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Francesco Lana, with his 'aerial ship, stands as one of the first great exponents of aerostatics; up to the time of the Montgolfier and Charles balloon experiments, aerostatic and aerodynamic research are so inextricably intermingled that it has been thought well to treat of them as one, and thus the work of Lana, Veranzio and his parachute, Guzman's frauds, and the like, have already been sketched.
But, in applying such a propelling force to the air, most of the force is utilised in maintaining aerodynamic support as a matter of fact, more force is needed to maintain this support than the muscle of man could possibly furnish to a lifting screw, and even if the helicopter were applied to a full-sized, engine-driven air vehicle, the rate of ascent would depend on the amount of surplus power that could be carried.
You would have myriad problems associated with aerodynamic heating, high aerodynamic loadings, and very probably a host of other problems that no one can now conceive of.
It was no small achievement in this period to have solved the problem of inherent stability, both in theory and practice, so successfully, that from the aerodynamic standpoint our machines in 1914 compare favourably with those in use at the end of the war.
"They are flying at great speed," calculated A. F. Zahm, the aerodynamic expert of the Smithsonian Institution, "but I don't see what their purpose is." "I've got it," suddenly exclaimed John Hays Hammond, Jr. "They've sprung a new trick. Their machines carry powerful radio apparatus and they're cutting off our wireless." "By wave interference?" asked Dr. Zahm. "Of course. It's perfectly simple.
Wires were sent to intelligence agents in Germany requesting that they find out exactly how much progress had been made on the various German projects. The last possibility, of course, was that the Soviets had discovered some completely new aerodynamic concept that would give saucer performance.
High-powered engines are very expensive to run and every effort has therefore to be made by aerodynamic efficiency to carry more useful load with less horse-power.
Again, it is often assumed by advocates of this form of flight that the rapidity of climb of the helicopter would be far greater than that of the driven plane; this view overlooks the fact that the maintenance of aerodynamic support would claim the greater part of the engine-power; the rate of ascent would be governed by the amount of power that could be developed surplus to that required for maintenance.
If we didn't want the inhabitants of the planet, if it were inhabited, to know what we were doing we could put destruction devices in the test vehicle, or arrange the test so that the test vehicles would just plain burn up at a certain point due to aerodynamic heating. They continued, each man injecting his ideas. Maybe the green fireballs are test vehicles somebody else's.
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