Allow me to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment and present a crazy idea.
I do lots of thinking at 30,000 feet. I even do some at 10,000 feet on approach. Tonight I was marveling at the skill in which the pilot was using the rudder to counter the strong crosswind we were flying through. It planted a seed in my mind.
When the pilot yaws the plane, he loses some lift as the wings aren’t squared up with the airstream. Imagine if the pilot could yaw the plane exactly 90 degrees against the airstream. He’d drop like a rock because the wings are designed to cut through the air in one direction only, right?
So why couldn’t a plane have shaped wings all the way around itself? I can’t think of any reason this couldn’t be done as long as the principles of lift are maintained: the air below the wing (or ring) must be moving faster than the air above the wing or ring.
Then I got to thinking of the Stealth fighter, a flying wing in itself. Why couldn’t it be round? Its engines are fixed in a way to push it through the air in one direction only but as long as the wing is supplying lift as stated above, it could be made round.
Then I thought of the lowly Frisbee. There are many variations, including flying rings. What makes it fly? The same lift principles that work for a wing: air below moving faster than air above. But Frisbees are decidedly earthbound due to one tricky issue: spin must be imparted on it from something else, i.e. you. So the next question is how can spin be imparted in a self-contained flying ring?
This brought to mind the Russian KA-25 helicopter I’d studied while in the military, which uses counter-rotating rotors to take the place of the traditional tail rotor. Rotor blades provide a helicopter’s lift. Imagine if the blades were instead rings, with far more surface area. You’d get more lift, right? Now imagine those rings expanding to make up the entire exterior of the craft: counter-rotating saucers. The entire craft would be a lift-producing machine, a giant circular wing.
Now, how to move the craft? It seems to me that varying the rate in which the two hemispheres rotate against each other would cause the craft to jerk one way or another, much like a spinning top jerks when it bumps into something.
What about how to power it? Traditional batteries as we know them would be far too heavy. The high-energy capacitors now being developed (and aimed at electric cars) might be a good solution, particularly if they could store the static electricity naturally generated by the spheres/blades moving through the air. Today’s helicopters treat this electricity as a waste product, simply shunting it to ground when they land. Helicopters generate high voltages from the static electricity their rotating blades generate. Why not make use of it?
So there you go. Counter-rotating hemispheres not only produce lift but also propel the machine. And its powered by the static electricity generated from its own rotation.
Crazy, huh. Maybe I should’ve been a science-fiction writer.
(Disclaimer: I am not an aeronautical engineer. Kids, don’t try this at home. Closed course, do not attempt.)