When I was 9-10-11 years old our family used to go camping at a really cool campground in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
The campground overlooked a great beach on Lake Michigan and had a long wooden staircase leading down to the beach. Across the lake, far in the distance, you could see the Lower Peninsula, about 30 miles away.
I had just recently seen diagrams of the V-1 buzz bomb from WWII and I started to figure out how I could convert the staircase into a dual-rail launch pad for a rocket-powered gliding plane. I started to think about a rocket plane flying off of alcohol and air (a pulse-jet like the V-1).
I knew there were such things as R/C airplanes at that time so I started to think about the idea of flying a rocket/pulse-jet across the lake and landing on the Lower Peninsula shore.
I knew there had to be some way of guiding the thing and found out that at least in theory I could mount some kind of video camera in the thing and follow it from shore. Back then there were some video cameras which only weighed 25 pounds or something.
I used up most of a notebook pad of paper scratching out diagrams and calculations and plans how this was going to work. I was going to launch it from the U.P., fly it using the onboard video camera, and fly it all the way to the shore on the other side. I calculated it would work out just about right to run out of fuel just as it got there. As I recall, my plan was I was just going to skid it to a landing on the sand on the other side. I also did some scratch-pad figuring and deduced I could probably do the whole thing for about $1000. (Of course my own personal fortune at the time amounted to about $10 so it would be my dad kicking in about $990 -- I never actually got to the point of asking how much money he wanted to kick in.)
I really hadn't thought of anything else I wanted this buzz-bomb thing to do, other than just make it to the other side. I didn't particularly devote any thought as to whether I was going to have to get legal permission or not (I suspect I would have since this whole extravaganza was going to be taking place some 20 miles from a USAF base).
For 2-3 years in a row, we kept going up there every summer, and I kept looking at that wooden staircase and figuring out how to covert it into a launch rack for this buzz bomb. But every year as I got older too I realized it was going to be harder and more expensive to do this thing, and by the time I was about 12 I also realized it would probably also get me chucked in jail (along with my parents and anybody else involved in it), so by about that time, I just gave up on it.
But I drove up to that campground a few years ago, walked out to the beach and saw that old wooden staircase, and thought, "gee, we have keychain size video cams now and minaturized R/C servos ... ya think??"
But then I realized now it would cost me $20-$30,000 instead of $1,000, and I STILL couldn't think of any real reason I really wanted to DO it. And now, I would CERTAINLY end up in jail if not at Gitmo. So it will have to remain a teenage daydream.
:surprised::surprised::surprised:
