Wasn't that just some experiment Lockheed funded on their own, back when the SkunkWorks was still going strong? I didn't think that ever received Navy funding.
Nope. Human powered flight will never be practical. We simply don't have the power output to function usefully as motors. World class bicyclists are good for about half a horsepower in a sprint, and maybe a third of a horsepower for sustained output. Your average handheld drill is more powerful.
In other words, in order to overcome an inherent flaw in the design, they had to come up with a convoluted gearbox that needs a substantial third motor just to manipulate the ratios between two others and the output. That's not a marvel. That's just engineers doing their best to mitigate poor decisions made higher up.
Actually, that's wrong. Capitalism is designed with corruption and greed in mind. Greed motivates entities to perform better in the market and get more stuff. Corruption is dealt with by entities shifting to competitors who are screwing them less. Capitalism's failure is in assuming all involved entities are sufficiently intelligent to be aware of when they're being screwed, and principled enough to forgo what they want to avoid being screwed.
For reference the transmission is an "electrically controlled manual".
When I say an "electric transmission", I'm referring to a diesel-electric drive, where a diesel engine powers a generator which powers one or more motors. The electrical wiring replaces the traditional mechanical linkages in the transmission.
However the diesel powers the front wheels and the electric the rear.
Which means the diesel is still mechanically connected to the road. Either you have an incrementally variable transmission, and chances are the diesel is not going to be running anywhere near its optimal conditions, or you have a continuously variable transmission, in which case you've got tons of losses anyway. The whole point of an electric transmission is to allow the engine to operate in the narrow band it wants to, and use the electric motor to provide the wide, efficient operating range you need.
A sufficiently large electric motor would have the power to capture most of your braking energy at typical urban speeds, and even if it weren't, you're stopping because of stop signs and traffic lights. You've got plenty of time when the car is sitting idle, using no energy, to rebuild your buffer, assuming you're using a proper electric transmission, and not one of these worthless hybrids that keeps the engine mechanically coupled to the drive train. The only value of a hybrid in a car is when you're actually a race car, you need high sustained power output, and it doesn't make sense to have a decoupled engine and a large generator due to weight constraints.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Arduinos are development boards. They're supposed to allow you to easily prototype things on them. If you're going to build more than a couple, why would you ever spend $30 on an Arduino board, when you could have your own custom units made in bulk for $10?
Yes. If you're putting a 200hp engine in a hybrid designed for use as a passenger vehicle, you're doing it wrong. The engine only needs enough power to resist rolling friction and drag at highway speeds. Somewhere around 30-50hp would be plenty. When you need acceleration, you rely on the big motor.
The individual cell voltage only really matters for small, portable electronics, where you don't have room for multiple cells.
And this is exactly what I meant, including lower-powered LED arrays.
So in other words, we're going to define the entire worth of a battery based off whether it can be used with something that is too small to support multiple cells, yet dumb enough to not require a regulator?
You're missing my point. The data center does NOT run off 12V. Your florescent lighting requires AC, and very high voltage at that. Your compressors and ventilation fans are running high voltage AC as well. On your server systems, you're feeding 12V into a power supply, which is then feeding 3.3V, 5V, and 12V into the motherboard and various components, and the motherboard steps the voltage again to power all the various components. You could just as easily feed 24V in, saving lots on bus bars to handle that high amperage, or run 48V like telecommunications stations.
When you're going to take the output of your battery and turn it into something very different for your application, the specific voltage really doesn't matter.
Try looking at RVs and portable housing. Oh, shit, those happen to run straight off a battery bank
To be frank, they don't matter. They have plenty of available volume to run any number of cells in series to reach their desired voltage. Lead-acid batteries nominally operate at 2V, but the typical battery has six cells to reach that typical 12V. Nickel and Lithium based batteries run 1.2V and 3.7V, respectively, but you see them arrayed in packs operating at several hundred volts for electric cars. The individual cell voltage only really matters for small, portable electronics, where you don't have room for multiple cells.
