Fullerite Kites, Magnus Effect, and the Lazy Man's Way to Travel a Thousand Miles on the Cheap

One of my heroes is Richard Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller. Some people haven't heard of him. You can tell people when you encounter such, "He has a form of carbon named after him." You see most people only get a unit of measure named after them: Volts, Ohms, to name two easy ones.

Anyhoo, he invented, or noticed anyway, that you could make a very very sturdy structure by combining struts in tetrahedrons and octahedrons in a way that mimicked the closest-packing structure of a bunch of spheres. He called it the "Octet Truss" and it turns out to be very useful.

The cool thing is Alexander Graham Bell, of telephone fame, also invented it about fifty years earlier to prove a point about heavier-than-air flight. He made giant kites out of it. The largest carried a man while being towed.



The point is, you can make kites out of Octet-truss as large as you like, and they can carry heavy loads.

Once you have the machinery and tools to build one "cell" of such a kite you can build as many cells as you like and keep adding them to the kite.

The OT is literally the strongest structure known, the strongest structure theoretically possible. Even the atoms use it. We can use it, and will, to build a huge kite, I'm thinking about a quarter acre, and then we'll pack the kite-making gear and build more octet-truss out on the water to house and protect us.

Bucky thought big and we will too. There's no limit to the size you can make these structures. We could build into the stratosphere if we wanted to, or down to the ocean floor.

We can have mile-wide flying structures with carrying capacity of millions of kilograms. Condos in the air, complete with organic Permaculture/Living-Machine food/waste cycles in greenhouses and ponds.

But wait, there's more... The Magnus Effect

There's a great way to control the air pressure around your kites to give you the ability to fly without regard to ambient wind conditions. It's called the Magnus Effect even though it was actually discovered by Newton and it is what makes a curve ball curve.

From the wikipedia article:

The Magnus effect is the phenomenon whereby a spinning object flying in a fluid creates a whirlpool of fluid around itself, and experiences a force perpendicular to the line of motion and away from the direction of spin. The overall behaviour is similar to that around an aerofoil (see lift force) with a circulation which is generated by the mechanical rotation, rather than by aerofoil action.

Briefly, if you take a cylinder, wave it in the air, and turn it on its axis while you do... ...it becomes a zoggin' great wing!

You get quite a bit of lift. One article I read in the old defunct magazine "Omni" stated that if you were to put ME airfoils on a bus you could fly it around at only thirty-five miles per hour.

It also makes a great airborne generator!

The equation for lift on such a cylinder indicates that as you increase the radius of your tube you increase the lift geometrically, by the square of the radius.

If you make your tubes out of Octet-Truss then, as you make them bigger and bigger, they are just as light and strong or more so, and you get much more lift.

We will have Magnus Effect "pontoons" on our kite to generate lift (and maybe thrust) and essentially remove the need for relying on ambient wind conditions.

I literally see a "kite" more than a hundred feet on a side, shaped like three herons playing follow the leader too closely, with the "bellies" full of plastic recycling gear, food and organic "cultures" plants, animals, microbes, etc..., water purifiers, tools, everything needed to go out to the GGP and start the self-replicating recycling process.

Like I mentioned above, we'll bring the OT-making gear too and build luxury homes and idyllic farms and factories out on the Ocean, out of the trash.