I had an idea that wasn't quite a hovercraft at all , but a hover-capable aerial vehicle. A long time ago I saw a video of a hunk o' metal floating in midair suspended by bursts from a downward facing rocket thruster. The thruster output a constant force I assume, but the rate at which it was fired controlled the rate of ascent/descent. Cool. Now, lets combine that with a quadrotor style platform, so you've now got a planar square arrangement of these thrusters. That's nice, but changing orientation would still be difficult with just those four coplanar deals. So, to add in the ability to strafe and rotate we just put on some horizontal firing thrusters and things are getting exciting. JPL, you listening?
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