Nope. Religion is fundamentally belief in a deity or a particular set of values or both. Believing in a deity does not indicate anything wrong with critical thinking skills any more than believing in string theory. Both involve belief in things that are currently untestable. Similarly, in many ways, the rules of mathematics are arbitrary. The operations have some basis in reason, but so too do nearly all religious rules, when examined in the context of conditions at the time and place those rules were established.
This is, of course, ignoring the question of people who continue to dogmatically believe in something even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's a completely different matter altogether. However, such dogmatism is not an inherent characteristic of all religions, nor inherently true of all religious people. Thus, painting religion in general with such a broad brush just makes you look every bit as closed-minded and arrogant as you are portraying religious people to be.
You can always put a more than one LED emitter in a single epoxy package. Tricolor LEDs are a red and green emitter inside a single clear shell. Those are at least as close to a point source as you'll ever get with a glowing filament....
Could be, but an LED that uses phosphors eliminates any interest in my book because it means the color spectrum is a spiky mess....:-) Either way, though, I'd gladly accept much less efficiency to get better light quality. I hate CFLs (even the so-called daylight CFLs) so much that I'm planning to start stockpiling incandescent bulbs soon in preparation for the U.S. ban on them. That cold, lifeless lighting just really bugs me.
Yeah. I've noticed that. What I don't get is why they choose to set the color temperature that way. Red LEDs are extremely cheap compared with producing light at the other end of the spectrum. Why in the world would they balance them towards the blue (expensive) end of the spectrum when that is both more expensive and visually unpleasant? About the only thing I can imagine about the current LED designs is that they were designed to be used in combination with standard incandescent bulbs. If you blend the two, you should get a fairly nice looking light spectrum, albeit probably a bit heavy in the yellows....
I'd buy LED lights instantly if they actually used three emitters. Unfortunately, most don't. They use two---one yellow, one blue. Because the yellow LED has a relatively narrow light spectrum compared with an incandescent, you end up with basically no light output down near the bottom of the visual spectrum. The result is light that is downright unpleasant to deal with in every way. The bluish light makes it hard to see color accurately, makes colors not reproduce well in photography or video, and really isn't good for you mood-wise. Basically, the current crop of LED lights have all the problems of CFLs except the mercury (well, and the LEDs should last a lot longer, I believe).
The question, then, becomes this: "When are we going to see properly designed white LED bulbs?"
On the other hand, while they suck for homes, the existing LED lights are perfect for street lights. First, there was one experiment that suggests that suicides and crime may decrease when street lights are replaced with bluish lighting. Second, the color temperature of blue LEDs are virtually indistinguishable from the mercury vapor lights (~6000K) that are already used in a lot of places.
Even Lithium Polymer batteries burn fairly violently when they overheat or get punctured, though. If you've never watched one burn, you should do so. Gas tanks in cars don't have a habit of suddenly bursting into flames while you fill up your tank, the rare static discharge notwithstanding.
Your assertion that batteries last longer if they have greater capacity is certainly true, but I fail to see what bearing that has on my assertion that NiMH batteries aren't practical for car use much beyond hybrids because of their limited energy density.
On the issue of Lithium and health, yes, it exists in nature. So does uranium. That doesn't mean I want to add more of it to my drinking water. Lithium salts have fairly well understood impacts on the human nervous system, so to imply that there's no risk by dumping this stuff is reckless and irresponsible, IMHO. Unlike metal car parts that are recycled at a near 100% rate when looked at over the long term, Lithium-based batteries currently are not. That makes them a completely different ball of wax in terms of the threat to health.
Similarly, regarding your comparison with lead acid batteries, it is true that lead-acid batteries contain more substances that shouldn't be disposed of. There are also laws that require them to be recycled and require anyone who sells them to provide said recycling services. That's not currently true for Lithium Ion and similar batteries, which are currently allowed to be disposed of as ordinary trash.
I'm not sure we disagree on anything here. I wasn't arguing that pack manufacturing shouldn't happen in the U.S. I was arguing that there's little advantage from a car manufacturer's perspective to using custom cells within the pack versus using standard ones, and thus little advantage to actually manufacturing the cells themselves here relative to the cost of having to build up all the infrastructure necessary to make that possible.
The disadvantage of electric Humvees is pretty significant. In a war environment, you want something you can top up rapidly. Even hybrids add extra layers complexity and are therefore are more likely to break down when things start blowing up around it. IMHO, military is the last place I'd want to see anything nontraditional as far as engines are concerned.
