Only the fact that they in fact aren't doing what you're suggesting, because as mentioned in the very article, gearboxes aren't that significant of a problem because wear and tear hits the rest of the wind power plant at around the same time, so you have to replace most of it anyway. And wind turbine with a gearbox is far cheaper to run, far lighter, and GE and Siemens still overwhelmingly use wind turbines with standard gearboxes. Because efficiency.
For example, here's GE's current list of wind turbine offerings: http://www.ge-energy.com/wind Let's pick some plants and look into them, shall we? http://www.ge-energy.com/produ... "Higher AEP than its 1.x predecessors by incorporating a larger gearbox scaled from GE’s 2.x platform and longer 52.2 meter blades" Oh look, not only are they not dropping gear boxes, they are enlarging them to fit larger blade.
Surely, the smaller ones will have none then? http://www.ge-energy.com/produ... "Higher AEP than its 1.5 predecessors by incorporating GE’s 1.6-100 gearbox"
In the end, I have only one question for you. Your experience in the industry, was it in marketing or unrelated thing like running the office or cleaning toilets? Because I know people who used to work for Winwind, and even their marketing people aren't as ignorant of reality as you are, so I'm starting to think you're more of a toilet cleaner type.
I humbly disagree. The case has been extremely traumatizing for many people, and frankly it would make a terrible precedent if civil aviation, something that is international for a very good reason, was to buckle because of diplomatic pressure.
They should do the normal investigation to the best of their ability. I would just prefer if they did it openly enough so we wouldn't have to question whether or not results were "corrected".
Unfortunate reality is that this incident has been used as a tool for diplomatic pressure however, which significant reduces chances of us ever finding out what really happened, because each side will spin the narrative, and if possible pressure the investigators. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try.
Right. You are smartest person in the world, and people actually building these things are idiots. http://www.technologyreview.co...
Those retards at GE and Siemens sure would like your input, since you're clearly so much smarter than any of them. What would they know, being on the actual bleeding edge of the technology, when faced with you, a person "who worked in the industry with tens of years of experience [doing the marketing?]"
"Siemens’s plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system’s generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine’s blades and must therefore be much bigger–over four meters in diameter for Siemens’s three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine’s entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons–12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.
Much of the weight reduction comes from the use of permanent magnets in the generators’ rotor–a trick that GE is also using. Conventional turbine generators use electromagnets–copper coils fed with electricity from the generator itself. Henk Polinder, an expert in permanent-magnet generators at Holland’s Delft University of Technology, says that a 15-millimeter-thick segment of permanent magnets can generate the same magnetic field as a 10- to 15-centimeter section of copper coils.
Stiesdal says Siemens reduced weight further by inverting its generator’s design. Rather than a steel rotor covered with permanent magnets spinning inside a stationary doughnut-shaped stator (the design GE is using in its four-megawatt direct-drive turbine) Siemens’s rotor is a steel cylinder with permanent magnets on the inside, and this rotor spins around a column-like stator."
Preliminary report struck all the initial questionable observations out, including those of type of damage and specific locations. That's why it generalizes it as "large number of high energy objects" without classifying if patterns were different or not. Initial reports from site suggested that they were indeed different on cockpit and fuselage.
"As yet it has not been possible to conduct a detailed study of the wreckage. However, the available images show that the pieces of wreckage were pierced in numerous places. The pattern of damage to the aircraft fuselage and the cockpit is consistent with that which may be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside. It’s likely that this damage resulted in a loss of structural integrity of the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break up. This also explains the abrupt end to the data registration on the recorders, the simultaneous loss of contact with air traffic control and the aircraft's disappearance from radar."
We still don't know who's sub that was. It's very well known that Sweden itself is basically a NSA partner after they changed the law a few years ago to let their intelligence to spy on all the internet traffic that passes the country. Most of Moscow and St. Petersburg traffic passes through Finland and Sweden on the way to Europe and we Finns didn't play ball.
