Phaeton Group's ongoing research project to study high-performance and special-application vehicles

Experimental high-performance and special-application vehicles often represent the cutting edge of technology development and innovative thinking. Aircraft and automobiles, submarines, spacecraft, and all the rest... in experimental vehicles we often see a concentration of the best an era's designers have to offer.

In the underlying concepts that relate experimental vehicles to their predecessors, as well as in the novel approaches that make them experimental, these machines carry special potential foster a better understanding of the state of the art and the culture of the place and time that produced them. What concepts are considered inviolable basics? Where do designers feel free to experiment? How far outside the standards does a particular design dare to go?

Dynamic eras produce highly original designs, as conceptual explorers probe outward from the known to find the edges of the practicability envelope. Be they brilliant steps forward or functional failures, highly experimental designs testify to confidence and the courage to risk resources in true experimentation. By contrast, conservative eras tend to show limited experimentation, sticking close to standard designs.

A complex range of factors can affect the degree to which a particular era dares to experiment and innovate, just as geographic exploration is a distinctive characteristic of certain times and places, and not others. It is interesting to observe that above a certain baseline, access to resources is not the key enabling factor. The 1930s saw the Great Depression in the United States and in much of the rest of the world, and yet this period also produced a spate of highly innovative vehicle designs in aircraft, rocket propulsion, and autmobiles particularly.

Experimental vehicles, like geographic exploration, are considered by Phaeton Group's director Dr. David West Reynolds to be "index elements" of special value in assessing the nature of a culture at a particular time.

An improved understanding of how "index elements" can be used to illuminate our understanding of culture is an ongoing research topic at Phaeton Group, involving a number of our scholars and collaborating specialists as we turn our attention to various different types of vehicles. We have carried out research and first-hand investigations of NASA space shuttles, satellite launchers, icebreakers in the Arctic, historical aircraft, and even the DeLorean automobile. The Sea Shadow mission was also part of this ongoing research program.