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YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

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Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#281

Post by dmayman »

dalbasal wrote: post #207
dmurray wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, this seems like a huge problem and this > The startup’s most pertinent problem is creating the autonomous stabilization technologies that will make flying the Speeder effortless and safe. looks like a smokescreen for marketing to the tech crowd. Everyone is going to believe they can solve the stabilisation problem: that's "just software" and we see demos of robots solving stabilisation problems all the time.…

If that "most pertinent problem" is tech savvy investor/journalist bait... it's genius. I read that and thought "well that's probably solveable." OTOH... In the context of a moonshot, maybe the non-existence of an affordable & appropriate engine is ok. Tesla started with an unaffordable battery, and built a really expensive car with it. The car was good though, compared to other cars in the sheiks & princes price ran…

If we can fly quickly AND safely and land within feet of an injured person and that makes a difference of them living or dying, isn’t that worth a shot?

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#282

Post by dmayman »

darkpuma wrote: post #224
dalbasal wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that "most pertinent problem" is tech savvy investor/journalist bait... it's genius. I read that and thought "well that's probably solveable." OTOH... In the context of a moonshot, maybe the non-existence of an affordable & appropriate engine is ok. Tesla started with an unaffordable battery, and built a really expensive car with it. The car was good though, compared to other cars in the sheiks & princes price ran…

The military market for tiny turbine engines has been serious for decades; cruise missiles use them. I really do not believe that a plucky SV attitude towards engineering and VC funding is going to waltz into this domain and shock the world. But I definitely believe that SV self-confident arrogance would lead some to convince themselves otherwise.

Every minute saved in reaching a stroke or heart attack victim reduces mortality by approx 10%. Worth fighting for?

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#283

Post by dmayman »

votingprawn wrote: post #279
Animats wrote: post #153

Where are they getting the engine? You can get model aircraft jet engines with enough power for this.[1] Various human-carrying craft have been built that way, such as the Zapata Flyboard.[2] But the engines have a lifespan measured in hours and not enough reliability for carrying humans. That's why all the demo videos of these things are over water, or tethered. People have been trying to build small, cheap jet engi…

Based on the spec I'm guessing it is an AMT Nike Five engines in the render, assume 1 is redundant: 705lbs to metric: 3134N. Divide by 4 = 784N which is _exactly_ the max thrust of a Nike.

Yes you are correct. We are also working on our turbofan. Way better sfc, quieter and cooler exhaust.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#284

Post by votingprawn »

votingprawn wrote: post #279
Animats wrote: post #153

Where are they getting the engine? You can get model aircraft jet engines with enough power for this.[1] Various human-carrying craft have been built that way, such as the Zapata Flyboard.[2] But the engines have a lifespan measured in hours and not enough reliability for carrying humans. That's why all the demo videos of these things are over water, or tethered. People have been trying to build small, cheap jet engi…

Based on the spec I'm guessing it is an AMT Nike Five engines in the render, assume 1 is redundant: 705lbs to metric: 3134N. Divide by 4 = 784N which is _exactly_ the max thrust of a Nike.

Doing some bistromaths on the stated hover performance.

With a 231lb empty weight, 180lb rider, and 5 gallons of kerosene (ultra light version) you get

104kg + 81kg + 15 kg = 200kg

sfc of a Nike is 40 grams / (kN second) (Should have gone with Hawk ;) )

Lets say hover thrust on a nice still day will be around ~ 1.9kN -> 76.7grams per second of flight.

Assuming I've not made any mistakes that gives roughly 3.5 minutes of hovering flight on that 15kg of fuel (ignoring the fact the vehicle gets slightly lighter as the fuel burns off).

That sort of matches up with the spec, assuming the 10-22 minutes stated is for a lighter human on the experimentally licensed version of the vehicle.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#285

Post by tim333 »

estsauver wrote: post #183
Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're VCs. They have to bet on moonshots, because they bet on a lot of companies, most of which fail. If they don't bet on crazy ideas, it means the few that succeed, will only succeed like a "regular" company would succeed - with some nice just above positive cashflow, growing in the next 20 years to somewhat sustainable business - nice and slow. This will not fuel financing other 100s of companies that have faile…

Yah, but I don't know if it's really fair to lump all VC businesses into the same bucket. Weebly and Boom don't same like the same kind of risk.