Depends on whether you're talking about Li ion or Li polymer packs. Lithium ion packs are quite common, and contain standard cells. Lithium polymer packs tend to be custom shapes and sizes, designed for a specific application. In something as big as an automobile, though, there's little advantage to not standardizing on a single cell size, regardless of whether it's a round cell or a square pack. The tiny bit of extra energy density you'd get out of custom-shaped packs would likely be completely overshadowed by the need to dismantle large parts of the automobile whenever some of those oddly-shaped packs needed to be replaced....:-)
1. I don't just mean catching fire, but sure, let's go with that. Lithium cells don't stop burning until the contents are power. Lithium can burn through steel. Even gasoline fires won't do that. Lithium also can reignite after you put the fire out. I'm assuming Lithium because quite frankly no other battery tech has enough energy density to really be viable, last time I checked.
2. Yes, lots of batteries last a long time. Let's put that in perspective. Those advanced Li Ion batteries are still only rated for a couple of decades. I could buy a capacitor-based power storage cell and my great grandkids could still be using it. Also, the Rav4 EV had a maximum range per charge of roughly a third what is expected from a consumer vehicle, and requires five hours to charge, which is also unacceptable for most people.
3. Sure, it's not as nasty as some stuff, but if you're just throwing these things in the trash every few years---even every twenty years---that's a significant amount of metal salts leaching into the soil. I'd be concerned about the health effects if that much of these chemicals end up in our water supply.
I would also add that the biggest problem with batteries is charge time. Sure, they've made some advances in that area, but in general, the faster the charge, the shorter the lifespan of the battery. That's another clear win for capacitors, which can take a huge charge very rapidly without degradation.
Sure. But that doubles the amount of transportation, adds a month or more of product-in-pipeline time, and doubles the environmental impact of shipping all so the batteries can be made in the U.S. Consider it from the perspective of boat shipping, which typically takes 4-6 weeks to get from China to the West coast of the U.S. (plus probably another three or four weeks to get to Europe). Compare that with sending it via truck or rail transport from Asia directly to Europe, which probably takes a couple of weeks. With that in mind, you'd have to be out of your mind to ship a product to the U.S., add a trivial component to it, then ship it out to the rest of the world. Do you have any idea how big the economic impact would be adding almost an extra two months of pipeline time between when you shut down a line and when products are cleared out of store shelves so you can release the next version?
Trader Joe's isn't selling products on a release cycle. That's pretty atypical as products go. That's why transportation isn't a problem for them. Outside of food products, that just isn't feasible.
IMHO, that's taking a bit too narrow a view of the problem. Car batteries generally use the same cells as batteries for hundreds of thousands of other products. They just use a heck of a lot more of them, built into larger packs with different configurations. It's not like engine parts that are pretty much limited to use in cars. Building additional plants to manufacture a general-purpose part and targeting sales specifically to a single industry isn't likely to be cost effective by any stretch of the imagination. Quantity-wise, the packs for cars are likely to represent a small percentage of the cells sold and manufactured for a very long time.
When you're talking about batteries, you are likely better off trying to make the packing density as high as possible for the cells themselves so you don't waste volume during shipping. Then, ship the individual cells over and assemble the packs in the U.S. That way, you do the custom work (pack assembly) as close as possible to the point of assembly.
Besides, battery technology is not the most effective way to power cars. They are too volatile, have too short a life expectancy, and produce too much nasty chemical waste (both during manufacture and disposal). We should be focusing on ultracapacitor research, not chemical storage. It seems pretty clear that the future for automotive power storage does not lie in battery technology.
But products are usually not destined exclusively for the U.S. market, so if you do the assembly here, that means you're shipping products back to the U.S. to add the batteries to them, only to then turn around and ship a bunch of them to Australia or Europe. That makes even less sense than shipping the batteries. The alternative is to have battery plants around the globe, which is just not particularly efficient.
If we really wanted to have tech manufacturing in the U.S., we needed to have beefed up American component manufacturing twenty or thirty years ago when the Asian component market was still nascent. At this point, it's pretty much like trying to put the cat back in the bag. As far as the global economy is concerned, we're better off having the component manufacturing and finished goods manufacturing in the same place, much as we'd be better off with more car parts manufacturing in the U.S. (Cars can't be shipped cost-effectively once assembled, so it makes economic sense to move production closer to the point assembly even if that means automating more of the manufacturing to keep labor costs down.)
