kengr | A question for the fen.

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You are wandering through the dealer room at a medium to large convention (Westercon, Baycon, that sort of thing).

There's a table with a couple of people wearing some pretty good spacesuit outfits, complete with mirrored helmets. Even have "translators" with an appropriately "computer" voice.

They're selling toy radio controlled flying saucers. They zip around nicely, making a humming noise much like the cars in the Jetsons.

They want $50 for them.

What do you do?

Current Mood: devious

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From:

mhw.livejournal.com

Be amused, probably. I don't think that I'd spend so much on something like that, though.

Why do you ask?

From:

kengr

Well, there's no visible means of propulsion. It makes the humming noise, but there's no downdraft of air. And they do seem to zip along quite nicely...

From:

Engage them in conversation and find out how the thing works. Probably buy one or two, because it sounds cool. If they're mysterious (i.e., aliens really, not just salesmen, or something like that) and I can't tell how the things work, I may get one and bring it here to work where we take it apart and find out how it works.

From:

kengr

They say it's complicated but tell you it's all explained on the CD the comes with it.

If you buy one, they take your money and given you a box and a recipt

When you open the box, you'll find a brief manual and a CD. Along with the control box and the saucer.

From:

kengr

Oh yeah the saucer is around 11 inches across.

From:

... go on. What's on the CD? Or is it encrypted in codes not known to man? (And is it Mac-compatible? I'm not buying it if all their info and instructions are for WinBlows.)

From:

kengr

"You must learn patience, Ed Gruberman."
(chortling gleefully at being on the other end of snippeting :-)

Well, there's no Windows logo, and no mac logo either. The printed manual says it's an ISO format CD. And that it contains the service manual for the saucer.

No computer dependencies are listed. It does state that an HTML browser capable of graphics will be required.

So, gonna buy it?

From:

I buy two. (if they work as demoed, my son will probably use and destroy one in short order after I give it to him. WHich I won't do until after I've thoroughly learned its manual and investigated anything REALLY odd about it).

From:

kengr

Ah, grasshopper...

The CD has rather detailed schematics and blueprints.

You'll find several "really odd" things. There's a "lift unit", a "drive module" and a "comm unit". The controller has a similar "comm unit". Oh yeah, the power cells ain't batteries

The lift unit seems to be some sort of anti-gravity. There's no explanation of how it works. Just how to test and calibrate it.
It takes power to rise, and feeds power back into the power cells when it descends. It takes very little power to hover.

The drive unit pushes in any direction. No apparent reaction to go with the action (ie if there's an exhaust, it's not detectable without fancy instruments.

The power cell are weird too. Buildable, and apparently as high storage density as shipstones. :-)

Oh yeah, the comm section isn't radio. Apparently they are paired units that have about a dozen parameters that ccan be set. And once a pair tunes, they can't be picked up or jammed by any others. (ie untraceable, unjammable)

Have fun turning the world upside down.

From:

1) Any contact numbers for the manufacturers? (if so, I am going to call and talk with them)
2) Any patent numbers associated with the device? (If so, I look up the patents and see if they actually correspond with what I've got here)

If neither 1 or 2 are answerable as "yes", then the things are heading to my work for some serious reverse engineering. Nice that I work at a high tech R&D facility with a concentration in things like NDE.

From:

kengr

No patent info.
No contact info (well none that's usable: A joke(?) address on Procyon 3 isn't much good).

You won't need to reverse engineer them to build copies. The "service manual" seems more than detailed enough for that. Building larger units looks doable as long as there aren't any hidden gotchas.

But there's not a trace of *theory*. Just practical engineering & maintenance details. There are some equations that look to be helpful in figiring how to scale up (or down) units. But that's it.

From:

... first we file provisional patents on all aspects of the systems.

Then I call in my physicist friends to help us test the things so we can start deriving theory from them; I want to make sure there AREN'T any "gotchas" before scaling up. (If doubled in size, the pseudogravity field generated inside the saucer reaches singularity, and all within the area are sucked down to oblivion. Or constant use consumes gravitic field of planet, eventually atmosphere goes away. Or...)

We can also do general functionality tests -- maximum support capacity (if it's hovering, what force is required to raise it or lower it?), speed, etc.

Note that with schematics good enough to allow reproduction of the thing and testing by professionals, there should be no reason we can't get the theory fairly soon, as any usable schematics obviously are using items we either already manufacture or which can be assembled from available components, and we KNOW how all of that stuff works; it will therefore be a matter of measuring and deducing interactions between various components and so on.