But NSA doesn't trust anyone, and they maintain the same underwater cable taps that Russia does. So who it was that was renewing the taps is a good question, especially when you consider that Swedes didn't actually bring along their best and newest ship that NSA equipped for them to do the searching. Instead they kept mostly the older boats and the only ships capable of detection were new corvettes like Visby, which are general usage corvettes, not ships that specialize in intelligence and data gathering like the said specialist ship which sat around southern Sweden for duration of the search.
The timing would suggest Russians. The numbers on the other hand don't - Russians are actually the weakest major territorial power in terms of submarine capability in the region with only three submarine in the Baltic. Swedes have five and Germans even more (can't remember how many off the top of my head). We have none because we traditionally focused on self defence rather than force projection, as a result we have a whole lot of listening devices installed across the key approaches instead of having any subs.
Considering that overwhelming majority of claims supposedly implicating Russians have been debunked so far (there was no message in Russian, there were no russian frogmen on the islands, etc) and the only evidence Swedes have is one image of a submarine of unknown origin makes it very difficult to figure out who it really was. Chances are it was either Russian or US submarine refreshing hardware on cable taps, Russians triggering Swedish reaction to sub alert to study their actions or US conducting a false flag operation to ensure that new Swedish government follows in Bildt's footsteps when it comes to strong anti-Russian bias. All hypotheses are reasonable and have some circumstantial evidence which aligns with them.
Liveleak has videos or at least still images of most launches, usually sources from various social media. This is one of the most urbanised areas and BUK's single stage engine produces a long smoke trail and a huge bright plume. As a result, it tends to draw attention from a lot of people and bored soldiers in the area who take pictures with their cellphones. Which end on social media, and eventually on liveleak.
I still stand by my original statement back when this story started to unfold: most likely scenario is rebels accidentally killing the plane instead of one of the Antonovs spying on them in area.
But there's a significant amount of evidence so far that appears, at least on surface, to conflict with this hypothesis, so I'm not taking any bets.
As for the flight path, this is a mix of Ukrainians needing the money for transit royalties and capitalist drive for efficiency at the cost of everything else. As long as no aircraft is shot down, choosing a safer trajectory is an inefficiency which must be eliminated.
Because I haven't seen any footage so far, and I tend to follow liveleak pretty closely. They had video footage of even most MANPADS fire which is far less visible.
Ah yes, the obligatory "if you don't believe what you've been told and look at it critically, you're a russian shill because [list reasons one you reply to lists as not trustworthy, completely ignore reasons listed that are noted as trustworthy and the critique is based on]" - comment.
Cold Fjord, is that your slightly more civil twin?
I think you vastly underestimate the capabilities of modern fly by wire systems. They can steer aircraft that has sustained fuselage damage by design.
This isn't autopilot of the past that mostly just hooked into hydraulics and kept them stable. Modern FBW systems are effectively piloting systems that have access to all sensor readouts and have a massive amount of preprogrammed scenarios and logic patterns to adapt to them to the best of their ability.
Pretty much. Civil aviation authorities have already changed the process in how they pass on information on military activity. Ukraine was apparently trying to milk the route for royalty payments and extreme efficiency oriented civil aviation was more than happy to save on fuel costs by flying over area stuck in civil war with active fighter aircraft and surface to air missiles present in the theatre.
We are suffering from a severe shortage of Pu238 already. It's already one of the main limiting factors to NASA/ESA long range space exploration efforts.
To be fair, it's not like our media isn't just as full of BS on the subject. No one is talking about weird slugs that Dutch found in the wreckage. No one is talking about the fact that plane was sliced to pieces by what was very clearly a continous rod type charge that is typically used in AAM, whereas BUK typically uses high explosive fragmentation warhead that does damage in a very different pattern.
