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Comment by anonymouz | Hacker News Reader

I'd like to see what became of the project and why it was apparently canceled.

I disagree however with the last statement of the article: "If flying saucers were somehow faster or more efficient or capable of lifting heavier loads, we would almost certainly see them in a commercial setting."

Just because flying saucers aren't used commercially doesn't necessarily imply that they are inefficient. It just means that the flying saucer technology we have at the moment is more inefficient than the fixed wing technology. Fixed wing technology could simply be ahead because it has seen a lot more iterative development.

Endeavors of this kind, that carry a huge upfront investment in the initial technology compared to what's on the market now, tend to be things where a free market really performs badly.

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Nearly infinite odds are that it was canceled because it didn't work.

From TFA: One declassified memo, which seems to be the conclusion of initial research and prototyping, says that Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of "between Mach 3 and Mach 4," (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles (1,150mi, 1850km). [...] According to the cutaway diagrams, the entire thing would even be capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL).

VTOL, Mach 3++, 100,000ft - the only thing it was missing for it to be the perfect military aircraft is a Romulan cloaking device.

If the "flying saucer" could meet those specifications, it would still be classified. Q.E.D. it didn't work.

I'm inclined to agree. This is the answer that Occam's Razor would give us. Especially given the fact that this aircraft was designed so long ago.

It would be one thing if we were reading leaked documentation about an experimental aircraft designed 10 years ago. But we're not. We're reading declassified info about an aircraft designed some 50-60 years ago. If it actually worked, a half-century would be a pretty reasonable timeframe from experiment to slightly more mainstream application. If not commercial application, than certainly military or scientific application. And its existence would have turned up by now. Alternatively, it would be so effective and groundbreaking that it would remain classified to this day, and nobody would have declassified any of this documentation.

EDIT: From the (extensively documented) Wikipedia article on the very similar Avrocar:

"In flight testing, the Avrocar proved to have unresolved thrust and stability problems that limited it to a degraded, low-performance flight envelope; subsequently, the project was cancelled in September 1961."

Additionally, if the "saucer" had any reality to it, the F-35[1] program would not be the mess that it is. It's performance is half the "saucer's" purported performance[2]: short takeoff / vertical landing (STOVL), half the maximum speed, slightly more range (which it is struggling to achieve), approximately half the service ceiling (and the range and service ceiling are probably for the conventional "A" model, not the STOVL "B" model).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning_...

Consider the contemporary development programs RAINBOW and GUSTO and these specs don't seem so far out. Rainbow was to add radar stealth the to U2 (cloaking). Lockheed started development of what became the A-12 in the late 50's. It flew reconnaissance 10 years later. The A-12 could fly at mach 3.35 at 75000 ft. and had a range of 2200 nm.

Those specifications were achieved in that era on other programs. I think the answer requires a deeper look.

Saucers are fixed-wings.

A saucer wing has a very low aspect ratio, which has very low aerodynamic efficiency in cruise. The high-aspect trapezoidal wing we commonly see today is used because it produces much less drag while providing sufficient wing area to lift the aircraft. This has been understood since the 1930s, if not earlier.

I can't see why a saucer airframe would be desirable unless it spent a lot of time in backwards and sideways horizontal flight, where it might have better stability than a traditional wing. The complexity of the controls and thrust arrangement wouldn't seem outweighed by this though.

Actual test performance of Avro's saucers never exceeded altitudes of a few feet and speeds of a few mph.

Not fixed wing like the Avro you're talking about. From the article it sounds like a different craft entirely:

"...Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles ...

...the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coandă effect. Maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge of the disc ..."

Sometimes I think the people who designed these kinds of saucer crafts actually believed in extra-terrestrial UFOs and were on a mission to try and duplicate what they envisioned their technology would be.

Or, our government has witnessed said technology and tried to recreate/reverse-engineer it? Makes you wonder why they would build something like this just on a without a valid reason behind doing so.

The US government seems to be quite ready to try out a lot of fringe stuff if it provides military applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project). They may as well just have gotten their inspiration from the general flying saucer hype.

One reason could be inspiration from Science Fiction.

http://ufopop.org/ufopop_mags.php

I think far more likely, they thought "Saucer? How would that even fly? But wait, what if it was spinning really fast? Hmm... let me get my slide rule...".

Seems like it'd be a fun project to hack together a scale model with someone who understood the physics. Computer control of flight surfaces would probably go a long way towards negating the difficulty of controlling it, and RC jet turbines could power it.

A blended wing body and flying wing configuration have been flown. There are similarities to the saucer in that they use lifting body effects. They benefit from high lift-to-drag ratio.

However, the other handling qualities of these designs make them difficult to fly. Stability can be a real problem. I would guess that air handling problems were the issues that cancelled the saucer program. Perhaps the modern fly-by-wire computer control systems used today might make it easier to fly a saucer.

Technology moving from the military to the private sector is rarely a free market activity. It's much more common for the Pentagon to have bankrolled the upfront R&D costs of a defense contractor, who first provides it to the military and then transitions it to commercial use.

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