Mechanical battery.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Far more sensible than accepting that 'energy' is 'real'...

[Clive Arthur]

<snipped>

It's not intuitive, but it is fundamental to their operation! You simply can't generate/supply a torque indefinitely without something to react against. If you could 'meddle with the laws of physics' in such a way, satellite manufacturers would be beating a path to your door.

Look at it this way. Without external influence, you can't hold a bike leaning to one side using gyros, the best you could do is keep it there for a very short time while your gyros precessed over their useful range. It's an inverted pendulum and needs constant correction to remain upright.

You can hold a bike leaning to one side if you let it rest on your finger, and this is the quiescent situation which the gyros enforce - touch a balancing bike and your finger is pushed and moved back dynamically until the system is at rest leaning against it.

I'd like to see that footage. Yes, it can be made to work after a fashion, but not well enough for other than novelty or demonstration purposes. Lit motors has a lot of animations but very little real video

- you'd think no-one had access to a video camera. I don't know if it was a scam from the start or if there was a sudden 'oh shit' moment when they made their prototype some years ago.

Schilovsky's vehicle was an impractical novelty too, it demonstrated a principle. One of the best photographs from the Brennan monorail shows his young daughter sat in a small scale monorail car balanced on a wire rope several feet off the ground. You can see how this might easily impress investors, though I think Brennan was genuine.

(Gyro bearing seizing is a non-issue from the safety perspective if you have two.)

[Andy Burns]

How does a reaction wheel differ from a flywheel then?

[Clive Arthur]

Both gyros and reaction wheels are used, I think gyros are more compact, but they both need to be periodically reset with a burst of rockety gas stuff (or something reacting against the earth's magnetic field I think, or maybe solar wind, ask an expert) if required to compensate for a constant applied torque.

Reactionless torque is like reactionless drive, it needs a special sort of physics found only on YouTube.

[tabbypurr]

Google away, there have been a handful of gyro cars, some filmed. Eg

It was a demonstrator for his proposed railway. He drove it around London, it worked.

The 2 are connected together. If one stops, so does the other. If that didn't happen, things would be much worse!

NT

[Clive Arthur]

<snipped>

That sort of makes the point. Barely jogging speed, rocking around. A fun toy. Even the later track test shows the driver really fighting with the steering.

After a fashion. 'Around London' is a bit of a stretch, and driven slowly and gingerly according to contemporaneous reports. I think the Schilovsky vehicle, in addition to the gyros, used moving mass to help balance, maybe that was later. He only had the one gyro, so cornering was rather asymmetric.

In which vehicle are the two connected? Not Lit, not Brennan. That's one of the safety features, if a gyro fails you still have the one to hold you steady enough for a while.

There's one of Brennan's prototypes in the York railway museum, maybe about the size of a very small car.

Such a shame, but it's been shown to be inadequate for practical use several times over the last century. Almost there, but never quite.

This guy has a lot of fun with them...

[bert]

God invented work. And to do work you need energy. So she invented energy. Simples.

[tabbypurr]

it seems to work in that demo

NT