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3D Printed Spherical Flying Machine

A gang of 3D printing / science fiction reading / spherical flying machine building enthusiasts have gotten together to create a cool machine for the rest of us to build, thanks to their detailed plans.


(Spherical flying machine)

This our entry for a local flying machine design competition. For the competition, we were tasked with designing and building a flying machine that can be described as 'unconventional'. Being hardcore fans of many science fiction shows ourselves, we immediately drew our inspiration from the mapping drones in Prometheus, Kinos in Stargate Universe, IT-O Interrogator drones in Star Wars, and many many other movies to unanimously decide on building ourselves a spherical shape drone.

SF fans of course recall the recent movie >I>Promethius, and it's extremely cool fictional flying spherical mapping device.


(Promethius trailer [start at 2:35])

Fans of Stargate may recall this hovering spyball technology.


(Stargate hovering spyball)

SF fans may also remember the copseyes from Larry Niven's 1972 story Cloak of Anarchy:

Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the usual number of copseyes floated overhead, waiting. Gold dots against blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each a television eye and a sonic stunner...

What's your favorite spherical sf robot? (Thanks to readers, lots of additional references may be found in the comments to a previous article - see Spherical Flying Robot Hovers - comments..

Via A Spherical Flying Machine with no Control Surfaces via 3DPrint.

Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 6/15/2015)

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