Message posted by habu-e6 on December 13, 2007 at 22:38:48 PST:

Thats a far out thought, but thats what they told all dreamers. "If we put down all the dreamers we would still be banging rocks together". DF

You could use a very long small diameter tunnel to house a super conducting rail gun used to launch a small recon uav aircraft. It would have to be long enough so that it could build up enough speed to ignite a very compact fuel source, maybe a plastic fuel or possibly the atmosphere itself or a combination.

The rail gun would also have to be long enough for the vehicle to build up to that speed and keep g force levels below the amount that the structure and components can handle. It would be a wild guess for me but that baby would be moving. I think the materials use for space shuttle tiles would crumble at those velocities.

Someone that was good in physics should be able to come up with some numbers pretty easy. The biggest problem may be dealing with heat.

I’m sure that with the advancement of material composites, such as combining super alloys with non-metallic’s using high powered CAD controlled 6 axis LASERS to bond ceramics at a microscopic level into base metal alloys, it may be possible. It’s probably already being done.

The vehicle would be so small that it could just land in a net. There would be no data to recover as it is uploaded at real time to satellites. It would not need any stealth because it would look like any other meteor flying through the upper atmosphere.

With the advancement of micro processors, and nano technology a vehicle such as this could be no bigger than a few feet long if that. Check out this link- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanotechnology

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