Also YC seems to have changed in that regard under Sam Altman compared to PG. The old YC did very well with web startups like Airbnb and Reddit but they didn't have the nuclear fusion and supersonic aircraft. It remains to be seem if YC succeeds with the latter stuff but well done to them for trying.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#286

Post by jecel »

antt wrote: post #127
ehnto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I don't think we would ever have flying cars either. We can barely handle driving on flat surfaces and I suspect most people on the road only get by idly emulating simple line following machines rather than actually engaging the whole situation. It takes a third party to orchestrate busy sections of our current flying vehicles, planes, so I can't see any alternative to full automation of a mass of flying c…

I mean cars wouldn't be accepted today if they were just invented. The only reason why we think 30k deaths a year is fine is because "that's the way it's always been", and cars come from an age when one out of three children would die before they turned 5. In a sane world we would have only segregated rail transport in urban areas and cars in rural areas where the population density is less than 10 people a square mi…

For the whole world, cars kill 1.2 million people per year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Though there are better places than the US, quite a few countries are willing to put up with absurdly higher risks.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#287

Post by dmayman »

darkpuma wrote: post #261
farisjarrah wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah this point piqued my interest. Before I thought this was a waste of time for YC to be throw $150,000 at this company, but with the military aspect it makes it a lot more of a feasible business model. The military doesn't need something with many hours of flight time for all scenarios. They might just need to get medical supplies delivered to the field really quick and this could more then accomplish that potential…

Yes, very small turbines have a variety of military applications beyond just cruise missiles. Small turbine driven reusable drones are one possible application. I'm not sure if you're trying to imply it, but YC funding defense tech under the guise of funding toys for the ultra-wealthy would be interesting, but I don't honestly think that's what's going on here. I don't think they're likely to develop novel turbine te…

We’re actively working with army, navy and marines in US. Why put a Blackhawk and crew at risk where one it a swarm of autonomous cargo Speeders can do same work. 400-600lbs cargo of equip, blood supplies etc. Not to be used for insertion of operators in covert mission but in overt ops our noise signature isn’t a factor.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#289

Post by darkpuma »

dmayman wrote: post #287
darkpuma wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, very small turbines have a variety of military applications beyond just cruise missiles. Small turbine driven reusable drones are one possible application. I'm not sure if you're trying to imply it, but YC funding defense tech under the guise of funding toys for the ultra-wealthy would be interesting, but I don't honestly think that's what's going on here. I don't think they're likely to develop novel turbine te…

We’re actively working with army, navy and marines in US. Why put a Blackhawk and crew at risk where one it a swarm of autonomous cargo Speeders can do same work. 400-600lbs cargo of equip, blood supplies etc. Not to be used for insertion of operators in covert mission but in overt ops our noise signature isn’t a factor.

For unmanned for cargo delivery it makes a lot of sense and could be revolutionary. But putting a man on it doesn't make so much sense; whoever was standing on top would be a very noisy obvious target and even if that weren't the case the case, the system would probably create a ton of casualties anyway just from people getting too excited and crashing it.

Re: YC's latest moonshot bet is a startup building a $380K “flying motorcycle”

#290

Post by designtofly »

abock1 wrote: post #270
Animats wrote: post #153

Where are they getting the engine? You can get model aircraft jet engines with enough power for this.[1] Various human-carrying craft have been built that way, such as the Zapata Flyboard.[2] But the engines have a lifespan measured in hours and not enough reliability for carrying humans. That's why all the demo videos of these things are over water, or tethered. People have been trying to build small, cheap jet engi…

We have actually teamed up with a company called AMT Netherlands to build our custom engines. The engines are not cheap because most of the companies are making them in very very small batches. We are currently increasing our numbers so the numbers are coming down considerably. We are actually currently working on a small thrust class turbofan which would solve a lot of issues that turbojets present. If you check out…

What bypass ratio are your turbofans? Your argument seems to be that because it's a turbofan (bypass > 0), you've "solved" all of the issues with turbojets. But at this size, you've still got a bypass ratio that's much closer to a turbojet than a modern commercial airline engine.
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