Resistance heaters (including evaporation refrigerators), incandescent lighting, and brushed motors can run directly off 12VDC. Just about everything else is going to need some form of voltage regulator to operate.
You've never going to operate any complex piece of electronics straight off the battery. You're always going to have some form of power supply, and it's going to be able to provide you whatever voltage you need regardless of the input voltage.
Much like Nickel-Zinc batteries, this is a great alternative for environmentally-unfriendly power storage.
You don't store power, you store energy.
If so, despite the lower power density, I'd buy electronics using this battery without any hesitation.
Again, energy, not power. Most modern batteries have gobs of power density, and far more power than the devices they are used with draw. That's not a problem. The problem is energy density. The only time you really worry about power density is when you're using a short duration UPS that doubles as a generator starter, or are using a flow battery or fuel cell. Other than that, if you've got a reasonable energy capacity, you usually have plenty of power.
If it can withstand high drains and provides at LEAST 1.4V per cell, I'd be happy.
Who cares what voltage it operates at? Unless you're expecting to use this as a drop-in replacement for traditional alkaline primary cells, it's nothing to put in a little boost converter to bring your voltage up to whatever your device needs to run. Motors for things like fans, hard drives, and optical drives typically run much higher than 1.4V. The CFLs in monitor backlights typically run a few kV.
Well designed electric motors already run 80%+ efficient. There's not much room for improvement there. Single junction cells have a hard upper limit around 33%, due to losses on either side of a cell's tuned band gap. We do have room for improvement in multi-junction cells, but at a rapidly increasing cost. You can run a heat engine rather than photovoltaic, but doing so requires concentration. Mirrors are simply not an option, and lenses get you into weight and diffraction issues. At the end of the day, power demands increase with the cube of velocity, and that's an insurmountable problem. Even with all the power we could ever theoretically pull out of solar power, this aircraft would never be able to sustain more than around 70mph.
There is really very little room to improve such technology. The claims on the solar array are that their cells are roughly 22% efficient. The only way to really go up from there is with much more expensive multi-junction cells, and even then, you're going to top out at around 40%. Batteries could be improved, cutting weight and wingspan. Best case scenario, you might end up with something that could sustain 60mph, up from a mere 45mph. This will never be an alternative to the current batch of gas-guzzling technology.
they've been proven to lift tens of thousands of pounds.
They have? I suppose 20000lbs of capacity in the largest of airships would be sufficient to qualify as "tens", but that's an awfully pitiful payload in comparison to the lifting volume needed to accomplish it.
Stability does. There's no way in hell you want to be landing a tall, unstable craft on a pitching barge in rough seas. There's a reason SeaLaunch uses semi-submersible oil platform, where you have a huge amount of mass to keep you stable, and the vast majority of the buoyancy comes from well below the surface chop. Even then, they have to delay launches if the seas are not suitable.
Drag will get you down to just a few hundred miles per hour all on its own. That last few hundred miles per hour, plus a bit of additional maneuvering fuel, is really a trivial amount of weight in the grand scheme of things. On a half-million pound stack, you're probably looking at maybe ten to twenty thousand pounds more fuel to allow it to land under power. Remember, liquid rocket fuel is cheap. Each half-billion dollar Space Shuttle launch only used a couple million dollars worth of liquid fuel.
With parachutes, you're still going to be landing at too high a velocity for gear alone to arrest you. You would still need to eject the chute early, to prevent getting tangled in it, and then use rockets to land under power. In the end, you're right back where you were originally, but now with more components that can fail.
On a lifting body, you have to think of the load pattern. A rocket sits vertically, and is powered vertically from the bottom of the stack. The only structural loads it ever sees is vertical compression. If you try to attempt a horizontal landing as a lifting body, your entire craft needs to be redesigned to handle intense bending loads. That's going to eat up a whole lot of weight trying to strengthen it. Far more than you eat up in fuel by just landing vertically, and whatever structural weight you add is just going to eat up more fuel on take off anyway.
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Wasn't that just some experiment Lockheed funded on their own, back when the SkunkWorks was still going strong? I didn't think that ever received Navy funding.
