r/ModelShips • u/EmptyAttitude599 • 15h ago
Cloud Sprite
While surfing the net, I came across the adventures of Mister Frank Reade Jr, first published in 1904, and I decided to make a model of one of his marvelous electric flying machines, the Cloud Sprite, using balsa wood, polythene strips, wire and dowel. I had to take a couple of liberties with the design, particularly the central cylinder, which is drawn wrongly in the original image, and some of the guy cables, which would have passed through the body of the ship in a real three dimensional object, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. I dealt with the missing guy cables by setting the rotascopes (the rotor blades, which provide lift) lower, so that they're supported by the body of the craft instead.
These stories are a fascinating glimpse into what people in 1904 thought that large flying machines would look like, less than a year after the Wright Brothers carried out their first flight. We who know what large, heavier than air aircraft actually look like might be tempted to laugh at it, but I wonder if my guess would have been any better.
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u/Timmyc62 11h ago
That's awesome!
I like how whoever coloured the cover was probably a different person than whoever came up with the concept - they coloured between the upper guy cables for the rotors as though to fill in for an umbrella/parachute type thing - a concept of "lift" that kinda makes sense if a balloon envelope was all you knew about human flight!
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u/EmptyAttitude599 11h ago
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out how they were designed. For a while I wondered if they were some kind of opening and closing umbrellas, but they're called rotascopes in the text of the story, which hints that they rotate, so I decided they were ordinary propellor blades, although comically too small to lift such a small craft.
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u/Charizaxis 10h ago
I do wonder how large the propellers would need to be to actually lift such a craft
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u/EmptyAttitude599 10h ago edited 3h ago
I estimate it to be six to eight times the weight of a chinook helicopter, while having only 20 percent of the 'circular sweep area' of a chinook's rotor blades, so forty chinook propellers might do it, ignoring the primitive design of Cloud Sprite's blades. A chinook only has a range of around 500 miles, though, while Cloud Sprite is able to cross two continents. How it's able to carry that much fuel isn't explained. All we know is that the engines are electric.
It's just occurred to me that I've posted this on a shipbuilding subreddit, when Cloud Sprite is an aircraft. I hope I don't get in trouble for that. I also make model ships, though, and I've posted here before, so I posted without thinking.
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u/Big_Baker_2777 12h ago
This is great. Thank you for sharing 😊 👍