From:

... hidden (backdoor) control,activation, self-destruct systems. Bugs (monitors) incorporated into the device. Interactions between several operating in a given radius. Cause emission of various forms of radiation; nondangerous over short term, terrible over long term. Cause unanticipated changes in local material (catalyzes nitrogen oxide formation, weakens metal crystal structure, etc.) I could go on for hours. I'd like to believe that whoever did this is purely benevolent, but the method is odd, to say the least, and the risks considerable.

From:

kengr

I figure that there are two main possibilities:

A: These are usful, but as in Turtledove's "The Road Not Taken" they lead away from other technologies and into a blind alley it'll take use a *long* time to work our way out of.

B: They aren't a booby trap, but are sufficiently ahead of us that can can make "monkey copies" (and worry) or throw a *lot* of effort into research. Or both. Either way, we;'ll be busy for a while and have had our faces rubbed in the fact that we don't know as much as we think we do.

That would either piss us off or teach us some much needed humility.

Considering that they "gave" us this (even in such a roundabout fashion) one has to assume that they aren't articularly worried about the "pissed off" option. :-)

From:

kengr

If you file (keep in mind that doing so could get various unpleasant government agencies involved) the patent examiner will be notified of an obscure website that predates your submission. Therefore it ain't patentable having been published more than a year before submission. <eg>

Going up lifter energy consumption seems to be about 10% over the change in potential energy. And that extra 10% seems to wind up as heat. Going down, it produces energy equivalent to the potential energy change plus 10%. All this is in addition to the "baseload" consumption (and heat production when) hovering.

Loading? Well, obviously that's covered for up & down in the above. More load, more energy. Hovering? I'll get back to you on that...

Note that with schematics good enough to allow reproduction of the thing and testing by professionals, there should be no reason we can't get the theory fairly soon, as any usable schematics obviously are using items we either already manufacture or which can be assembled from available components, and we KNOW how all of that stuff works; it will therefore be a matter of measuring and deducing interactions between various components and so on.

Yes and no. Consider that I could create instructions for someone in 1900 to create circuits using galena crystals and *two* "cat whiskers" to create crude point contact transistors. And go on to build circuits using them. That doesn't mean they'd have the vaguest idea *how* they worked. That'd required about 30-40 years of solid state physics *and* quantum mechanics that they don't have.

Heck, with only a bit more work, I could do the same sort of thing for *1800*, and have crude radios created.

Figure that this stuff will make a similar shanbles of existing theory. It all works based on knowing how gravity works and maybe other stuff. But they don't tell you that.

From:

1) Provisional patents are not examined. That's only for full patents. (I know, I've been filing provisionals several times this year)
2) Prior obscure website publication will be unlikely to gain you patent rejection. A decent lawyer would kick that out of court, especially since it's quite possible to fake up dates on websites and even insert history if you really wanted to (and with the technology in question, it'd be worth the effort to someone).
3) We already WORK with the "unpleasant Government Agencies" (DHS, SOCOM, USMC, etc), and they'd just be offered a license on the stuff.

4) So the hovering object is at an ABSOLUTE elevation, then? It doesn't conform to the landscape?

5) 10% greater than PE as heat... hmm, will need cooling for speedy ascension. Not all that much compared to engines, of course.

6) Maximum speeds attainable?

7) You're more pessimistic than I am. If you handed someone a working device that could be built with their technology, and they have a scientific mindset, at the very LEAST you're cutting down on their development time by a LARGE factor. A radio in 1800, with a real research organization behind it (remember that we HAVE those now, didn't really have effective ones then) would be a shortcut of probably at least 50 years to proper theory of electromagnetics. Your 1900 transistor (assuming it gave them something cool and useful enough to motivate spending hundreds of millions on researching it, which your antigravity devices certainly do) would cut development of quantum theory down to 15 years, at least for the critical elements. Remember that Einstein made his Relativity breakthrough in about 1911 and quantum followed not all that long thereafter (even though it offended Albert's sensibilities, it shows that even in the natural progression of things 40 years from 1900 would be reasonable, so given a specific and analyzable example of a specifically quantum-related phenomenon and sufficient motivation, you'll get it a *HELL* of a lot sooner).