I think a battery design firm would be a good investment with those rules. I don't think a battery factory would be a good investment under any circumstances. What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.? It's not like it will create more than a dozen jobs---those sorts of plants are all pretty much automated anyway.
Besides, most manufacturers build their products in Asia, so a component plant in the U.S. is likely to have a hard time selling any products, particularly given China's stiff import restrictions.... You'd have to make the products a lot cheaper than they can be made in China, which seems dubious at best. Otherwise, no manufacturer in their right minds would go through all the hassle and expense of buying batteries from an American plant, shipping them to China to be assembled into a product, then shipping them back to the U.S. for consumption....
Like I said, pretty much lifting a large automobile. That's a pretty cramped environment even for two people.
BTW, the Gemini payload (not counting the rocket or people) weight over 8,000 pounds. BTW, according to the specs, Titan II can't even make a stable LEO with that big a payload (though it's probably within the margin of error for Wikipedia).... Putting a two-person vehicle into LEO and putting a usable space environment for several people into proper orbit are two very different things.:-)
Now that is funny. Guess it went over the moderators' heads. A Henry is a unit of inductance. Grossly oversimplified, inductance is basically the property by which current produces an electromagnetic field....
The difference is that most of those industries have actually been profitable at some point in the past and have some potential for making a profit in the future. I don't foresee a future in which biofuels could possibly be economically viable unless you are talking about at a very small, local level where you can use waste material from restaurants to run a half dozen cars or where farmers grow corn for human or animal consumption and use some of the leftover biomass to make fuel for their tractors. As soon as you cross the line from recycled biomass to newly grown biomass specifically for fuel, you find an entire industry based on a fundamentally flawed economic model. Basically, it's the dot-com boom all over again---a company loses money on every sale but tries to make it up in volume.
The amount of energy put into biofuel in the form of fuel to run tractors, transport it to market, etc. exceeds the amount of energy you get out of it. Therefore, by definition, short of a significant change in the fundamental technology of farming or in the types of crops grown, biofuel will never---can never---be commercially viable. (Source: Cornell/UC Berkeley study circa 2005. And then, there's the fact that the U.S. seems myopically focused on using corn as a source, which is quite possibly the worst thing you could possibly plant for fuel purposes by almost any useful metric---output relative to soil damage, output per acre, etc. It's a joke.
About the only thing slightly promising in that area is the whole algae thing. but I'm not holding my breath. Even if it eventually proves financially viable, you're still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And I suspect that when you factor in all the hidden maintenance costs, etc, it will end up being unprofitable just like the rest of them.
The GP poster may have said it in a flamebait-like way, but that doesn't mean the post was wrong. On the contrary. it was dead on accurate, at least if you limit biofuel to current farming technology and current sources of biomass. Realistically speaking, dumping more and more money into biofuel research is not the answer. We already have much better sources of energy---solar, wind, geothermal, tidal---that don't pollute our atmosphere significantly, don't contribute to global warming significantly, and at least in the case of solar and wind, don't require nearly the overhead in terms of maintenance, repairs, infrastructure, etc. because they can be set up at the local level (or, in the case of solar, even the household level). Power storage. That's where we should be spending research dollars. That's a problem that will still be needed even if biofuels did become commercially viable, but with better power storage, biofuels would have no real purpose for existing.
Yes, but part of that weight is used for things like engines that you'd strip out if it were on top of a stack. The engines are about 20,000 lbs of that. Also 180k estimate is a little high; the heaviest orbiter was Columbia at about 178k with engines; Challenger was about 175k, the rest are about 171k-172k. Without engines, the empty weight of the three remaining shuttles is only about 151000 lbs.
That said, if those weight ratings are right, the Titan III can't even lift a full size cargo van into a reasonable orbit, much less anything actually usable as a crew habitat and descent vehicle.... It's pretty much a lightweight as launch vehicles go.
Not too much. The only problem is that it doesn't come with a free gas card good for a couple of tanks.... That and the fact that some cheap b*stard at NASA decided it would be fun to steal the engine(s).
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Nope. Religion is fundamentally belief in a deity or a particular set of values or both. Believing in a deity does not indicate anything wrong with critical thinking skills any more than believing in string theory. Both involve belief in things that are currently untestable. Similarly, in many ways, the rules of mathematics are arbitrary. The operations have some basis in reason, but so too do nearly all religious rules, when examined in the context of conditions at the time and place those rules were established.