Right now, both sides are victims of a very obvious disinformation war, only providing parts of the story beneficial to their version of events to the public and completely obfuscating or ignoring the rest. Which is why I rather disagree on your conclusion. This will likely go the way to Kennedy or Palme murder, lots of theories, someone will be nailed for the crime, but that will probably not be the one who did it.
Again, the investigators of the Malaysian jet that they suspect went down in the Pacific debunks this very well. Their working theory is that cockpit itself was completely burned out, alongside all control surfaces and computers. Fly by wire computers however are spread across the aircraft AND FULLY REDUNDANT. That means that even if you lose all of the cockpit, the other computers will simply take over the work and continue steering the plane.
And as AC below pointed out, no one care about upper stage. The stage that makes exceptionally visible plume and long lasting smoke trail is the booster stage which pushes the missile for quite a while before disengaging. This is what I was talking about.
All in all, I'm not sure about "conspiracy theories" as right now every single version of how the plane was shot down can be defined as such in view that none of them can account for all evidence present, such as the hypothesis overwhelmingly presented in Western media continues to be silent about strange slugs that were found in the wreckage that do indeed look a lot like AA cannon shells, or the fact that it was shot down by what appears to be continuous rod warhead which is generally used in AAM rather than SAM. Typical BUK for example is a high explosive fragmentation warhead. Russia hypothesis fails to account for apparent lack of pictures of said SU-27, and in fact their initial claim was that strike was performed from SU-25 which is all but incapable of such a feat due to lack of proper air to air aiming capability. This was demonstrated quite well when two Iraninan pilots flying SU-25s couldn't hit a US reconnaissance drone over Persian Gulf some time ago.
I'm mostly in agreement with another poster in the thread. We'll never find out what really happened here, like in other cases where too many interests were at play. Too much smoke and mirrors on all sides and too little interest in actually finding out what happened.
It does, though not much. Most forget that before this incident, most of the Europe was very much on the fence about who was more aggressive in the conflict.
Downing of a plane with a lot of Dutch on board triggered a heavy anti-Russian sentiment in a lot of European countries. It was literally a turning point in propaganda warfare.
But to be fair, even if we found out today that it was Ukrainians who did it, the damage has already been largely done. EU has taken the path it took, and a ship this big doesn't turn fast. Too many bridges burned on both sides, too many insults traded. It will probably take at least a decade to fix relations to pre-downing levels even if we find out that Ukraine was the one that shot down the plane.
And let's face it, even if they did, we won't be told for aforementioned "face saving" reasons. Union is already on a very shaky ground with GB almost splitting off, Juncker drowning in tax avoidance allegations, Hungary taking openly conservative anti-EU stance within EU and the obvious elephant in the room, Eurocrisis. Greece is due for the next "shaving of the debt" soon enough, which is bound to create even more internal tensions. External enemy makes it much easier for politicians to rally their people, and Russia played the proverbial bad guy role like champ by ramping up its aerial penetration testing across Europe.
As the other Malaysian jet showed, modern aircraft stay airborne for a long time even without any active controls because of fly-by-wire.
That means aircraft would go into Russian space silent, get intercepted and Russians would get delicious photos of the jet with its cockpit blown off by cannon fire at over 10km.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. That's why the computers in the other parts of the plane take over.
What, you think aircraft designers put FBW computers in the cockpit?
Only the fact that they in fact aren't doing what you're suggesting, because as mentioned in the very article, gearboxes aren't that significant of a problem because wear and tear hits the rest of the wind power plant at around the same time, so you have to replace most of it anyway. And wind turbine with a gearbox is far cheaper to run, far lighter, and GE and Siemens still overwhelmingly use wind turbines with standard gearboxes. Because efficiency.
For example, here's GE's current list of wind turbine offerings:
http://www.ge-energy.com/wind
Let's pick some plants and look into them, shall we?
http://www.ge-energy.com/produ...
