I have a new piece on Wired.com, entitled: “Fifty Years of Hovercraft: The Tech That Barely Takes Off.” The title pretty much tells you what you need to know. Here’s an excerpt:
Post-Apocalyptic Crowd Control
If ever there was a craft that looked like it had slipped through a time portal, from some steel-hearted, robot-dominated future into our all-too-fragile, meat-based present, it’s SRL’s Pulse-Jet Hovercraft. The sound this thing makes, like millions of angry robotic bees gearing up to swarm, is indescribably creepy … and awe-inspiring. The all-aluminum construction weighs about 350 pounds, with four 4-foot long pulse-jet engines providing 70 pounds of thrust. At 150 decibels, it’s billed as “the loudest robot in the world.”
Read the full piece here.
