Japan develops spherical flying machine

[Enzo-03]

I was shown this by a friend and thought it was cool. They supposedly got the idea from one of their planes in their aircraft R&D (I cannot tell if the subtitles talking about this part are in engrish or not, though it doesn't seem like it).

I wonder what it'll be like when (if) they try scaling it up to a size suitable for manned flight?
Then again, I also wonder if that's practical.

[snoopy]

I bet that it has limited scalability.

It's pretty close to a helicopter with a ball around it, which means that the rotors are protected but they are also limited in size. I'd be willing to bet that the thing shown in the video has very little payload capacity and short flight time.

[Enzo-03]

All we've done is build this from commercially available parts, and test whether it can fly in its round form. So it's performance as such has absolutely no significance.

Just a concept, I think.

[snoopy]

I understand.

I also think that they probably don't have a whole lot of room to improve upon the commercially available parts.

That's just my opinion, though, so I hope they prove me wrong.

[Isaac]

I will make one and ride it to work.