WALRUS was a DARPA program to move massive amounts of military cargo into war theaters quickly, by means of a revolutionary hybrid airship. It was supposedly canceled in November of 2006 in spite of the fact that tests were sucessful - so successful that one of their contractors plans to build a commercial version. The video above shows a Walrus-derived vehicle in civilian configurations. For a longer video showing the military version, click here.
An article in Wired quoted Program Manager Preston Carter as saying Walrus would rely on new technologies like electrostatic ion propulsion. Oh really? The machines in the videos are shown with conventional propulsion, but DARPA obviously had something else in mind.
Since ion propulsion involves the manipulation and acceleration of plasmas, I started to wonder just what one of these things would look like surrounded by glowing plasma? Pretty otherworldly I'd guess. Then I remembered something else I'd read about Russian experiments that indicated plasma could reduce aerodynamic drag.
An article in SpaceDaily discusses the potential of plasmas to greatly reduce drag and perhaps even allow slow aircraft to move supersonically:
...what sent aeronautical engineers reaching for their slide rules was that the sphere somehow experienced less drag when it entered the plasma. The group found that this was not some minor effect: they measured a whopping 30 per cent reduction in drag. Aeronautical engineers usually struggle to shave fractions of a per cent off drag, so the results set their pulses racing.
Others in Russia even reported that plasmas could somehow reduce the drag in subsonic flows as well. With less drag, might it be possible to fly sluggish airliners far faster--perhaps even at supersonic speeds?
What if the Walrus program wasn't canceled, but simply went "black"? Why go black? Who knows? Maybe they're using nuclear power to generate plasma and they don't want to people to know there are reactors flying over the heads. Maybe someone decided it would be a great way to do research on how populations react to unexplained objects. Maybe the government is just paranoid. Maybe I am.
Imagine a giant airship, able to move at outrageous speed inside a bubble of glowing plasma, with silent ion propulsion. Wouldn't that look a lot like what was seen in Stephenville?
I'm just sayin'...
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