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Solar Impulse, Continuing World-Spanning Trip, Attempts To Cross The Pacific
The BBC reports that Solar Impulse has resumed its 'round-the-world attempt, having taken off today from Nagoya, Japan for what is intended to be a 120-hour voyage to Hawaii. [If pilot Andre Borschberg] succeeds, it will be the longest-duration solo flight in aviation history, as well as the furthest distance flown by a craft that is powered only by the Sun. The Pacific crossing is the eighth leg of Solar Impulse's journey around the world.
But this stage has proven to be the most difficult, and has been hit by weeks of delays." The circumnavigation attempt began earlier this year.
Please return the user interface to how it was. You are just pissing the long term userbase off.
Pulling out the read more link is like pulling the start button / menu from windows 8. It is a user interface disaster because it's not obvious w\
here you should click for the comments.
Slashdot has always been about the comments, if you minimise them by obfuscating the link to them you are left with the news stories from reddit \
a couple of days late and some obvious paid advertising plants.
Implementing aspects of the failed beta interface piecemeal with no discussion seems a bit underhanded.
If you aren't lucky you might succeed at killing slashdot which would be a shame.
I am a lawyer and this constitutes legal advice and I shall indemnify you against any losses arising from taking it.
There's a pretty big difference between a solo flight in an ulta-lightweight solar-powered plane. Note that they've had to wait for months for a clear weather window, and you're claiming that it's now possible to use commercial solar-powered planes? It's sort of like claiming that because we put a man on the moon, we're now ready to build a tourist resort there.
though naturally it wont happen until it's either mandated by law
You can't pass a law of physics through legislation. This is cool and all, but don't mistake a this for any sort of substitution for current aviation tech. It's not, and won't be anytime in the near future. We need to focus our efforts on places where it IS feasible to reduce or replace our use of fossil fuels in the relatively near term. Power plants. Cars. Stuff like that. There are many people who are investigating more sustainable aviation fuels, but for the foreseeable future, these are still going to be carbon-based.
I hate sounding like a naysayer, but you need to be a bit realistic about these sorts of things.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Once again : Not, it's not possible.
Here's a comment I posted 5 years ago : http://science.slashdot.org/co...
The laws of thermodynamics haven't changed much since.
It's pretty profoundly useless as a replacement for a commercial airliner or cargo plane(basically the wingspan of a 747; but transports a single pilot at a painfully tedious 50-100km/h); but suitably automated versions of the very-long-endurance solar aircraft concept have other uses. Longer life, and greater control, than balloons; but markedly cheaper to launch, and lower ping, than anything in orbit.
As a manned aircraft it's a pure novelty; but its performance is increasingly close to 'like a small satellite; but closer to the ground and requires only a large strip of pavement for launch and recovery', which could definitely find some takers.