[starpilot]

Saucers are fixed-wings.

A saucer wing has a very low aspect ratio, which has very low aerodynamic efficiency in cruise. The high-aspect trapezoidal wing we commonly see today is used because it produces much less drag while providing sufficient wing area to lift the aircraft. This has been understood since the 1930s, if not earlier.

I can't see why a saucer airframe would be desirable unless it spent a lot of time in backwards and sideways horizontal flight, where it might have better stability than a traditional wing. The complexity of the controls and thrust arrangement wouldn't seem outweighed by this though.

Actual test performance of Avro's saucers never exceeded altitudes of a few feet and speeds of a few mph.

[danboarder]

Not fixed wing like the Avro you're talking about. From the article it sounds like a different craft entirely:

"...Project 1794 is a flying saucer capable of “between Mach 3 and Mach 4,” (2,300-3,000 mph) a service ceiling of over 100,000 feet (30,500m), and a range of around 1,000 nautical miles ...

...the supersonic flying saucer would propel itself by rotating an outer disk at very high speed, taking advantage of the Coandă effect. Maneuvering would be accomplished by using small shutters on the edge of the disc ..."

[redthrowaway]

Seems like it'd be a fun project to hack together a scale model with someone who understood the physics. Computer control of flight surfaces would probably go a long way towards negating the difficulty of controlling it, and RC jet turbines could power it.

[runjake]

Sometimes I think the people who designed these kinds of saucer crafts actually believed in extra-terrestrial UFOs and were on a mission to try and duplicate what they envisioned their technology would be.

[wallawe]

Or, our government has witnessed said technology and tried to recreate/reverse-engineer it? Makes you wonder why they would build something like this just on a without a valid reason behind doing so.

[anonymouz]

The US government seems to be quite ready to try out a lot of fringe stuff if it provides military applications (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project). They may as well just have gotten their inspiration from the general flying saucer hype.

[manaskarekar]

One reason could be inspiration from Science Fiction.

http://ufopop.org/ufopop_mags.php

[aninhumer]

I think far more likely, they thought "Saucer? How would that even fly? But wait, what if it was spinning really fast? Hmm... let me get my slide rule...".