"Higher AEP than its 1.x predecessors by incorporating a larger gearbox scaled from GE’s 2.x platform and longer 52.2 meter blades"
Oh look, not only are they not dropping gear boxes, they are enlarging them to fit larger blade.
Surely, the smaller ones will have none then?
http://www.ge-energy.com/produ...
"Higher AEP than its 1.5 predecessors by incorporating GE’s 1.6-100 gearbox"
In the end, I have only one question for you. Your experience in the industry, was it in marketing or unrelated thing like running the office or cleaning toilets? Because I know people who used to work for Winwind, and even their marketing people aren't as ignorant of reality as you are, so I'm starting to think you're more of a toilet cleaner type.
I humbly disagree. The case has been extremely traumatizing for many people, and frankly it would make a terrible precedent if civil aviation, something that is international for a very good reason, was to buckle because of diplomatic pressure.
They should do the normal investigation to the best of their ability. I would just prefer if they did it openly enough so we wouldn't have to question whether or not results were "corrected".
Unfortunate reality is that this incident has been used as a tool for diplomatic pressure however, which significant reduces chances of us ever finding out what really happened, because each side will spin the narrative, and if possible pressure the investigators. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try.
No, they are not. And preliminary statements ranged from "shrapnel embedded in the hull" to "large slugs embedded in the cockpit".
We'll see when they release their findings. Some parts are already being sent to Kharkiv via train as we speak.
Yes. Indeed. Those "rare" materials like AU, of which there's a huge abundance of in our oceans. Clearly, it's all artificial scarcity!
Right. You are smartest person in the world, and people actually building these things are idiots.
http://www.technologyreview.co...
Those retards at GE and Siemens sure would like your input, since you're clearly so much smarter than any of them. What would they know, being on the actual bleeding edge of the technology, when faced with you, a person "who worked in the industry with tens of years of experience [doing the marketing?]"
"Siemens’s plans hinge on a new design that reduces the weight of the system’s generator. In conventional wind turbines, the gearbox increases the speed of the wind-driven rotor several hundred fold, which radically reduces the size of the generator required. Direct-drive generators operate at the same speed as the turbine’s blades and must therefore be much bigger–over four meters in diameter for Siemens’s three-megawatt turbine. Yet Siemens claims that the turbine’s entire nacelle weighs just 73 metric tons–12 tons less than that on its less powerful, gear-driven 2.3-megawatt turbines.
Much of the weight reduction comes from the use of permanent magnets in the generators’ rotor–a trick that GE is also using. Conventional turbine generators use electromagnets–copper coils fed with electricity from the generator itself. Henk Polinder, an expert in permanent-magnet generators at Holland’s Delft University of Technology, says that a 15-millimeter-thick segment of permanent magnets can generate the same magnetic field as a 10- to 15-centimeter section of copper coils.
Stiesdal says Siemens reduced weight further by inverting its generator’s design. Rather than a steel rotor covered with permanent magnets spinning inside a stationary doughnut-shaped stator (the design GE is using in its four-megawatt direct-drive turbine) Siemens’s rotor is a steel cylinder with permanent magnets on the inside, and this rotor spins around a column-like stator."
Preliminary report struck all the initial questionable observations out, including those of type of damage and specific locations. That's why it generalizes it as "large number of high energy objects" without classifying if patterns were different or not. Initial reports from site suggested that they were indeed different on cockpit and fuselage.
"As yet it has not been possible to conduct a detailed study of the wreckage. However, the available images show that the pieces of wreckage were pierced in numerous places. The pattern of damage to the aircraft fuselage and the cockpit is consistent with that which may be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside. It’s likely that this damage resulted in a loss of structural integrity of the aircraft, leading to an in-flight break up. This also explains the abrupt end to the data registration on the recorders, the simultaneous loss of contact with air traffic control and the aircraft's disappearance from radar."