The NSA controls the Chinese?
Painfully...
Nope. Human powered flight will never be practical. We simply don't have the power output to function usefully as motors. World class bicyclists are good for about half a horsepower in a sprint, and maybe a third of a horsepower for sustained output. Your average handheld drill is more powerful.
at 200 Watts per second
A quick read yields the following:
You don't know much about physics or units of measurement.
In other words, in order to overcome an inherent flaw in the design, they had to come up with a convoluted gearbox that needs a substantial third motor just to manipulate the ratios between two others and the output. That's not a marvel. That's just engineers doing their best to mitigate poor decisions made higher up.
Actually, that's wrong. Capitalism is designed with corruption and greed in mind. Greed motivates entities to perform better in the market and get more stuff. Corruption is dealt with by entities shifting to competitors who are screwing them less. Capitalism's failure is in assuming all involved entities are sufficiently intelligent to be aware of when they're being screwed, and principled enough to forgo what they want to avoid being screwed.
For reference the transmission is an "electrically controlled manual".
When I say an "electric transmission", I'm referring to a diesel-electric drive, where a diesel engine powers a generator which powers one or more motors. The electrical wiring replaces the traditional mechanical linkages in the transmission.
However the diesel powers the front wheels and the electric the rear.
Which means the diesel is still mechanically connected to the road. Either you have an incrementally variable transmission, and chances are the diesel is not going to be running anywhere near its optimal conditions, or you have a continuously variable transmission, in which case you've got tons of losses anyway. The whole point of an electric transmission is to allow the engine to operate in the narrow band it wants to, and use the electric motor to provide the wide, efficient operating range you need.
A sufficiently large electric motor would have the power to capture most of your braking energy at typical urban speeds, and even if it weren't, you're stopping because of stop signs and traffic lights. You've got plenty of time when the car is sitting idle, using no energy, to rebuild your buffer, assuming you're using a proper electric transmission, and not one of these worthless hybrids that keeps the engine mechanically coupled to the drive train. The only value of a hybrid in a car is when you're actually a race car, you need high sustained power output, and it doesn't make sense to have a decoupled engine and a large generator due to weight constraints.
That's exactly what I was thinking. Arduinos are development boards. They're supposed to allow you to easily prototype things on them. If you're going to build more than a couple, why would you ever spend $30 on an Arduino board, when you could have your own custom units made in bulk for $10?
Yes. If you're putting a 200hp engine in a hybrid designed for use as a passenger vehicle, you're doing it wrong. The engine only needs enough power to resist rolling friction and drag at highway speeds. Somewhere around 30-50hp would be plenty. When you need acceleration, you rely on the big motor.
The individual cell voltage only really matters for small, portable electronics, where you don't have room for multiple cells.
And this is exactly what I meant, including lower-powered LED arrays.
So in other words, we're going to define the entire worth of a battery based off whether it can be used with something that is too small to support multiple cells, yet dumb enough to not require a regulator?
You're missing my point. The data center does NOT run off 12V. Your florescent lighting requires AC, and very high voltage at that. Your compressors and ventilation fans are running high voltage AC as well. On your server systems, you're feeding 12V into a power supply, which is then feeding 3.3V, 5V, and 12V into the motherboard and various components, and the motherboard steps the voltage again to power all the various components. You could just as easily feed 24V in, saving lots on bus bars to handle that high amperage, or run 48V like telecommunications stations.
When you're going to take the output of your battery and turn it into something very different for your application, the specific voltage really doesn't matter.
Try looking at RVs and portable housing. Oh, shit, those happen to run straight off a battery bank
To be frank, they don't matter. They have plenty of available volume to run any number of cells in series to reach their desired voltage. Lead-acid batteries nominally operate at 2V, but the typical battery has six cells to reach that typical 12V. Nickel and Lithium based batteries run 1.2V and 3.7V, respectively, but you see them arrayed in packs operating at several hundred volts for electric cars. The individual cell voltage only really matters for small, portable electronics, where you don't have room for multiple cells.
