New cargo lifter concept by VW... Looks like right out of KSP

[Frank_G]

This craft looks like some airhogging engine spam thingie from KSP...

http://www.gizmag.com/vv-plane-vtol-cargo-ducted-fans/33296/

There are lots of interesting and unusual concepts popping up these days. We live in interesting times.

[Tommygun]

It's cool looking, but the engine mounts look way too thin especially consider it's claimed lift capacity of 30 tons.

I guess those thin tubes are suppose to double as fuel and electrical conduits too and no sign of the title motors.

I've been near an old Huey taking off and I can't imagine how much engine wash a VTOL aircraft taking off with 30 tons would be like.

It might actually push some of the lightly filled TEU container around?

Those 20 foot TEU containers weigh 2,400 kg empty as well. Seems a little wasteful for air transport.

But yes very Kerbal though.

[Red Iron Crown]

They're crazy if they think it will be able to compete with road based transport cost-wise. Fuel and pilot costs alone would make that just about impossible. There might be a niche for hard to reach places where runways aren't feasible, but it's a small, small niche.

Cool concept though, and I have to agree with the sentiment that it's very kerbal (moar engines!).

[cantab]

Not by Volkswagen.

I agree the engine mounts look flimsy, and it also seems like there's not enough wing for the body. And no vertical stabiliser? That's asking for issues.

Really I don't think it will ever get off the ground. There are frequently cool-looking air cargo ideas and nothing ever comes of them.

[xenomorph555]

...what the...., is this Danny's new revolutionary spaceplane.

[The Pink Ranger]

Anyone hear about Aeros? They're developing a cargo blimp with some kind of bladder inside that allows it to change altitude like a submarine. Probably be much more cost effective than that contraption.

[Tweety]

There is also the Pelican being developed by Boeing that has a 150m wingspan and some ridiculous weight capacity. That's a far more feasible route. uses ground effect to stay aloft.

In hindsight using ground effect might not be such a good idea..... lots of tall ships and stuff on the oceans.

[Nuke]

i rather like the idea of using a generator to power a bunch of lightweight electric motors. but 16 of them seems overkill. and those brackets around the motors just scream out 'drag!', you can surely do better than that. id make pods with 3 motors in a side by side configuration, where the whole thing can rotate. you can loose 2 motors per pod and still fly, and you might be able to fly if you loose an entire pod by shutting down the kitty corner motors and continue to fly on the remaining 6 motors. thing about these motors is they can actually be way more powerful than needed, they might run at a third of their max performance, and if you loose motors, you can increase the power output on the others. actually 2 motor pods would probibly be good enough, considering that electric motors can be extremely reliable.

[vger]

Anyone else feel like this is way too much engine and not enough wing?

They're crazy if they think it will be able to compete with road based transport cost-wise.

Might be a case of very forward thinking. At least, the future of America's roads is very much in question right now, and we don't have a top-notch rail system to fall back on.

Edited August 14, 2014 by vger

[Nuke]

my state has very few roads, light aircraft reign supreme here. i think we also have the highest aircraft ownership per capita. this kind of ship would work quite well here if it has any kind of range.

[RockoDyne]

There is also the Pelican being developed by Boeing that has a 150m wingspan and some ridiculous weight capacity. That's a far more feasible route. uses ground effect to stay aloft.

was the first thing I thought of. I would have to think it's a thousand times more efficient.

As far as naval passages go, the ocean is a big puddle and there aren't that many boats. Add in radar and radio with half a dozen protocols used to position and ID vessels, there's no real reason you can't reliably find a route.

[Godot]

They're crazy if they think it will be able to compete with road based transport cost-wise. Fuel and pilot costs alone would make that just about impossible. There might be a niche for hard to reach places where runways aren't feasible, but it's a small, small niche.

...

And I guess even for this purpose there were better concepts ... like Cargolifter ... which tried to revitalize the long forgotten german tradition of building large airships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

much fewer fuel consumption if you don´t have to care about fighting gravity with your engines

[magnemoe]

They're crazy if they think it will be able to compete with road based transport cost-wise. Fuel and pilot costs alone would make that just about impossible. There might be a niche for hard to reach places where runways aren't feasible, but it's a small, small niche.

Cool concept though, and I have to agree with the sentiment that it's very kerbal (moar engines!).

This thing is more like a heavy lift helicopter, most places don't have runways however they have roads.

Interesting for bringing heavy loads to places without roads, currently you use helicopters for this. This includes offshore oil installations who is a huge marked for helicopters.

Interesting for the military, it will probably beat the V-22 tilt rotor plane the US is using on cost (an very easy thing to do) benefit of all the engines is that you have good redundancy.

Much of the reason why the V-22 is so expensive is that they wanted to make sure none of the rotor stop.

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

At low speeds (200 MPH counts) a big propeller moving a lot of air slowly is much more efficient than a small propeller moving a little air quickly. The same goes for rotors - this is why very few helicopters have more than two rotors.

A tiltfan would need an absurd amount of power to get enough thrust to lift off the ground even with four fans. Sixteen would be awful.

There's also the fact that while sixteen motors gives it some engine-out capability it still has the inherent safety issues of a tiltrotor. An airplane or helicopter with multiple engines can stay airborne for a long time on one, and make a controlled, survivable landing on zero. This thing would at best be a lowsy glider, and in vertical flight it would drop like a brick. Even a tiltrotor can autorotate like a helicopter in theory, although they wouldn't be very good at it.