This is, of course, ignoring the question of people who continue to dogmatically believe in something even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That's a completely different matter altogether. However, such dogmatism is not an inherent characteristic of all religions, nor inherently true of all religious people. Thus, painting religion in general with such a broad brush just makes you look every bit as closed-minded and arrogant as you are portraying religious people to be.
You can always put a more than one LED emitter in a single epoxy package. Tricolor LEDs are a red and green emitter inside a single clear shell. Those are at least as close to a point source as you'll ever get with a glowing filament....
Could be, but an LED that uses phosphors eliminates any interest in my book because it means the color spectrum is a spiky mess.... :-) Either way, though, I'd gladly accept much less efficiency to get better light quality. I hate CFLs (even the so-called daylight CFLs) so much that I'm planning to start stockpiling incandescent bulbs soon in preparation for the U.S. ban on them. That cold, lifeless lighting just really bugs me.
HPS bulbs last about two years. LED bulbs should last at least a decade.
Yeah. I've noticed that. What I don't get is why they choose to set the color temperature that way. Red LEDs are extremely cheap compared with producing light at the other end of the spectrum. Why in the world would they balance them towards the blue (expensive) end of the spectrum when that is both more expensive and visually unpleasant? About the only thing I can imagine about the current LED designs is that they were designed to be used in combination with standard incandescent bulbs. If you blend the two, you should get a fairly nice looking light spectrum, albeit probably a bit heavy in the yellows....
I'd buy LED lights instantly if they actually used three emitters. Unfortunately, most don't. They use two---one yellow, one blue. Because the yellow LED has a relatively narrow light spectrum compared with an incandescent, you end up with basically no light output down near the bottom of the visual spectrum. The result is light that is downright unpleasant to deal with in every way. The bluish light makes it hard to see color accurately, makes colors not reproduce well in photography or video, and really isn't good for you mood-wise. Basically, the current crop of LED lights have all the problems of CFLs except the mercury (well, and the LEDs should last a lot longer, I believe).
The question, then, becomes this: "When are we going to see properly designed white LED bulbs?"
On the other hand, while they suck for homes, the existing LED lights are perfect for street lights. First, there was one experiment that suggests that suicides and crime may decrease when street lights are replaced with bluish lighting. Second, the color temperature of blue LEDs are virtually indistinguishable from the mercury vapor lights (~6000K) that are already used in a lot of places.
Same way you tune a fish.
Even Lithium Polymer batteries burn fairly violently when they overheat or get punctured, though. If you've never watched one burn, you should do so. Gas tanks in cars don't have a habit of suddenly bursting into flames while you fill up your tank, the rare static discharge notwithstanding.
Your assertion that batteries last longer if they have greater capacity is certainly true, but I fail to see what bearing that has on my assertion that NiMH batteries aren't practical for car use much beyond hybrids because of their limited energy density.
On the issue of Lithium and health, yes, it exists in nature. So does uranium. That doesn't mean I want to add more of it to my drinking water. Lithium salts have fairly well understood impacts on the human nervous system, so to imply that there's no risk by dumping this stuff is reckless and irresponsible, IMHO. Unlike metal car parts that are recycled at a near 100% rate when looked at over the long term, Lithium-based batteries currently are not. That makes them a completely different ball of wax in terms of the threat to health.
Similarly, regarding your comparison with lead acid batteries, it is true that lead-acid batteries contain more substances that shouldn't be disposed of. There are also laws that require them to be recycled and require anyone who sells them to provide said recycling services. That's not currently true for Lithium Ion and similar batteries, which are currently allowed to be disposed of as ordinary trash.
Only if you have a crane. Those things weigh hundreds of pounds and are usually mounted under a seat.
I'm not sure we disagree on anything here. I wasn't arguing that pack manufacturing shouldn't happen in the U.S. I was arguing that there's little advantage from a car manufacturer's perspective to using custom cells within the pack versus using standard ones, and thus little advantage to actually manufacturing the cells themselves here relative to the cost of having to build up all the infrastructure necessary to make that possible.
The disadvantage of electric Humvees is pretty significant. In a war environment, you want something you can top up rapidly. Even hybrids add extra layers complexity and are therefore are more likely to break down when things start blowing up around it. IMHO, military is the last place I'd want to see anything nontraditional as far as engines are concerned.
