Excalibur takes flight
I've always got one eye on the weapons industry, just because I've seen Terminator and know what's coming.
A new unmanned vertical-takeoff combat aircraft has recently been tested and could soon be zipping around the battlefield.
The Excalibur successfully completed its first flight and its big brother will be capable of carrying four Hellfire missiles. They don't beat around the bush when they name missiles, do they? Hellfire - what next? The Wrath-of-God rocket launcher?
Anyways, the Excalibur will have a maximum speed of 460mph but can just as easily hover overhead using its unique hybrid turbine-electric propulsion system.
Aurora Flight Sciences are the company behind it and they're itching to get them in production for the US Army and Navy.
The Excalibur is a funky machine, but I just can't help thinking I've seen something just like it before...
Weird Science Factoid: In its ancient form, the carrot was purple, not orange. And they were thought to be an aphrodisiac too. The Dutch, who like orange, cross bred the vegetable to create the colour we all know today.
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Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