200 MPH isn't much to boast about either. There are helicopters that can do that - they're fairly high power-to-weight helicopters mind you, but they'd still be more efficient than this. Compound helicopters (a helicopter with propellers and stubby wings for extra thrust and lift at high speeds) could potentially reach 300 MPH.

This is nothing but vaporware and flashy graphics, apart from what appear to be test articles for some sort of rotary internal combustion engine. If those actually work as advertised they might revolutionize the light aircraft industry once the patents expired and someone put one in an aircraft that's actually useful.

[78stonewobble]

And I guess even for this purpose there were better concepts ... like Cargolifter ... which tried to revitalize the long forgotten german tradition of building large airships

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

much fewer fuel consumption if you don´t have to care about fighting gravity with your engines

Yeah, I was remembering those as well. Is a shame they didn't make it...

[WestAir]

In horizontal flight is it smart to have an engine right in front of another engine like that?

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

In horizontal flight is it smart to have an engine right in front of another engine like that?

Jets might be a bit awkward because the exhaust is so hot and high-speed, but there have been airplanes built with propellers in front of each other. It does decrease the design's efficiency, but not the the point of being unusable. Of course, this design is already unusably inefficient.

[Nuke]

In horizontal flight is it smart to have an engine right in front of another engine like that?

you would need to stagger them. rear set would be mounted up higher than the front set. i do this in a lot of vtols i build in ksp. engine thrust can do a full traversal over 90 degrees without hitting any part of the ship. tandem props are a thing, but i dont think it works with ducted fans.

Edited August 15, 2014 by Nuke

[K^2]

In horizontal flight is it smart to have an engine right in front of another engine like that?

Depends on air speed, exhaust speed, and engines.

This particular concept is definitely example of how not to do it, however. But everything about it is flawed from aerodynamics perspective. The 30T lifting capacity they claim is absurd with that fan arrangement as well. The power requirements will be huge, but a bigger problem will be ~140m/s exhaust speeds in hover. You really don't want extreme hurricane wind speeds while trying to load cargo.

In horizontal flight, this can be dialed back, but the rear fans are still going to be experiencing much stronger relative wind. And without variable pitch blades, it's not something you can deal with efficiently. And that's on top of poor glide ratio such a configuration will have, bringing back fuel efficiency even further down.

I'm pretty sure it's vaporware either way, intended only to siphon investment money.

[AngelLestat]

someone understand how those engines rotate from vertical to horizontal?

The engine support is too thin, I cant not understand how this design can work..

I guess VV should go back to cars.

About the Aeros blimp, that is a clever design than probably would leave the prototype stage.

[Armchair Rocket Scientist]

someone understand how those engines rotate from vertical to horizontal?

The engine support is too thin, I cant not understand how this design can work..

I guess VV should go back to cars.

About the Aeros blimp, that is a clever design than probably would leave the prototype stage.

It's a textbook case of "Vehicle designed by business majors and graphic artists" syndrome.

[Canopus]

The Article says VV stands for "Versatile vehicle". The Car manufacturer is called VW for Volkswagen.

[AngelLestat]

ok, I dont know how I miss read a V by a W.

It's a textbook case of "Vehicle designed by business majors and graphic artists" syndrome.

heh, agree.

[K^2]

someone understand how those engines rotate from vertical to horizontal?

They do talk about it on their site. Not in too much detail, but the gist of it is that their VTOL system doesn't rely on power transmission or tilting via heavy shafts. Power is obvious, these being the EDFs. But I think their plan for tilting is to use thrust from the fans themselves to provide torque. I don't know if that's supposed to be achieved with thrust vectoring or differential thrust.

Either way, it's a neat idea, which would reduce complexity, cost, and weight. But I have serious doubts about these guys being able to execute this. Especially with aft set of EDFs being in the exhaust stream of the fore EDFs. This can result in all sorts of oscillations if the EDF sets are free to swivel about the support. Again, their site claims that they have electronic/algorithmic solutions for this sort of stuff, but I'd have to see it to believe it.

It's a textbook case of "Vehicle designed by business majors and graphic artists" syndrome.

Ayup.

[Justy]

I can't get excited about cargo airships anymore. They hooked me as a kid with the "Hystar" demonstrator at Expo '86, when heavy lift airships were just a few years away from transforming the logging industry (no more logging roads, and selective logging will be so cheap there'll be no more clearcuts!). But cargo airships have remained "just a few years away" for the 28 years since (Hystar's main business since then appears to be moving its headquarters from New Brunswick to Maine to Delaware to Nevada). I was up in the arctic when Discovery Air, a moderate sized charter operator who, to their credit, run services with oddball aircraft like their trio of Dash-7's, announced they were going to buy a fleet of hybrid airships from the UK, but by then I just didn't believe anymore... and lo and behold, it didn't happen.

They're crazy if they think it will be able to compete with road based transport cost-wise. Fuel and pilot costs alone would make that just about impossible. There might be a niche for hard to reach places where runways aren't feasible, but it's a small, small niche.

Might be a case of very forward thinking. At least, the future of America's roads is very much in question right now, and we don't have a top-notch rail system to fall back on.

The availability and cost of energy for transportation use will be a problem before the roads fall apart. You can't save long distance transportation in North America (Canada has the same problem, only worse!) with a system that consumes more energy to move the same payload the same distance. If airships can't compete on a cost-per-ton-mile (or cost-per-passenger-mile) basis, an all-powered VTOL has no chance. Nevermind passenger rail; if you want to enjoy the future, pound tracks for freight rail, NOW.

Edited August 17, 2014 by Justy