Depends on whether you're talking about Li ion or Li polymer packs. Lithium ion packs are quite common, and contain standard cells. Lithium polymer packs tend to be custom shapes and sizes, designed for a specific application. In something as big as an automobile, though, there's little advantage to not standardizing on a single cell size, regardless of whether it's a round cell or a square pack. The tiny bit of extra energy density you'd get out of custom-shaped packs would likely be completely overshadowed by the need to dismantle large parts of the automobile whenever some of those oddly-shaped packs needed to be replaced.... :-)
1. I don't just mean catching fire, but sure, let's go with that. Lithium cells don't stop burning until the contents are power. Lithium can burn through steel. Even gasoline fires won't do that. Lithium also can reignite after you put the fire out. I'm assuming Lithium because quite frankly no other battery tech has enough energy density to really be viable, last time I checked.
2. Yes, lots of batteries last a long time. Let's put that in perspective. Those advanced Li Ion batteries are still only rated for a couple of decades. I could buy a capacitor-based power storage cell and my great grandkids could still be using it. Also, the Rav4 EV had a maximum range per charge of roughly a third what is expected from a consumer vehicle, and requires five hours to charge, which is also unacceptable for most people.
3. Sure, it's not as nasty as some stuff, but if you're just throwing these things in the trash every few years---even every twenty years---that's a significant amount of metal salts leaching into the soil. I'd be concerned about the health effects if that much of these chemicals end up in our water supply.
I would also add that the biggest problem with batteries is charge time. Sure, they've made some advances in that area, but in general, the faster the charge, the shorter the lifespan of the battery. That's another clear win for capacitors, which can take a huge charge very rapidly without degradation.
Sure. But that doubles the amount of transportation, adds a month or more of product-in-pipeline time, and doubles the environmental impact of shipping all so the batteries can be made in the U.S. Consider it from the perspective of boat shipping, which typically takes 4-6 weeks to get from China to the West coast of the U.S. (plus probably another three or four weeks to get to Europe). Compare that with sending it via truck or rail transport from Asia directly to Europe, which probably takes a couple of weeks. With that in mind, you'd have to be out of your mind to ship a product to the U.S., add a trivial component to it, then ship it out to the rest of the world. Do you have any idea how big the economic impact would be adding almost an extra two months of pipeline time between when you shut down a line and when products are cleared out of store shelves so you can release the next version?
Trader Joe's isn't selling products on a release cycle. That's pretty atypical as products go. That's why transportation isn't a problem for them. Outside of food products, that just isn't feasible.
IMHO, that's taking a bit too narrow a view of the problem. Car batteries generally use the same cells as batteries for hundreds of thousands of other products. They just use a heck of a lot more of them, built into larger packs with different configurations. It's not like engine parts that are pretty much limited to use in cars. Building additional plants to manufacture a general-purpose part and targeting sales specifically to a single industry isn't likely to be cost effective by any stretch of the imagination. Quantity-wise, the packs for cars are likely to represent a small percentage of the cells sold and manufactured for a very long time.
When you're talking about batteries, you are likely better off trying to make the packing density as high as possible for the cells themselves so you don't waste volume during shipping. Then, ship the individual cells over and assemble the packs in the U.S. That way, you do the custom work (pack assembly) as close as possible to the point of assembly.
Besides, battery technology is not the most effective way to power cars. They are too volatile, have too short a life expectancy, and produce too much nasty chemical waste (both during manufacture and disposal). We should be focusing on ultracapacitor research, not chemical storage. It seems pretty clear that the future for automotive power storage does not lie in battery technology.
But products are usually not destined exclusively for the U.S. market, so if you do the assembly here, that means you're shipping products back to the U.S. to add the batteries to them, only to then turn around and ship a bunch of them to Australia or Europe. That makes even less sense than shipping the batteries. The alternative is to have battery plants around the globe, which is just not particularly efficient.
If we really wanted to have tech manufacturing in the U.S., we needed to have beefed up American component manufacturing twenty or thirty years ago when the Asian component market was still nascent. At this point, it's pretty much like trying to put the cat back in the bag. As far as the global economy is concerned, we're better off having the component manufacturing and finished goods manufacturing in the same place, much as we'd be better off with more car parts manufacturing in the U.S. (Cars can't be shipped cost-effectively once assembled, so it makes economic sense to move production closer to the point assembly even if that means automating more of the manufacturing to keep labor costs down.)