We still don't know who's sub that was. It's very well known that Sweden itself is basically a NSA partner after they changed the law a few years ago to let their intelligence to spy on all the internet traffic that passes the country. Most of Moscow and St. Petersburg traffic passes through Finland and Sweden on the way to Europe and we Finns didn't play ball.
But NSA doesn't trust anyone, and they maintain the same underwater cable taps that Russia does. So who it was that was renewing the taps is a good question, especially when you consider that Swedes didn't actually bring along their best and newest ship that NSA equipped for them to do the searching. Instead they kept mostly the older boats and the only ships capable of detection were new corvettes like Visby, which are general usage corvettes, not ships that specialize in intelligence and data gathering like the said specialist ship which sat around southern Sweden for duration of the search.
The timing would suggest Russians. The numbers on the other hand don't - Russians are actually the weakest major territorial power in terms of submarine capability in the region with only three submarine in the Baltic. Swedes have five and Germans even more (can't remember how many off the top of my head). We have none because we traditionally focused on self defence rather than force projection, as a result we have a whole lot of listening devices installed across the key approaches instead of having any subs.
Considering that overwhelming majority of claims supposedly implicating Russians have been debunked so far (there was no message in Russian, there were no russian frogmen on the islands, etc) and the only evidence Swedes have is one image of a submarine of unknown origin makes it very difficult to figure out who it really was. Chances are it was either Russian or US submarine refreshing hardware on cable taps, Russians triggering Swedish reaction to sub alert to study their actions or US conducting a false flag operation to ensure that new Swedish government follows in Bildt's footsteps when it comes to strong anti-Russian bias. All hypotheses are reasonable and have some circumstantial evidence which aligns with them.
Liveleak has videos or at least still images of most launches, usually sources from various social media. This is one of the most urbanised areas and BUK's single stage engine produces a long smoke trail and a huge bright plume. As a result, it tends to draw attention from a lot of people and bored soldiers in the area who take pictures with their cellphones. Which end on social media, and eventually on liveleak.
I still stand by my original statement back when this story started to unfold: most likely scenario is rebels accidentally killing the plane instead of one of the Antonovs spying on them in area.
But there's a significant amount of evidence so far that appears, at least on surface, to conflict with this hypothesis, so I'm not taking any bets.
As for the flight path, this is a mix of Ukrainians needing the money for transit royalties and capitalist drive for efficiency at the cost of everything else. As long as no aircraft is shot down, choosing a safer trajectory is an inefficiency which must be eliminated.
Because I haven't seen any footage so far, and I tend to follow liveleak pretty closely. They had video footage of even most MANPADS fire which is far less visible.
Ah yes, the obligatory "if you don't believe what you've been told and look at it critically, you're a russian shill because [list reasons one you reply to lists as not trustworthy, completely ignore reasons listed that are noted as trustworthy and the critique is based on]" - comment.
Cold Fjord, is that your slightly more civil twin?
Actually there are PLENTY of videos of those events. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Note: "embedded in CREW SEATS".
Argument here: "Autocannon attack on cockpit".
I think you vastly underestimate the capabilities of modern fly by wire systems. They can steer aircraft that has sustained fuselage damage by design.
This isn't autopilot of the past that mostly just hooked into hydraulics and kept them stable. Modern FBW systems are effectively piloting systems that have access to all sensor readouts and have a massive amount of preprogrammed scenarios and logic patterns to adapt to them to the best of their ability.
Typo on my part. Meant "controls" as I was reading a story on how control surfaces on aircraft change performance upon passing supersonic barrier.
Pretty much. Civil aviation authorities have already changed the process in how they pass on information on military activity. Ukraine was apparently trying to milk the route for royalty payments and extreme efficiency oriented civil aviation was more than happy to save on fuel costs by flying over area stuck in civil war with active fighter aircraft and surface to air missiles present in the theatre.
This has since changed.
You're still not providing the quote and trying to dodge the subject.
Quote me on what you claimed I said or admit you are lying.