8) "Dead ends" are a dangerous game to play. Sometimes it turns out that because the newbies don't come into it with preconceptions that they make use of it in ways you don't expect. "The greatest swordsman in the world does not fear the second-greatest. He fears the worst, because there is no telling what he will do."

9) There's also quite a number of other ancillary characteristics of your devices which may, or may not, use these same obscure physical principles. You've got quite a few different systems there serving different purposes; the "battery" alone will be a significant advance, forget the antigrav.

From:

kengr

So it'll be a self published book that has the details in the midst of a lot of other pseudo science instead of a website.

Oh, I realizred the is a "gotcha" of sorts. The manual even warns you about it. It's *descending* (at any rate) with almost fully charged cells. You see, a fuly charged cell has an energy density considerably higher than TNT. The phrase that will probably catch someone's eye is "overcharging cells may cause catastrophic failure". Along with "physical damage to cells may cause uncontrolled release of energy further damaging cells in a positive feedback loop"

The cells store something in the neighborhood of a MW/hr per kilo.

From:

I'm not sure that even that will prevent patent. There are some interesting twists to patent law in that regard. We'd certainly find some lawyers to look into it, although as long as we're first to market it won't necessarily make a HUGE difference, especially if we get in with sufficiently broadly written patents on various USES for the things. (I also don't believe that it could have worked that way; with the number of people crawling the Web and looking for Kook Science, at least a couple of them would have tried that book, and since it DOES work, would have caused the stir *I* am about to at least a year ago).

On the"gotcha", you're saying... someone set up us the bomb?!

Not a hard Gotcha to get around, though; just an equivalent of a safety valve for charging. The same problem, albeit less destructive, exists for a number of batteries used today.

That's a LOT of energy storage. By themselves those little gadgets will change the face of technology.

From:

kengr

Well, it's my uinderstanding that a patent can be easily overturned (or denied) if evidence can be shown that the idea was made openly available (ie published) more than a year prior to filing. Especially if said publication was by someone other than the person filing. :-)

Oh yeah, you don't seriously think that you're the *only* folks trying to reverse engineer one of these do you?

As for the power cells, yeah, they'd make an interesting bomb, but the cirrcuits do try to avoid that. Stil, I'd not want to be around if you hit even a "D cell" sized one with a sledgehammer. :-)

Lots of things about this will change the world. "anti grav", "reactionless" drive, *truly* secure com links. That last will screw things up for a lot of folks, all by itself.

Think we ought to summarize/condense this thread and dump it on the Bar somewhere, just to stir things up?

From:

Well, it's my uinderstanding that a patent can be easily overturned (or denied) if evidence can be shown that the idea was made openly available (ie published) more than a year prior to filing. Especially if said publication was by someone other than the person filing. :-)

Patent law is complex, and a lot of it depends on things other than the strict letter of the law, especially if you throw in "National Security", etc.

Oh yeah, you don't seriously think that you're the *only* folks trying to reverse engineer one of these do you?

Judging by the statistics on your board so far, actually, YES.

More seriously, no, but given the reactions here I may WELL be the only one who buys a couple AND happens to work at a firm connected to Homeland Security, the US Military, and various state research agencies, AND which has NDT research capabilities, immediate access to machinists and engineers used to prototyping small units, and so on.

Lots of things about this will change the world. "anti grav", "reactionless" drive, *truly* secure com links. That last will screw things up for a lot of folks, all by itself.

Truly secure? Are you saying the control methodology isn't detectable? Or that there's some method of encryption beyond what we currently understand?

You still didn't give me the load-bearing in hover mode. And does it consume energy hovering -- or will it literally stay there forever (or at least until one of the components fails)? And the maximum speed achievable with the device both vertically and laterally? No emissions aside from heat at all?

Think we ought to summarize/condense this thread and dump it on the Bar somewhere, just to stir things up?

That's up to you. :)

From:

kengr

Oh yeah, I assume you *don't* mess with the "guts" of the originals until you have working copies?

When you are confident enough to tear it apart, you'll discover a few things. "identical" parts *are* identical. Chemical analysis (assuming someone tries the right kind soon enough) will suggest that all elements present were isotopically pure. Add in the lack pf tool marks and molding seems and someone will probably suggest that these where assembled using some sort of "fabber" that built them up from atoms.

Not that such is necessary to make things work. But...

From:

... nanotech advancement would be natural for a more advanced race.

