Navy Bomb Squads Get a Solar Power Upgrade

An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from TPM's Idea Lab: "The U.S. Navy's bomb squads have a weight problem. To keep their field gear powered up, the typical explosive ordnance disposal unit has to haul fifty pounds of specialized chargers and related devices around, creating an unwieldy and potentially dangerous drag on the operation. Now help is coming from an unexpected source: the sun. The Navy's Explosive Ordnance Disposal Training and Evaluation Unit 2 in Virginia has been testing five prototype lightweight field power kits that include solar cells as a key component. The kits replace fifty pounds of equipment with a compact system that weighs only about nine pounds."

Comments

Adapters were scrapped, solar cells only optional

[tp1024]

Guys, you're missing the point.

The weight savings result from doing away with a mess of redundant equipment/chargers etc. that were designed by moronic, egoistic engineers whose idea of standardization is that they are happy to follow any standard, so long as it's theirs.

They were instead replaced by one small and much more lightweight unit that weighs 9lbs instead of 50lbs and is still able to plug into all their gadgets and charge their batteries. (Maybe one day we can do that with laptops and cellphones too ...) This unit can accept power from a lot of different kinds of sources (conventional grid AC, but also DC etc.), they plan to also distribute a set solar cells and buffer batteries, that can (naturally) also plug into this unit - but will almost double the weight of the equipment to about 17lbs. (Still a lot less than 50 lbs, but the usual caveats of solar power apply, so they are quite likely to end up using other sources a lot as well.)