Not really. Most modern power generators solve the problem by elongating rotor and stator to avoid having to use a lot of expensive neodymium.
This approach is not available in wind turbines due to size constraints.
We are suffering from a severe shortage of Pu238 already. It's already one of the main limiting factors to NASA/ESA long range space exploration efforts.
Only for taste-testing.
To be fair, it's not like our media isn't just as full of BS on the subject. No one is talking about weird slugs that Dutch found in the wreckage. No one is talking about the fact that plane was sliced to pieces by what was very clearly a continous rod type charge that is typically used in AAM, whereas BUK typically uses high explosive fragmentation warhead that does damage in a very different pattern.
Right now, both sides are victims of a very obvious disinformation war, only providing parts of the story beneficial to their version of events to the public and completely obfuscating or ignoring the rest. Which is why I rather disagree on your conclusion. This will likely go the way to Kennedy or Palme murder, lots of theories, someone will be nailed for the crime, but that will probably not be the one who did it.
Again, the investigators of the Malaysian jet that they suspect went down in the Pacific debunks this very well. Their working theory is that cockpit itself was completely burned out, alongside all control surfaces and computers. Fly by wire computers however are spread across the aircraft AND FULLY REDUNDANT. That means that even if you lose all of the cockpit, the other computers will simply take over the work and continue steering the plane.
And as AC below pointed out, no one care about upper stage. The stage that makes exceptionally visible plume and long lasting smoke trail is the booster stage which pushes the missile for quite a while before disengaging. This is what I was talking about.
All in all, I'm not sure about "conspiracy theories" as right now every single version of how the plane was shot down can be defined as such in view that none of them can account for all evidence present, such as the hypothesis overwhelmingly presented in Western media continues to be silent about strange slugs that were found in the wreckage that do indeed look a lot like AA cannon shells, or the fact that it was shot down by what appears to be continuous rod warhead which is generally used in AAM rather than SAM. Typical BUK for example is a high explosive fragmentation warhead. Russia hypothesis fails to account for apparent lack of pictures of said SU-27, and in fact their initial claim was that strike was performed from SU-25 which is all but incapable of such a feat due to lack of proper air to air aiming capability. This was demonstrated quite well when two Iraninan pilots flying SU-25s couldn't hit a US reconnaissance drone over Persian Gulf some time ago.
I'm mostly in agreement with another poster in the thread. We'll never find out what really happened here, like in other cases where too many interests were at play. Too much smoke and mirrors on all sides and too little interest in actually finding out what happened.
It does, though not much. Most forget that before this incident, most of the Europe was very much on the fence about who was more aggressive in the conflict.
Downing of a plane with a lot of Dutch on board triggered a heavy anti-Russian sentiment in a lot of European countries. It was literally a turning point in propaganda warfare.
But to be fair, even if we found out today that it was Ukrainians who did it, the damage has already been largely done. EU has taken the path it took, and a ship this big doesn't turn fast. Too many bridges burned on both sides, too many insults traded. It will probably take at least a decade to fix relations to pre-downing levels even if we find out that Ukraine was the one that shot down the plane.
And let's face it, even if they did, we won't be told for aforementioned "face saving" reasons. Union is already on a very shaky ground with GB almost splitting off, Juncker drowning in tax avoidance allegations, Hungary taking openly conservative anti-EU stance within EU and the obvious elephant in the room, Eurocrisis. Greece is due for the next "shaving of the debt" soon enough, which is bound to create even more internal tensions. External enemy makes it much easier for politicians to rally their people, and Russia played the proverbial bad guy role like champ by ramping up its aerial penetration testing across Europe.
As the other Malaysian jet showed, modern aircraft stay airborne for a long time even without any active controls because of fly-by-wire.
That means aircraft would go into Russian space silent, get intercepted and Russians would get delicious photos of the jet with its cockpit blown off by cannon fire at over 10km.