Airships are increasingly thought of as global transport vehicles for the future.

Today’s invention is a dirigible design which consists of a number of modules, many of which contain a vertical matrix of super-strong, partially evacuated tubes (the others would contain cargo or passengers).

These tubes can withstand atmospheric pressure but should some become damaged, the whole vehicle will remain aloft.

All these tubes are arranged so as to form a very tall, vertical aerofoil section. The pressure difference between top and bottom faces provides the upthrust required to support the ship (as usual) and the blade-like section minimises drag.

I imagine this would be driven by jet engines embedded in a subset of modules.

For flexibility of operation and safety, groups of modules might be extractable from the stack, rotated through 90 degrees to form a wing, and flown earthwards.

Here’s another of my seemingly unavoidable weaponry ideas.

One problem when firing a handgun is the twisting that happens during recoil. Watch a high-speed film of this and it’s amazing that people don’t break their wrists. Getting the next shot anywhere near on target is therefore going to be difficult.

In order to help alleviate this difficulty, I suggest creating a revolver with two barrels. These admit bullets simultaneously from diametrically-opposite chambers and fire together using a unified hammer system.

The propellant in each bullet could be halved to lessen the overall recoil. The barrels are rifled in opposite directions so that the torques created cancel each other out and the wrist twisting is greatly reduced.

No need to restrict the cylinder to only six bullets of course. More bullets = lower recoil movement.

Lego bricks (never ‘Legos’) have always been important in my life. I even built several working demo machines using them whilst at Imperial college, much to the irritation of the staff who didn’t understand creativity.

One annoying aspect though is the colours. The only way to get 10,000 pale grey bricks is to shell out a fortune and buy them individually -assuming the shade is even manufactured.

Today’s invention is a modification to the classic brick design. Each brick would be made so that the walls, which are currently solid, would be hollow. A huge number of say 4*4 bricks would be made in this way using transparent plastic and with one of the lugs on each a screw-in plug.

This would allow all bricks to be submerged in a tub of water-soluble, coloured dye. They would fill with colour and the screw lugs would be sealed.

In this way, one could build a massive sculpture in colours of one’s own choice (perhaps subtler than the stock ones).

Ladders remain both ubiquitous and potentially lethal. Someone I know fell off one and broke both femurs.

Today’s invention is a system designed to lessen the severity of such accidents.

It consists of a number of automotive-type airbags which are stored in pods attached to the base of a ladder. These would be wired to pressure sensors in the ladder rungs and feet, so that the position of a worker would be known to a processor in the pod control unit.

When a fall was in progress (as detected by a sudden asymmetry in rung and foot loadings), the airbags would be timed to fire so as to be fully inflated at the instant the victim made contact with them.

When climbing mountains at very high altitude one’s mental function is impaired enormously. Even doing the simple mental arithmetic to decide how long one’s oxygen supply will last can be impossible.

Today’s invention is an indicator that does the thinking part for a befuddled alpinist.

It consists of a gauge which can monitor both one’s oxygen consumption rate and the present altitude. This profile is then compared with the data from a number of expert climbers, as measured at the same spot on this route during an earlier climb.

If one’s performance is noticeably poorer than the average for the earlier climbers (who survived) and the vertical distance to the summit is still large, the gauge could issue a warning saying “Descend now”.

Failure to do so would publicly label a climber as reckless and lessen his/her popularity as a partner in future.

During the descent, the oxygen might be dispensed automatically in response to eg panicky breathing or prolonged pauses with no change in altitude.