Difference in Purpose

[stickmaker]

 
There are several individuals and groups which fly demilitarized F-104s for airshows. I have this mental image of a young pilot in an F-35 encountering one of these planes, practicing for an airshow, and reporting it as a UFO. 

"It made a bunch of high-speed maneuvers I couldn't match, then went vertical. That's when I lost it."

Comments

[kengr]

Well, unlike a "real" UFO, it'd have a filed flight plan and a working transponder.

Hmm. Now I'm thinking about somebody in the classic "build your own spacecraft using unusual tech" type story.

If he has flown a lot of experimental aircraft from his spread/base/whatever then he'll have a spare transponder or two. And maybe even be able to sign of on flightworthiness.

So now we have something that *really* looks odd, and manuevers weirdly. And it's squawking a civilian transponder code...

If you haven't read it, track down a copy of G. Harry Stine's book "Star Driver. Just be sure to shop around as "new" copies are being sold for prices up to and above $100. Used copies are much more reasonable.

It's basically the story of the Dean Drive with the serial numbers filed off and the tech updated a bit.

So these guys at a corporate research lab, doing some odd "basic research" come up with a "reactionless" drive. Due to various happenings, they need to go public about it in a way that can't be ignored, but also won't get them in trouble with the orders to drop it that some corporate vultures gave them.

So they wind up installing it in a Cessna belong to one of the engineers.And they make a "perfectly normal" flight. "Testing a special power mod" is what they tell the air traffic controllers.

They draw the attention of everyone monitoring ATC frequencies when they request permission to go to a higher altitude than that model of Cessna is supposed to be able to reach.

They get *everyone's attention when they request permission to go to 35,000 feet. Which there should be now way in hell a prop plane could reach. But they do.

Even more fun when they have a close approach to an airliner and the pilots not only confirm that it *is* a Cessna, but that the propeller isn't moving.

All questions about how they are doing it get answered with "proprietary info, you'll have to contact corporate headquarters".

Then they land (the batteries are running low) and they hide the plane and the two people who were flying it. And watch the fun begin as the flight becomes a major news item.

And the corporate assholes/idiots are getting hit with questions they can't avoid.

One of the few stories of the "invent a space drive" type where the characters manage to make their flight *legally* and deal with all the fun publicity, etc.

A number of others have had great fun dealing with the authorities looking for the UFO...

[stickmaker]

Would the military pilot even look for a transponder, since no civilian plane could fly like that? :-) Yeah, though, the mystery would be solved quickly.

I read book that when it was titled _The Daleth Effect_.

My variation is to assume that the events of the first part of the original, magazine serial version of _The Skylark of Space_ (which is in public domain and available on Project Gutenberg, complete with illustrations) was based on something Doc Smith heard second- or third-hand. That after the "real" Seaton and Crane never returned from their first flight (due to a flaw in their "space car" design) the families sealed the lab and just left it. That a century later (about now) the contents were auctioned off, and someone rediscovered the copper catalyst.

This isn't actually an FTL drive. (Doc fudged a lot.) By the time you get much above 90% of C even using Newtonian mechanics you have more kinetic energy in the object than its mass equivalent. However, it is great for tooling around the Solar System. In my fantasy, one of the first missions for the team developing the tech is to mount a docking adaptor on their test vehicle and send it to the ISS. An astronaut has a badly broken leg and the _Soyuz_ is a notoriously rough ride on reentry.

[kengr]

I think their radar automatically shows transponder info.

"The Daleth Effect" was by somebody else. Harry Harrison? I read it when it came out in Analog. I recall the artists having to explain that he put propellors on the sub even though the story was explicit about it not having them,
because otherwise no one would have know it was a sub!

"Star Driver" came out as a paperback in 1985.

Yeah, I recall your ideas about an alternate timeline for Seaton & Crane.

One *big* advantage they had was the major lack of regulations back before WWI one and for a short time afterwards.

There are a *lot* of stories with this plot. John Varley's "Red Thunder" and a number of others I've read.

Heck "Rocket Ship Galileo" qualifies!

Gina Marie Wylie's Kinsella stories are good. And she points out several things that get overlooked when it comes to exploring "strange new worlds". she also shows a lot of ways you can die in space if you make mistakes.

Laurence Dahners has several series involving that sort of thing, and he does ok, though he could use a science adviser to point out a few "oops" types mistakes.

Brian Whiting's "Galactic Startup" is yet another, and includes the whole "dodging the government bit".

I was able to list these quickly because I keep track of what I read on my Kindle, in case I want to re-read it.

There are a variety of others on Amazon, and I'm *excluding* the huge number where the protagonists are using recovered alien tech!

BTW, a big problem for anyone trying this sort of thing nowadays is the Outer Space Treaty (or one of the related things that got set up in the last 50 years).

It makes the *government* of whatever country you are a citizen of responsible for your actions if your are operating a spacecraft. One of the many barriers the Soviets came up with to try to discourage the capitalists from getting into space.

Most governments aren't real happy with private citizens being able to create messes that they (the government, not the citizen) will be responsible for.

[stickmaker]

_Rocketship Gallileo_ was supposed to be the first in a series of juveniles, collectively called "The Young Atomic Engineers." Unfortunately, it fell through.