Half a croissant, on a plate, with a sign in front of it saying '50c'
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I think this would be a great thing to not do.

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Project Orion-cycle

Because personal jet packs really haven't delivered.
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The bicycle is a perfectly acceptable invention. The in- line 2 wheel thing has gone remarkably well, as it turns out humans are pretty good at the whole balancing thing. The bicycle does suffer from poor rough terrain performance however. Sure, you can slap on a couple of big nobbly tires and you're able to ride over the slightly bumpy bits of the Earth's continents. What about the rest?

The common, or garden variety Orion space ship utilizes massive explosions and a big sprung plate to elevate the ship into and through space. How about two of these plates, one fore one aft of a standard-ish mountain bike. The plates could be mounted on long levers with a sort of parallelogram arrangement for alignment, to a fairly conventional suspension system. The plates have holes in the center through which small blobs of plastic explosive are dropped.

Essentially, the thing then stays in the air with grenade- sized explosions every second or so, front and rear propelling the massive sprung plates up before the springs push them back down. I suppose some slight rear-ward weight bias and a steerable front plate would give theoretical control over direction, but who cares.

Unlike the spaceship, this doesn't need to be made out of unobtainium. It will however be very loud and dangerous. Ear defenders advised.

bs0u0155, Sep 26 2014

Sort of like this idea, only not Grasshopper_20cycle
[normzone, Sep 26 2014]

It's a blast. https://www.youtube...watch?v=Pcidu6ppcFg
They start to iron the bugs out at around the 8:00 mark [2 fries shy of a happy meal, Sep 26 2014, last modified Sep 29 2014]


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Annotation:







       Cool.
If you don't like your ankles and dangly bits.
  

       The original Orion prototypes flying on blasts of dynamite is worth a watch.   

       ah, watched... like that, but 2 of them...
bs0u0155, Sep 26 2014
  

       Is it possible to say which bit of the youtube Sea Mule video is of interest, as it's 23 minutes long...
not_morrison_rm, Sep 27 2014
  

       //which bit of the youtube Sea Mule video is of interest,//   

       It's a declassified military film of a slightly bonkers project to propel craft with a series of explosions... what's not interesting.
bs0u0155, Sep 27 2014
  

       <hovers cursor over the timeline of the video, while bs0u0155 says "cold", "cold", "colder", "hot", "hotter">
not_morrison_rm, Sep 27 2014
  


 

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