Category: Possible inventions

Infantry on a battlefield will often want to surrender when confronted by tanks or attack helicopters.

This is a perilous exercise, since the process of surrendering to a war machine is not clear and waiting about for the associated infantry to appear is risky.

Today’s invention is a mobile, lightly armoured cell block. This is mounted on a robot chassis and can be air dropped onto a battlefield a few at a time.

Soldiers who want to capitulate, each dump any weapons in a hopper on the side and then enter the vehicle, one at a time, via a metal detector and bomb sniffing doorway. Soldiers each lock themselves into a cubicle and when the cell wagon is full, the vehicle departs to the safety at the rear.

Soldiers who can’t immediately get aboard may pick up a white flag which would be dropped alongside the cell blocks, so that they can give up in the usual way.

When I was small, playing with toy guns was an essential part of growing up. My mother went to great lengths to buy me a plastic Thompson submachine gun and my father modified it so that it could no longer fire the plastic rounds with which it came equipped.

Now, however, toy guns are often considered seriously bad. I guess the thinking is that children may develop violent tendencies but they have ‘World of Warcraft’ for that. It certainly became actively dangerous to run around the Belfast streets with a black plastic gun in my five year old hands.

Today’s invention is for parents who want to discourage their kids from gunplay.

The grips of the toy gun would be made of metal plates. These would be connected in a circuit with a very small voltage across them.

The voltage would be just sufficient to cause an unpleasant buzzing in a young sherriff’s hand, but without the possibility of doing any actual harm.

(If this seems rather draconian, I urge anyone reading this to search online for bitter aloes, which was commonly used to stop me chewing my fingernails when I was stressed).

Mixing fluids is important and difficult.

Today’s invention is a way to determine optically just how mixed eg a can of paint is (and might be applied to many other industrial processes).

Paint is mixed using a robotically-driven stirrer with an endoscope (or two) within it.
The stirrer can send information to a computer, with image processing capability, which can tell by colour contrast, what the state of mixing is locally.

If it’s well mixed then the endoscope would be automatically moved to a new location within the container.

This process would continue until the degree of local mixing at each 3D location, assessed by contrast, was within an acceptable tolerance. Multispectral contrast would allow machines to spot unmixed regions with greater precision than human eyes.

Doing CPR on someone is often not that effective. One reason is that it’s quite hard to know how hard to pump the chest.

Today’s invention is a simple clip-on device to be worn on the outside of clothing and with a pad set to click when squeezed with the correct force (set for an individual -depending on chest size and clothing density). This would be attached on the best spot for CPR and with an instruction to press hard enough to hear clicks, and to the beat of the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive”).

If the wearer is found lying unconscious, anyone could press on their chest with the correct force to hear the clicks.

People buy cocktails, even at stupid prices. Today’s invention is a beer cocktail.

Consumers should be able to ask for a combination of several beers, so that each pub visit has an element of discovery about it. Popular hybrids could be given common names to make ordering easier.

This would be pretty easy to achieve, using bar taps and a metering unit into which a bartender could enter how much of what beers were required using a keypad.

This would also allow a pub-goer to order his or her favourite beer diluted with zero alcohol beer, in order to limit their intake of alcohol.

The bar would then issue you with a receipt for each drink, stating the amount of alcohol included (with a warning on your phone, as you approach the legal driving limit).

Some of the most popular combinations might be made available in bottled form.

Today’s invention is inspired by the idea of vortex flipping which is beautifully described here.

A fish, moving through water at medium speeds, sheds a vortex from one side of its body and then flips it to the other side of its body, using its tail. This shedding happens from right and left sides in sequence. The effect of this is to significantly lessen the drag force on the fish.

So, imagine say a streamlined vehicle, fitted with a tail device.

This tail can sense the motion of a vortex down its surface (perhaps by using whiskers protruding through the boundary layer) and, just as it is about to be shed, the tail moves to flick it to the opposite side of the vehicle.

This would have a measurable effect on fuel economy, as long as the roadspeed was not so high that the vortices became too small/fast to sense.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that this drag reduction would only be significant at speeds less than about 10 MPH, so this is really only relevant to cyclists and mobility scooters.

Tracks on armoured vehicles are something I can’t stop thinking about.

Today’s invention consists of tracks which run around subsets of roadwheels, rather than all the wheels on one side of a tank.

For example, in the image we have two (green) wheels, linked by a track. The suspension of the vehicle could have several units. At a minimum, each such unit on each side would need to include one drive sprocket, although ideally I’d like to see every unit with its own separate electric motor.

The track around each unit, being much shorter than normal, could be made of something like kevlar reinforced rubber, or chain, rather than requiring to be solid steel.

This would allow each wheel to be made with hollow internals so that extra coiled lengths of track could be stored inside, as shown. (I will come up with a way to have these coils link automatically, in a future post).

This design still spreads the load of a heavy vehicle quite well (especially with interleaved wheels) and massively improves redundancy when under attack, whilst also allowing for faster repairs.

Military jets can find themselves being targetted by smart missiles that are hard to evade.

Today’s invention is to use the missiles being carried by a target plane to save it from attack.

Missiles and rockets are still commonly carried on pylons under-wing. If a missile approaches, the plane can rotate the pylons and fire its missiles in situ, so as to make the whole target plane sidestep out of the way.

Timing would be critical and the g forces for the crew might be rough, but the same could be said of ejection systems. An upgraded version could have variable firing rate characteristics, to make the attacker’s job even more difficult.

I’m sometimes a source of amusement because I like having numerous windows open on my desktop at once. This requires a certain amount of shuffling between overlapping windows, but works better for me than eg switchable desktops.

Today’s invention offers little practical benefit, but adds a certain extra realism to screen displays.

If you have one window which is showing eg a video and which becomes occluded by another window, imagine having the video sound track muted in accordance with the number and placement of other windows on top. This is the audio equivalent of having windows with varied translucency, which seemed popular at one time.

You might choose to have windows with different qualities of sound transmissibility, or arrange a multipart harmony between tracks played in different windows, arranged to form a 3D soundscape. Even the movement of one window over another could have eg a sliding noise sound effect, given the popularity of ASMR.

Some windows might offer an echo effect, dependent on their ‘depth’.

If you actually like having several desktops, it would be possible to have the computer speakers emit sound from some window, off the screen, so as to convey its apparent location.

Audible alerts would thus be somewhat muffled by the ‘depth’ or offscreen position of their window.