I’m designing an electric flying house. The chair can recline into a bed & is also an airtight toilet (so it doesn’t smell). The sink faucet doubles as a shower head. Food is stored in overhead compartments and clothes & belongings are stored in floor compartments. It’ll have curtains for privacy too.
Exterior. The wheels are for parking, not for driving on the road.
Flight controls
Left armrest: up down buttons, joystick for forwards/backwards/left/right
L=landing gear
Right armrest: fans (air comes from exterior vents through ceiling + electric heater), interior lights,
joystick for pointing headlights (will go on bottom center of aircraft)
Is that supposed to be water flowing from the top to the bottom? Then when you’re getting low on water in the top tank, you fly inverted for a couple of hours while it flows back the other way?
Yes. The gravity pulls the water down through the hose. The end of the hose has a lever to turn the water on and off. When you run out of water, you’d have to land and refill somewhere. Although, I am considering water recycling, like how they do on the International Space Station. I think water recycling would require a pump, filters, and stuff. Also, I didn’t add an tilt controls to the aircraft because I wanted the house to be level while flying. Instead of tilting the craft to accelerate, like a drone, the propellers tilt to create directional thrust. Each propellers can also rotate 360º, so they can point in any direction. It’d be really cool, although unrealistic, if solar panels could generate enough energy to keep the house flying, so it didn’t have to land to refuel.
What is the planned GVW? How much power will be required to get it into the air and keep it there? What is the efficiency rating of your generating system? How much power can you generate with your gravity system? Where will the solar panels be mounted? How much surface area do you need for PV cells to be able to charge the batteries you’d need to carry. What kind of batteries have you specified? How many do you need? Where will they fit?
This brought to my mind a “char” - a combination of “Chair” and “Car” referenced in a fable told by Vera Allwen in Ernst Callenbach’s speculative fiction follow on to Ecotopia: Ecotopia Emerging.
Given that the fable is dystopian, it wasn’t a pleasant thought.
@sjdorst Just think about how much less housecleaning & maintenance you’d need to do if the house only had a chair. The thought of less responsibilities and more free time makes me happy. Ideally, I’d like to combine the sink and chair to reduce the complexity of the design even more. The design kinda reminds me of the Jetsons.
@DaveR I honestly don’t know the math behind it, but I was thinking the design would call for batteries similar to Tesla’s. Preferably, the aircraft would be as light as possible and have the highest energy to thrust ratio possible. The batteries could fit into the floor of the ship. I wasn’t planning on generating energy with gravity, but the wing could be made of solar panels. Also, I want to figure out a way to make the propellers quiet, so the house is peaceful…
You might find it useful to figure out the weight of the vehicle and the batteries. What is the current density of the Tesla batteries? How much do they weigh? How many will you need to run the motors, the motor controllers, and the other systems required to make it flyable? As for the noise, you’ll have to work on the blade shape and size and figure out how many RPMs it’ll take to move enough air to keep it flying. One thing that will help to keep the noise level down is to design the rotors so the blade tips remain subsonic
Time to sit down with a calculator and do some math.
It would be ideal if the house was the size of a wand. If people figured out how to synthesize cellular matter, then the rod could intake inanimate matter and have food come out the other end. If a rod could generate everything people need to survive, then that’d be amazing. Especially if the wand only cost $1.
I have this ‘Exabode’ concept - cannot imagine just what shape it would eventually take, but ‘propulsion through’ and ‘absorption of’ will certainly figure in it’s design…, could end up looking like a Borg vessel, or maybe just a bigger humanoid shape, like Dave…
If memory serves me well,… it was around 1982, when ‘Lawn Chair Larry’ (aka Larry Walters) helped lay some of the foundational groundwork towards the efforts of flying around in a reclining chair.
Some 42 weather balloons, inflated with helium gas, took him to around 16,000 feet. The descent being controlled with a BB Gun. His efforts celebrated on the national news, and a visit to the David Letterman Show.
