Abstract: An electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft having a disc-shaped blended wing-body that houses power sources and controls. Thrust pod arms are attached to the blended wing-body and each arm has a one of a set of thruster pairs. An ingress/egress hatch is attached to the rear surface. Navigation and strobe lights are located on the outside edge. Front landing gear is attached to the upper surface including pair of parallel motor pod struts. Main landing gear is attached proximate the trailing edge and a set of right and left elevons is attached to the rear surface proximate the main landing gear. A cockpit area including a viewing window is formed on the blended-wing.

Abstract: A tunable optical oscillator with a period based on the speed of light is used to produce a periodic pulsed light signal with low jitter, low drift and high spectral purity. The pulsed light signal is generated through the use of a light source such as a laser, an optical switch, and two variable optical paths acting as delay elements. The variable delay elements form the basis of the system timing. The propagation time of the light signals passing through the delay elements determine the frequency of operation. The output frequency is based on the speed of light through these delay elements. The delay elements can be produced with materials that have a stable index of refraction over a temperature range and therefore the speed of light remains constant over a wide temperature range.

Abstract: A procedural solid texturing system which uses a parameterized function capable of reproducing the most common procedural solid textures, specifically wood, marble, clouds and fire (32). This model is simple enough to be implemented in hardware, and can be realized in VLSI with as little as 100,000 gates. The invention also includes a method for antialiasing the parameterized procedural textures (34, 36). The antialiasing includes an expression for the necessary box filter width, a technique for efficiently box filtering the procedural texture by either MIP mapping the color table or using a summed area color table (38).