Category: Possible inventions

When a battleship fires its guns, the momentum exchange is enormous.

Today’s invention makes use of that fact to help a ship perform emergency manoeuvres.

When a ship needs to stop urgently, it will attempt to run the propulsion units backwards. In addition to this, imagine it firing all of its guns forward simultaneously or in a very highly controlled sequence (this could be achieved electronically).

Such an action would greatly slow even a battleship.

With modern weapons such as railguns, it might be possible to fire them all in a coordinated way, in order to make sharper turns than would normally be achieved using just rudders.

Parachuting tanks onto a battlefield makes sense (leaving aside the fact that warfare should be everybody’s last resort).

Even light tanks require numerous parachutes and tend to damage themselves when they crash into the ground.

Today’s invention allows ultra heavy armoured vehicles to suddenly appear where they are needed.

First, each tank is made of separate modules eg turret, left track+suspension, right track+suspension, ammunition payload, main hull and perhaps even a separate crew module.

Each of these is mounted on its own shock absorbing ‘skid’ with its own chutes, so that it lands separately.

The skids are motorised, so that they can bring modules together very rapidly to form a huge armoured vehicle.

Each skid has a ramp and winch to help assemble the vehicle autonomously.

If a part is broken on landing, say a turret, it communicates that fact and is replaced automatically with another one from the same drop.

The skids can then be reused as shelters or perhaps light troop carriers.

Many belts these days are fitted with rather effective, lightweight, snap-together plastic buckles. The female end of these is almost always permanently stitched to the belt.

This means that, if you need to cope eg with an increase in waist size, you really only have the option of buying a whole second belt.

Today’s invention (in orange) is a secondary male-to female insert which can be used to extend one’s belt (by using several of these, if necessary).

Make these small and/or flexible enough and the whole belt might be made of them.
A similar approach could be used eg for watch straps.

If you have a heavy motorcycle, it’s easy to find yourself parked facing down a hill, towards a fence, with no way to move the bike backwards.

Today’s invention provides your bike with an emergency reverse gear.

With the bike on the centre stand, wedge the roller under the rear wheel.

Attach two ratchet straps to the centre stand hinge and tighten.

Sit on the bike and gingerly let out the clutch, so that the rotation of the rear wheel drives the roller and the bike moves a metre or two backwards, allowing your escape.

The system is small and light enough to fit in a topbox.

(I just discovered this!)

The McLaren formula one team apparently takes a 3D printer with them to the trackside during races.

This is supposed to allow the creation of replacement parts during the race (although I’m not sure about how the F1 rules people regard that).

Today’s invention is inspired by that idea, but for a much more prosaic purpose.

In order to extend the life of everyone’s car tyres, imagine a small 3D printer that fits inside a car’s wheel arch and delivers a very fine layer of rubber onto the surface of a tyre, in the correct tread pattern.

A car, parked on say a Quickjack, might have four of these operating, perhaps every night, scrubbing and rotating each wheel whilst providing a nice, new, vulcanised rubber surface by morning.

I’ve been trying to take exciting film footage of motorcycles, for a forthcoming tourism project. It tends to be easier to work with a good quality DSLR camera mounted inside a following car.

The downside, though, is that cars don’t lean and the footage looks relatively static and boring.

Today’s invention is a reverse gimbal: a camera mount which leans the camera to the left as the car goes around a left hand bend.

In reality, this would be achieved by a servo motor wired to the car’s existing stability control sensors, but I’ve shown a simple, ‘Coriolis acceleration’ version.

A red weight, heavier than the camera, is attached to a pole and the whole thing can pivot on the dashboard.

As the car turns to the left, the weight tends to stay where it is relative to the car and thus the camera tilts in the same way as the biker in front leans.