Category: Possible inventions

Armoured vehicles can be made quite resistant to attack by eg shells, using clever, multi-layer armour.

Today’s invention seeks to lessen that resistance.

Imagine firing two shots in very quick succession. The penetration power would be much greater, since both impacts would occur at the same spot.

It’s hard, however, to have even an autoloading tank gun reload and fire quickly enough to achieve such a ‘double tap’ with heavy ammunition.

Instead then, fire shells which have a heat retaining rear end (or flare) to act as tracers.

Normal, relatively cheap, heat-seeking rockets carried by ground troops can be automatically triggered and fired within a second of the tank’s shot, so that the missiles follow and catch up with the shell.

This results in several items of ordnance arriving at the target almost simultaneously.

I understand that many people of Germany live in fear that there will be another Chernobyl nuclear disaster, perhaps even one within the EU.

Today’s invention is a rapid response mechanism to ensure that radioactive particles given off by a plant on fire don’t rise into the atmosphere and spread beyond the immediate area.

A shell made of steel and concrete is made in two nesting half-hemispheres (black and blue). This structure would be built around every existing nuclear plant (red), without being particularly costly.

The outer half-hemisphere (blue) would be free to rotate, so that the two overlapping half-hemispheres could become a sealed hemisphere. This would be dragged into place (once the plant was evacuated) by a small, autonomous locomotive (green).

In the event of an explosion, this would contain any escaping dust or gas long enough for a sarcophagus to be created from concrete pumped into the sphere by robots.

Today’s invention is a browser which talks to your dvd player and also knows what shows you have watched online.

Then the browser screens out any articles, images, adverts etc which refer to series you have not yet completed viewing.

A great deal of effort goes into making spacesuits. These have to be extremely airtight and so today’s invention is intended to make them more reliable and simpler to don.

Imagine an inner layer of a space suit that is made in sections which join together using seams which are like those at the neck of a ziplock bag.

These sections could be made to fit an individual astronaut’s body perfectly.

After the sections are fitted to the person and the ziplock seams engaged, a 3D printing, handheld ‘sewing machine’ would be run along each seam, sealing it perfectly (These devices are already used in space).

This would do away with the need to use any high specification zips.

After use, the material could be simply cut off, fed back into a shredder, melted and reused.

Many adventure travellers like to take motorcycles with a backup truck. Even 4 wheel drive trucks get stuck in sand or mud. Today’s invention aims to help out.

These vehicles tend to have V-shaped restraints into which the front wheel of each bike can be rolled and secured.

The back of the truck would have hatches in the floor, so that the rear wheels of say two bikes in parallel could hang down and make contact with the ground (however uneven). The front wheels would remain securely fixed in their restraints.

Someone riding in the back could fire up both bikes and operate their throttles when the truck was in need of some extra traction, turning it briefly into a six wheeled vehicle.

It seems that wind tunnels have been labelled bad, because they are much more costly to run than simulation software. So today’s invention is an alternative to them, but which retains their potential for precision.

Most tunnels rely on dynamical scaling: essentially using model cars and planes scaled down so that their aerodynamic behaviour stays the same (ie the same Reynold’s number -the ratio between inertial and viscous forces), as the full scale flow (Re = density, flow speed, size/ dynamic viscosity).

It’s common to model airflows by using water. Both the viscosity and density are increased. Given that the water flow speed is lower than say that of a car on a motorway, to keep Re the same, requires the use of a larger than life model.

This would be impossible in a wind tunnel, where size raises the costs enormously.

There are, however, many places where there are tide races…predictable, high speed tidal flows within channels.

If we put our big, low-drag car design in a tideway we could do a bunch of tests at very low cost.

Today’s invention is an outline for a new form of ultra survivable tank.

It consists of a cylindrical module for each crew member (green), as well as one for the main gun.

These modules (except for the sealed weapons modules) each contain the controls for all the main functions of the tank and are individually armoured (small spheres are much harder to crack open). They can rotate and vary their height using hydraulic rams (red). This allows the vehicle to go into low-profile or conning tower mode.

As well as enabling a tank to continue operating if one or more modules are damaged, each of them will have an ejection device(turquoise) with parachute, so that crew members can exit and disperse if their systems are broken or they themselves are injured.