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The Best of What's New From Popular Science
Wrathie writes ""The top 100 technological innovations of 2003, from aviation to defibrillation, GPS to Wi-Fi, rotary to rockets. The year and the gear that was." This article from Popular Science magazine is quite extensive."
Though that Mag-train is beautiful.
Funny that they claim it's the world's first. I'm not sure what the criteria for 'first' is (other than the blatantly obvious) but at Expo '86, Japan had a working maglev train which was whisper quiet. It only ran for about 100m in length, back and forth, but it was certainly viable. You'd think in 17 years there would have been an implementation of this successful technology.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I could not repress a smile when the very first picture displayed in the article showed the White Knight and Space Ship One in flight. I'm a big Scaled Composites fan, and I'm pretty sure they're gonna collect the X-Prize this year (watch the sky on 17th of December).
The article says that the SS1 did not behave as expected and that it will have to be corrected, but that's because they didn't research their facts. The elevators stalled at the end of one landing, (so, yes, this was not expected) but it is corrected now, and it did not damage the aircraft (pilot just had to brake) nor casted doubt on the SS1's capability to reach space.
Maybe we deserve this world ?
The Shanghai Transrapid is the first in regular, scheduled, commercial travel.
The idea is much older (the first patent was granted 1934), and the system has been in test runs since the seventies.
More can be read here: http://www.transrapid.de/en/index.html
The manufacturers have a well-made site in English, French, and German (naturally, although the PopSci article neglects to mention that the Shanghai Transrapid was built by a German consortium).
You should get your facts right.
1) The new rating is 238. The old rating was 247. While various people have dyno'd and believe the true rating is below 238, there's some question as to if this is due to the car being too smart for single axel dynos and limiting performance if it doesn't detect the front wheels moving (plenty of BMWs do this too).
At any rate, the car's perfectly capable of pulling a "less than 6.0" 0-60. 5.9 secs if you want to be precise.
2) Yes, 159 lb-ft of torque is less than 160... It also redlines at 9000 rpms. It's a sports car so you rev it high and leave it there (and eat your gas bill). This isn't particularly different from the WRX (which admittedly isn't as bad) or S2000 both of which also lack low end torque (the WRX needs to get its turbos going before the fun really starts).
The best and easiest way to get more power out of a rotary engine core has always been to increase the size of the intake and exhaust ports. They moved some of the ports to the side of the housing. Rotary racers have used bridge and j-ports similarly but they were totally undrivable except as race cars and they were only useful for a handful of races. Mazda has now done this for a long-term use engine designed to be driven everyday.
You're also ignoring the reason why the RX-7 stopped being exported to the US and most of Europe. Emissions. They've lowered the emissions to be legal even in California.
So you've got the same 1.3l engine core, non-turbo'd putting out the nearly the same horsepwer output as the turbo'd version, the same gas mileage, and lower emissions and you think this isn't innovative?