Holy shit, who knew Tim Draper and Don Trump shared a tailor? For real though, I can't figure out which of those companies (ALEF or Long Shot) has a higher chance of never building a full scale prototype. It's cheating to bet "both". I have a very good buddy who's involved in the personal aircraft business, and he tells me that no matter how autonomous you make the thing, there's a snowball's chance in hell that the FAA is going to let anyone who isn't a pilot pilot it. Every time you see a dipshit on the side of the road walking to the gas station to get a gas can to fill up their car that they left on the side of the road (and fuckin' hell if I haven't been that dipshit in my younger years), just ask yourself if you want that person flying their car. I am curious about their modeling, because my understanding back from my fluid mechanics days was the the primary driver of ditching bi- and tri-planes in favor of long single wings was that the drag from the interwing connections was a giant net loss relative to the extra lift they produce. An infinity wing plane doesn't seem that make that an easier problem ("We didn't break the laws of physics, we fooled them" Um, what?). But to circle back to Long Shot's funding, $1.5M isn't very much given that they were granted a Phase II SBIR. Phase II SBIR grants are worth at least a million and up to 2 in some cases, so it's possible that the got a couple hundred grand from these high profile billionaires, and that gives them good PR and not much more. What's 100K to Sam Altman? I'm currently waiting on the review of a Phase I SBIR and I'm going to be mighty pissed off if I don't get it ($300k) after reading this garbage! Edit to add that I'd like to hear further thoughts about why betting on sure losers is a positive for VCs. Just as a write off? A tax dodge?
The video I shared of the Alef? That's the "VC comedy" video. There's also an "engineering comedy" video: Those three smiling individuals above are getting checks for "stuff" from Tim Draper. It's kind of like getting checks to pay off your campaign debts except you don't ever have to run for office. It's funny seeing the same faces around the same faces around the same terrible ideas - it's how you get dumb money to give to the smart money without being accused of running a Ponzi scheme. And hey - it's VC! 95% of them are supposed to lose money, right? So if you've got a "sure thing" like fuckin' WeWork for some dumb reason? That means you can literally light your Alef money on fire. http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/64b6f782d1187-life-is-parody.php
And hold the fuck up. CNN says that the company says that it tested a skeletonized version of a full sized prototype, while their own stupid video says they have only made "tiny" models fly. Bullshit that they have a full scale working prototype. To make a car drive 200 miles let alone fly 100 you need batteries that weigh thousands of pounds, and ain't no way they have fit a ton of batteries in that tiny little cockpit.
Oh it's a marvelous contraption. - Take a quadcopter. - Make it big enough to haul 200lbs of cargo. - No, not that big. Make it car-sized. - Now cover the top surface with venetian blinds. - Now put a bubble in the middle of it. - Now turn the bubble. - Now turn the bubble again. - Now go through the air perpendicular to the ground. - No, you don't get control surfaces. - You get tires for some reason. - The ones on the right of your craft steer, by the way. - Enjoy. ________________________________ The ukraine war shitposters dug up something marvelous last week. It reminded me very much of this. May I present the combat debut of the legendary T14 Armata:
That's some offshore content farm cranking out random weird shit. Their whole thing was that the FAA granted an airworthyness certificate to them a couple weeks ago. As my professional pilot buddy pointed out, you can get an airworthyness certificate for a kleenex box. But that offshore content farm? They didn't make that video. They stole it from somewhere. So at some point, someone with a vested interest in proving that bricks can fly if you only make them out of nothing, doodled up the world's ugliest Jetsons future.