(including evaporation refrigerators)
Make that "absorption refrigerators".
Resistance heaters (including evaporation refrigerators), incandescent lighting, and brushed motors can run directly off 12VDC. Just about everything else is going to need some form of voltage regulator to operate.
You've never going to operate any complex piece of electronics straight off the battery. You're always going to have some form of power supply, and it's going to be able to provide you whatever voltage you need regardless of the input voltage.
Much like Nickel-Zinc batteries, this is a great alternative for environmentally-unfriendly power storage.
You don't store power, you store energy.
If so, despite the lower power density, I'd buy electronics using this battery without any hesitation.
Again, energy, not power. Most modern batteries have gobs of power density, and far more power than the devices they are used with draw. That's not a problem. The problem is energy density. The only time you really worry about power density is when you're using a short duration UPS that doubles as a generator starter, or are using a flow battery or fuel cell. Other than that, if you've got a reasonable energy capacity, you usually have plenty of power.
If it can withstand high drains and provides at LEAST 1.4V per cell, I'd be happy.
Who cares what voltage it operates at? Unless you're expecting to use this as a drop-in replacement for traditional alkaline primary cells, it's nothing to put in a little boost converter to bring your voltage up to whatever your device needs to run. Motors for things like fans, hard drives, and optical drives typically run much higher than 1.4V. The CFLs in monitor backlights typically run a few kV.
50-100x more, even.
Well designed electric motors already run 80%+ efficient. There's not much room for improvement there. Single junction cells have a hard upper limit around 33%, due to losses on either side of a cell's tuned band gap. We do have room for improvement in multi-junction cells, but at a rapidly increasing cost. You can run a heat engine rather than photovoltaic, but doing so requires concentration. Mirrors are simply not an option, and lenses get you into weight and diffraction issues. At the end of the day, power demands increase with the cube of velocity, and that's an insurmountable problem. Even with all the power we could ever theoretically pull out of solar power, this aircraft would never be able to sustain more than around 70mph.
There is really very little room to improve such technology. The claims on the solar array are that their cells are roughly 22% efficient. The only way to really go up from there is with much more expensive multi-junction cells, and even then, you're going to top out at around 40%. Batteries could be improved, cutting weight and wingspan. Best case scenario, you might end up with something that could sustain 60mph, up from a mere 45mph. This will never be an alternative to the current batch of gas-guzzling technology.
they've been proven to lift tens of thousands of pounds.
They have? I suppose 20000lbs of capacity in the largest of airships would be sufficient to qualify as "tens", but that's an awfully pitiful payload in comparison to the lifting volume needed to accomplish it.
Stability does. There's no way in hell you want to be landing a tall, unstable craft on a pitching barge in rough seas. There's a reason SeaLaunch uses semi-submersible oil platform, where you have a huge amount of mass to keep you stable, and the vast majority of the buoyancy comes from well below the surface chop. Even then, they have to delay launches if the seas are not suitable.
Drag will get you down to just a few hundred miles per hour all on its own. That last few hundred miles per hour, plus a bit of additional maneuvering fuel, is really a trivial amount of weight in the grand scheme of things. On a half-million pound stack, you're probably looking at maybe ten to twenty thousand pounds more fuel to allow it to land under power. Remember, liquid rocket fuel is cheap. Each half-billion dollar Space Shuttle launch only used a couple million dollars worth of liquid fuel.
With parachutes, you're still going to be landing at too high a velocity for gear alone to arrest you. You would still need to eject the chute early, to prevent getting tangled in it, and then use rockets to land under power. In the end, you're right back where you were originally, but now with more components that can fail.
On a lifting body, you have to think of the load pattern. A rocket sits vertically, and is powered vertically from the bottom of the stack. The only structural loads it ever sees is vertical compression. If you try to attempt a horizontal landing as a lifting body, your entire craft needs to be redesigned to handle intense bending loads. That's going to eat up a whole lot of weight trying to strengthen it. Far more than you eat up in fuel by just landing vertically, and whatever structural weight you add is just going to eat up more fuel on take off anyway.