From:

kengr

You also have proof that they aren't perfect. In disassembling the original, at some point you'll wind up with a screw that had to be turned from the side because you can't get a straighgt shot at the head. And while it can be unscrewed enough to seperate the parts it's holding together, it can't be removed all the way as there isn't *room*.

Handing that part and screw to a machinist ought to producing some interesting reactions. :-)

Oh yeah, "atomic/molecular constructors" aka "fabbers" are not necessarily nanotech. They could be used to construct "nanites", but they are not nanites or even necessarily nanite based.

From:

gridlore.livejournal.com

Go "ooh" and "aah". Then go buy more books.

From:

cleverthylacine

1) Have I got $50?

2) Is it my food money?

3) What is the clothing selection like?

4) Any weird Slytherin items to be found?

5) Do they look like the cat could get hurt if she actually succeeded in catching one?

From:

kengr

I'll skip questions 1 thru 4 as they are SEP (Somebody Else's Problem :-)

They're an oblate spheroid shape (think, ellipse spun about the short axis). Outer covering feels a bit spongy/padded (sort of like wrestling mats. Doesn't feel like claws would be able to dig in though.

About a foot across and 2-3 inches thick. Weighs a few pounds.

Will that hurt the cat? Probably not. But then again, cats excel at finding ways to get thenselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. :-)

From:

cleverthylacine

Questions 1-4 may well be SEP, but if you're asking me what I would do, then they're important. I won't spend money I don't have or need to eat on, and I won't spend money on interesting intriguing non-fandom specific toys if there're items I need to have to complete my gear.

The cat question has a satisfactory answer though. Doesn't sound like she could get in there and ingest the contents. (My cat, whom you may see on

hp_feline is not as active as she once was. But when she was a kit...)

I think I would want to buy one, and I might buy one, but not if there were something that I wanted more, because I don't often find myself in places where I could really play with such a toy--I have a radio-controlled dancing Sailormoon doll that would see a lot more action if my floors were clear, and while that's not a problem with a flying thing, my rooms aren't that large individually and I have breakable objects on some of the shelves.

From:

starcat-jewel.livejournal.com

For $50? I ooh and aah a bit, and then continue my tour of the dealer room. At $20, or even $25, I might buy one for the novelty factor. But there's a limit to what I'm willing to spend for that, and $50 is way over that limit.

OTOH, once I got home, I'd probably go prowling the wholesale shops on Harwin to see if I *could* get one for a reasonable price. (Experience being that once you see something like that at one event, 2 months later they'll be everywhere.)

From:

draxenn.livejournal.com

ok.
First I cast detect magic. Is the saucer magical?
No?
I cast detect evil. Is it evil?
No?
I'll throw a rock at it. Does it see me now?
No?
hmm..
I shoot an arrow at it. Does it see me now?
No?
...
I hit it with my longsword. Does it see me?
No? Aww, but it's a +4 longsword...

From:

kengr

Con security (in this case a mix of the Dorsai Very Irregulars and the oinfamoius Klingon Diplomatic Corps) hauls you off for violating the weapons policy.

From:

... you've awakened it. It runs after you and eats you.

From:

draxenn.livejournal.com

Oh poop.
I'll start rerolling a new character.
=D

From:

kengr

Ahem. I'm running this. Be nice and go play with Virigar or something. :-)

From:

*Sigh*

Apparently you know not the story of Eric and the Dread Gazebo, else you would have recognized what we were doing.

From:

kengr

I'm familiar with that story. But this didn't trip that memory. And the "it runs after you and eats you" rather insured that it wouldn't.

Could I interest you in some mutant tribbles? These ones are omnivorous. And have teeth. (Cue "Little Fuzzy Animals" :-)

From:

... wouldn't that line trip you on it? That's the way Eric's encounter with the Dread Gazebo ends. "Too late, Eric. You've awakened the Gazebo. It runs down the hill and eats you." At which point Eric says he's going to roll up a new character who will seek revenge for the old one, and then the rest of the players crack up and enlighten Eric on his error.

Mutant tribbles? Aren't you describing "Pac Man"?

From:

kengr

The Gazebo story I'm familiar with doesn't end that way. It ends with the DM gently explaining what a gazebo *is* to the players who feel suitably silly.

From:

The original and canonical version certainly ends with the death of Eric's character. See, for instance,

http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=S13e8.94e%40netfunny.com&output=gplain

which reproduces the original article.

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kengr

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