The Manta Class Vessels

An Implementation of the Aerostat Spinner

This vessel design is based on my tethered floating rotary impellor invention,
which to my best knowledge is original with me.
It is published to make my point about anarchy replacing the money economy.
Fascists have not yet realized the logic of the internet as an evolutionary threshold.
Considering the public or communicated part of our species information treasury,
to be our collective consciousness, our neurons are just now becoming aware
that they can communicate with each other. You and I are fellow cells, Hi!
Collective unconscious be damned, we've got a mind now!

The first thing to do on awakening is check for danger.
Yes, we're in danger, because of excess carbon in the air.
First shut off the source of the carbon leak.
Its source is the economics of fuel, essentially burning fires.
To make the repair, we must turn off the economy, first of all.
It has guardians, which are governments, to prevent its being turned off.
These units will not be a feature of our new life and will be discarded.

For our species-wide awareness to work right, communication must be efficient.
Secrecy is greed. Greed is the tendency of a cell to live in amoeba mode,
selfishly gobbling nutrients to the detriment of its relatives,
refusing to participate in multicellular tissue formation, not cooperating.
Marks of selfishness are information hoarding:
patents, trademarks, copyrights, licenses, censorship, fascism.
These attributes are to be defeated, to allow information to flow freely to the needy cells.
That's what has to be done, let the economic chips fall whither they willeth.

One pleasant irony in this revolution of abandoning the money economy,
is that it will hurt most those who deserve it most.
Money had pervaded our culture, but those who had accepted its valuation system most eagerly,
the selfish, the greedy, and the stingy,
are those most distressed that its exchange value is lost.
That's the joke.

So these considerations are in my mind as I publish my design proposals.
Am I afraid of somebody "stealing" my ideas?
That's a pretty silly notion. No.
Those with incentive to "steal", private interests, greed,
are strongly committed to the obsolete fuel economy,
and are repelled by free energy technologies,
as they are by free information technologies.
Solar energy is their nemesis, these maggots squirm to avoid sunlight.
I would love to see other people build my devices, that's the point of publishing.
My enemies, corporations and governments, are very unlikely to adopt my designs.
They're scared of anarchists, and we like it like that.
Probably no fool will ever try to take one of my inventions to make money.
I have nothing to lose by publishing my inventions.
My sense of self has spread from individualism into the human overmind.
We have gained when somebody builds my gadgets, get it?
The species is richer by having new gadgets.
My species and I are on the same side, you see.
Our common interests lie in the defeat of capitalism and its economic engine fueled by carbon.

The Manta Ship with its Wind Spinner

The wind spinner is a tethered inflatable aerostat, shaped with a swirl,
so wind motion past it imparts to it a moment of torque.
This moment is applied to the tether as torsion,
which spins the turntable platform holding the winch with the spool from which the tether is fed.
Work is done by coupling the rotation of this turntable to a suitable load.
This wind spinner is a general design for windmills.
Its advantage is that it needs no tower to tap wind energy from arbitrary altitudes.
I expect it to be implemented in most future windmill designs,
on account of this crucial advantage.
Building no tower is cheaper than building a tower, q.e.d.
(An aerostat spinner is better than a kite spinner:
a kite spinner falls down when the wind dies, while an aerostat spinner falls up.)

The ship is propelled by pushing water back, as other ships.
The propulsion units are more sophisticated than the familiar screws.
Might as well optimize everything, while you're changing things.
Some problems with standard propellor design are cavitation and efficiency loss.
Efficiency is lost by water rolling over the outer edge of the propellor blade tip.
This water is forced out instead of back.
Also, the central core of the water column traversing the propellor is impeded in its flow
by the central location of the hub and shaft driving the propellor.
The propellor of our Manta class ship, located in a shroud,
is a centerless unit driven from the rim.
With the center of the water column unimpeded, less turbulence results in lower drag,
giving higher efficiency.
The Manta ships have steerable shrouds which are nacelles for the propulsion units.

Dynamics: Hydrodynamics, Aerodynamics

The Manta ship resembles a giant ray flying over the waves, trailing wingtips into the water.
It traps a pocket of air under its belly, squeezed between ship and water.
Much of the weight of the vessel is supported by aerodynamic lift.
The gimballed propellor shrouds under water are continuously abjusted by computer control,
to maintain steady way among the shifting forces.
The wind pulling on the tether of the spinner will tend to raise one side of the ship, generally.
The wind pushing on the vessel may not be even in the same direction as the high winds.
The computer must reconcile all these forces to provide the resultant steerage way
While all the forces providing lift are operating, the ship runs as a wind-powered hydrofoil.
That is, the bulk of the hull is clear of the mean wave scale height: it stays dry.
The prop shrouds and the wing tips bearing them are running submerged.
The Manta ships are proof of concept for the aerostat spinner.
They demonstrate combustion of fuel is not needed for speedy transportation.
They ought to be a fun way to get from one place to another.

Whithertowards?

rev 980303