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Zephyr Solar Plane Tops 7 Days Aloft
chichilalescu writes "The UK-built Zephyr solar-powered plane has smashed the endurance record for an unmanned aerial vehicle. The craft took off from the US Army's Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona at 1440 BST (0640 local time) last Friday and is still in the air. Maybe we can attach some netbooks, and extend the Internet to the clouds."
Remember these are just baby steps of solar powered flight. This in itself is quite an achievement, but there's still room for improvement. As solar panel technology gets better, so will the capabilities and usefulness of such projects in real life. However, i think just waiting for a better panel won't cut it - the rest can still be optimized, like internal circuitry, materials, the design and so on. That's why IMO it's important to keep making such prototypes. If (when?) we finally get better panels, we'll be all set with a proper aircraft architecture and, if we're lucky, it'll be able to sustain itself in every climate.
That said, the military will probably never release the specs to the public, so meh ;) .
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
why is one wing shaped differently than the other, i wonder..
You're right, there is a noticeable extra piece of wing on the right (looking from the rear)
The left wing appears to have an extension on the wing tip with negative dihedral: it points down. The guy on the right appears to be holding the tip extension, perhaps because they are assembling the aircraft.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
To local public communication infrastructure, such as fiber-optic cables; however, it becomes impossible to cut any single person's access away, since said person's packets can be routed through multiple routes even at the very beginning.
Compare this to the road network: while we have highways and such, individuals connect to the network through a mesh of small roads, and can in fact cross the whole country through them if necessary.
Naturally. I'm simply arguing against the current system, where your access can be cut off by either a commercial entity or the government. The whole point is to move from identifiable endpoints to a system where the mesh, as a whole, is an endpoint.
Communication is far too important to let either the RIAA, Comcast, or their paid representatives to mess with it.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
The problem is that you are limited by the amount of sunlight that reaches the earth. Even with solar panel efficiency at 100% you would only have about one kilowatt/square meter.
I submitted the story, and I made the pun. I thought it was funny...
and in principle I think in the future aircraft of this kind could perform some functions that are currently performed by satelites.
anyway, I don't know a lot about this stuff, so maybe it was a bad joke, sorry.
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