seen it before".
So I tried to remember where I have seen it - it was from an episode of an Star Trek Voyager episode. In that episode they designed their new shuttle and their basic holodeck conceptional model looked pretty close to HyFish. I tried to look for the image in the net but the closest I could come to a sideways image was this. It isn't the right image, but if you can watch the episode of "ST Voyager: Extreme Risk" (by this source) I'm sure You can see the similarities. A Mimbari from on of the Babylon 5 movies once said "Put a big enough engine on a flying brick and you get a starship" so the atmospheric rules don't apply in space :) The HyFish model looks a lot nicer than the Delta Fayer, but hey it lacks a warp drive, Borg weapons, teleporters, antigrav, antimatter core, unimatrix shields and who knows what else...
Back to real life. The design is sleek, but I can see some limitations with it. First is its wing span - its pretty small, witch means it cant carry a lot of weight and has to travel at high speeds. This is not really a drawback, but still if the landing gear cant properly retract on takeoff it will be guaranteed to crash thanks to the aerodynamic turbulence pushing the tail upwards and therefore making it nosedive in the runway. The same gos for landing - opening the landing gear bays will generate a lot of turbulence and possibly instability. The second thing is the large cockpit window (at least I'm assuming that is the black part). On high speeds (possibly exceeding march points) the pressure vortexes can crack or even shatter the glass as the pressure is not divided evenly - adopting the ST design could help. Also putting an ion generator at the front can reduce the pressure (this is experimental at this time tho). The third is the air intake(s) (I'm assuming there is another one at the other side) - they extend outwards to the direction of the plain. Its a common design used, but in high speeds the fuel/air mixture can get little too thin especially on high altitudes and the engine can stall. As its a single engine flayer, this can be problematic - it could be reduced by making the intakes the shape of an egg, so the airflow can be regulated without the need to regulate fuel intake.
This design can have a lot of promise and could be adopted to near earth orbit/orbital flight. We are just an step away from actual commercial spaceflight technology. Anyone have a warp drive / antigrav / shield / antimatter reactor plans lying on their desk? Care to share them? :)
PS! If the suggestions here will be taken account on improving the HyFish give some credit to the author also ;)
technorati tags:SmartFish, HyFish, StarTrek, Voyager, flight, technology
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