I think a battery design firm would be a good investment with those rules. I don't think a battery factory would be a good investment under any circumstances. What's the advantage to building them in the U.S.? It's not like it will create more than a dozen jobs---those sorts of plants are all pretty much automated anyway.
Besides, most manufacturers build their products in Asia, so a component plant in the U.S. is likely to have a hard time selling any products, particularly given China's stiff import restrictions.... You'd have to make the products a lot cheaper than they can be made in China, which seems dubious at best. Otherwise, no manufacturer in their right minds would go through all the hassle and expense of buying batteries from an American plant, shipping them to China to be assembled into a product, then shipping them back to the U.S. for consumption....
See why this is a silly idea?
Like I said, pretty much lifting a large automobile. That's a pretty cramped environment even for two people.
BTW, the Gemini payload (not counting the rocket or people) weight over 8,000 pounds. BTW, according to the specs, Titan II can't even make a stable LEO with that big a payload (though it's probably within the margin of error for Wikipedia).... Putting a two-person vehicle into LEO and putting a usable space environment for several people into proper orbit are two very different things. :-)
Now that is funny. Guess it went over the moderators' heads. A Henry is a unit of inductance. Grossly oversimplified, inductance is basically the property by which current produces an electromagnetic field....
Okay, I just reread the GGP post. The bit about global warming does strike me as a troll.... I missed that before. My bad. :-)
The difference is that most of those industries have actually been profitable at some point in the past and have some potential for making a profit in the future. I don't foresee a future in which biofuels could possibly be economically viable unless you are talking about at a very small, local level where you can use waste material from restaurants to run a half dozen cars or where farmers grow corn for human or animal consumption and use some of the leftover biomass to make fuel for their tractors. As soon as you cross the line from recycled biomass to newly grown biomass specifically for fuel, you find an entire industry based on a fundamentally flawed economic model. Basically, it's the dot-com boom all over again---a company loses money on every sale but tries to make it up in volume.
The amount of energy put into biofuel in the form of fuel to run tractors, transport it to market, etc. exceeds the amount of energy you get out of it. Therefore, by definition, short of a significant change in the fundamental technology of farming or in the types of crops grown, biofuel will never---can never---be commercially viable. (Source: Cornell/UC Berkeley study circa 2005. And then, there's the fact that the U.S. seems myopically focused on using corn as a source, which is quite possibly the worst thing you could possibly plant for fuel purposes by almost any useful metric---output relative to soil damage, output per acre, etc. It's a joke.
About the only thing slightly promising in that area is the whole algae thing. but I'm not holding my breath. Even if it eventually proves financially viable, you're still dumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And I suspect that when you factor in all the hidden maintenance costs, etc, it will end up being unprofitable just like the rest of them.
The GP poster may have said it in a flamebait-like way, but that doesn't mean the post was wrong. On the contrary. it was dead on accurate, at least if you limit biofuel to current farming technology and current sources of biomass. Realistically speaking, dumping more and more money into biofuel research is not the answer. We already have much better sources of energy---solar, wind, geothermal, tidal---that don't pollute our atmosphere significantly, don't contribute to global warming significantly, and at least in the case of solar and wind, don't require nearly the overhead in terms of maintenance, repairs, infrastructure, etc. because they can be set up at the local level (or, in the case of solar, even the household level). Power storage. That's where we should be spending research dollars. That's a problem that will still be needed even if biofuels did become commercially viable, but with better power storage, biofuels would have no real purpose for existing.
The good news is with the recently reduced fed rate, you could launch one for an interest-only loan of only 1.25 million dollars. :-D
Yes, but part of that weight is used for things like engines that you'd strip out if it were on top of a stack. The engines are about 20,000 lbs of that. Also 180k estimate is a little high; the heaviest orbiter was Columbia at about 178k with engines; Challenger was about 175k, the rest are about 171k-172k. Without engines, the empty weight of the three remaining shuttles is only about 151000 lbs.
That said, if those weight ratings are right, the Titan III can't even lift a full size cargo van into a reasonable orbit, much less anything actually usable as a crew habitat and descent vehicle.... It's pretty much a lightweight as launch vehicles go.
Not too much. The only problem is that it doesn't come with a free gas card good for a couple of tanks.... That and the fact that some cheap b*stard at NASA decided it would be fun to steal the engine(s).
It would be nice if the picture attached to the story showed the actual tree. The site is barely loading....
Hey, John, care to guess which team this AC is on? :-D