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UFOs?
- Thread starter nittany03
- Start date
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.
If you notice it was pretty much all labor.
Which suggests to me that the "device" seen in the pictures was probably constructed in old man Pais' garage. The real scandal here is how NAWC-AD ever entertained even a semi-serious look into this thing.
Must have been a SECNAV-approved garage build, then. Since the patents were conferred to SECNAV.
Take the devil's money and that's likely to happen. You can't tell me with a straight face, that after reading through all that documentation, that this "device" isn't pure fantasy. I mean, seriously. The one that's supposed to deflect an asteroid that's powered by a "fission pebble bed" and a whirling vortex of plasma? I'm sure Pax River will get right on that powerplant design. Hard to tell whether Pais is a kook, of if the writers at The War Zone are just portraying it that way.
Must have been a SECNAV-approved garage build, then. Since the patents were conferred to SECNAV.
Read this patent application. It's full of every conceivable piece of sci-fi "engineering" one could dream up.
Several possibilities:
Either Sais is the greatest scientific mind this world has ever known and he has propelled mankind's technology baseline forward 200 years... or he's an insane person.
Either Sais, during his spare time while working as a GS-15, without any significant resourcing or engineering support, has singlehandedly developed the most advanced technology mankind could conceive of... or he's an insane person.
Either Sais has inexplicably allowed the Navy to hold the patents to his technology that would undoubtedly have made him the richest man on this planet... or he's an insane person.
Ehhh, I am not convinced on only those three options. I think it’s possible that Dr. Pais is just the Navy’s designated patent-submitter-dude, and these concepts come from other DoN/DoD teams. That would explain why Dr. Pais doesn’t have multiple Nobel prizes and hasn’t yet been hired by Elon Musk to a million-dollar annual salary.
Also, it’s possible some of these patents are for items that don’t exist except in theory - but then it begs the question, why even patent it in the first place, if it’s not real? and why should such a patent be held by the govt instead of industry?
I don’t have good answers. The patents are super weird. If they’re in fact some elaborate, long-term disinformation campaign against a state adversary, I am unsure what sort of objectives we’d be trying to achieve with such disinformation.
I’ll give you this, though. Apparently, this Dr. Pais signs his emails with the year written in roman numerals. I wouldn’t call that insane but that is definitely a quirk you don’t see a lot.
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Years ago I supported a NAVAIR scientist who was a huge proponent of wing in ground effect (WIG) aircraft. He had done lots of solid work for the Navy, so the sense I got from leadership was that if he was really invested in it, we’ll support looking into it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
What he wanted to do, and there were steps taken to pursue it before he passed away early from a heart attack, was to fly a Vulcan bomber at high speeds and low altitudes to get some data. He said that anecdotal evidence from Brit pilots showed their fuel burn rates at high speeds and low altitudes (half a wing span in altitude low) were way lower than the charts suggested they should be, the charts being extrapolations of higher altitude data. He had a theory for why. Lots of aerodynamicists thought he was FOS, but his passion and past track record let him push it forward.
This situation kind of echoes of that one.
What he wanted to do, and there were steps taken to pursue it before he passed away early from a heart attack, was to fly a Vulcan bomber at high speeds and low altitudes to get some data. He said that anecdotal evidence from Brit pilots showed their fuel burn rates at high speeds and low altitudes (half a wing span in altitude low) were way lower than the charts suggested they should be, the charts being extrapolations of higher altitude data. He had a theory for why. Lots of aerodynamicists thought he was FOS, but his passion and past track record let him push it forward.
This situation kind of echoes of that one.
There are lots of S&T projects out there that are basically lab science. In the grand scheme the cost of paying their salary is nothing and if one of them happens upon a usable idea they've just made the investment worthwhile. That said, there's a long way to go to show that the ideas are worth contributing large sums of money to, note the TRL in the charts. To put it bluntly, I bet Taxi1's buddy never got his Vulcan.
