It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call.
IE they could charge everybody a flat rate, not have 'detailed billing', charge people less money overall and still make more money than under the current system.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You most certainly do, seeing as how you mostly managed to restate what I said.
Elecrticity does not explode
No it doesn't, but under the right circumstances it can heat something so fast and hard that it effectively explodes. Saw/heard it once when they tried replacing a fuse on a power line that had shorted closed next to our building(we were on generator at the time). It sounded enough like a gunshot to make me duck.
which can make semiconductors explode, but not on nearly so grand a scale as this.
My point. In order to get the other components in the cabinet to 'explode' at such a scale would require modification to the point of being obvious; or more likely access the physics labs that make things like hundreds of thousands of volts available.
I was looking through the pictures for something else that I was very surprised I did not see.
Nice long rant that missed the type of battery in the cabinet completely. It says right in the article that the batteries we're talking about are lithium-metal polymer (LMP), built by a bankrupt company by the name of Avestor. It's a solid state battery meant to last for at least 10 years. Oh yeah, and anybody moving them around should have hazmat qualifications as they can catch fire if they get too hot or 'become unstable' if damaged by movement.
Don't get me wrong -- you can rent a whole package, get some safety training, etc., for like $50 to $100 a day, all over the Caribbean, if you don't mind doing the group thing. But you ought to be able to get the lecture, pool lesson, equipment and a good day's worth of a reef dive for under a hundred bucks at pretty much any resort.
Resort equipment is going to be selected for ease of use; adaptability; safety; and cost effectiveness*. Good equipment should be able to withstand heave use for years; at a resort it's likely to see that use. $5k @ $100/rental fee per session is only 50 sessions for break even.
What I figured the $2k would get you would be new decent(not great) quality equipment needed to go coral diving and such. Not deep diving, not wreck or cave diving, just basic low depth diving to see the pretty fishes in person. I wasn't including air fare, travel accommodation's, boat, or anything else. Basically - the scuba version of the $150 bicycle.
Explains a lot as to why they're using AC motors, even if they do have to spend a couple percentage points of energy to run the DC from the batteries through an inverter.
I've been diving for a couple of decades and this includes rare specialties where covering a lot of distance is useful. For normal recreational diving traveling around fast generally indicates a newbie. The point of diving is to enjoy the scenery and as divers become more experienced they generally slow down and become "lazy" and try to leverage currents and surges as much as possible.
I was thinking 'the next bend of reef over distances'. Of course experienced divers are going to learn all the tricks to make moving easy.
A dolphin kick is something that divers occasionally do with normal fins to vary muscle usage and avoid fatigue and cramps. So many of us are somewhat familiar with the general style. The problem with this style is that it is quite limited with respect to maneuverability. Divers often use their legs/fins asymmetrically or at odd angles. This far more useful than going fast.
Which would indeed be a concern, and might kill this device for normal usage. Still, if it can be made to still allow you to do that...
Finally, anything that makes your silhouette look even more like a seal to a shark is a bad idea.;-)
Agreed, though remember, this thing faces backwards. Didn't look too seal-like to me. More like a hook.
It may be a controller issue; I can only report what I've seen. Thus far all builds I've seen by auto manufacturers have used AC motors, and even the home brew electric car sites place AC conversions as more effective and efficient than DC conversions. Just more expensive.
Reading through more sites, AC motors are more efficient, last longer, and emit less pollution. Apparently brushes wear out and can spark, leading to ozone creation.
From browsing conversion sites, another reason for using an AC motor over a DC one is the ability to do regenerative braking. The DC kits don't offer it. Apparently it's a lot easier to run an AC motor as a generator than a DC one.
Gear for diving costs approximately $1500 for basic cheap new equipment (including your life support stuff, basic suit and other crap).
So I wasn't far off. When posting prices for stuff like this, I tend to assume new equipment, as that's easiest to get and more stable in price than used. I also tend to take a step or two up from the cheapest(with research into quality). So $2k is about right.
Unless there is a marked improvement with this device it probably is not worth it.
There's a difference between 'not worth it' and 'people won't buy it'. There's all sorts of useless junk people will buy, as well as useful stuff that'll sit on the shelf forever.
I would probably put my $500 into getting a slightly better BC or regulator. For $500 one can pick up a computer.
But what do you do once you have the better BC, regulator, and computer?
The biggest benefit would be decreased air consumption if it requires substantially less energy to move with this thing
According to one poster, it's 85% efficient as opposed to 10% efficient with normal fins. I figure 20% for 'good' fins - so it'd cut your expenditures in movement by a factor of four. Still not a lot over the air demands for simply keeping you alive, but it's something.
I do not think that most recreational divers go anywhere near max ventilation or even a level that a reduced load would lower air consumption enough to warrant the price
I would tend to think that 'tourist divers' would use these things(assuming it's usage doesn't take long to learn), more because it makes swimming around easier, increasing their range due to limited muscle fitness for swimming than any air demand(which they won't push).
I am sort of diving on a budget though. This shit is expensive.
I know. I'm agonizing over buying a $500-700 bike coming up. My old one is just worn out. The $150 walmart special doesn't cut it for me though.
But with no budget maybe I would check something like this out. Most people who dive can afford to spend an extra $500 though. If it is easy to use and does not encumber the individual it will can on. Dive shops love to sell the newest thing. It is a hobby for people who have too much money and happen to live near water.
My point. Offer it as a rental, offer free lessons, and you'll get people buying it. Especially if it works. If the price eventually drops to $200, so much the better for us. Meanwhile let the rich yuppies buy them. Until then, you might eventually be able to pick up a used one cheap.
Dude - either uncheck the AC comment or get an account. This is a good post.
Good point about the cost of normal fins. That was part of my point - $500 is relatively cheap for many forms of sporting equipment.
Not to mention that during the fun part of the dive people like to be able to go at a slow speed so they can see things so they'd need to bring normal fins too.
The way I see this operating, it'd be a lot like a more efficient type of fin. It's not like they couldn't just flip it slower if they wanted to go slower. IE if they want to look at something a little ways away, they can travel there faster with less effort. Without going back to the scooter
I did some research - human swimming speed record is 2.29 m/s, which is around double the 'More than 2 knots' quoted in the article. While unaided - Tom Jager also wasn't encumbered by air tanks and only covered 50 meters in his run.
Still, I doubt their guinea pig was a world-class swimmer or diver.
If it really does increase efficiency from 10%(tourist fins) to 85% like another poster said, I can see it being really popular among serious divers. For one thing, it's probably less intrusive than a scooter.
I can go to walmart and buy a perfectly usable bike for $150, or go to a specialized bike shop and spend $2k or more for a really, really good bike. The same thing with golf clubs and bowling balls. Heck, look at archery. There's all sorts of sights and release aids that aren't strictly necessary that people willingly spend money on.
However, you *can* swim underwater without the Powerswim. How much more effective is the Powerswim than ordinary flippers? Is it worth the $490 increase in price?
I wouldn't know, I'm not a diver nor a power swimmer. I like to swim, but I've only used fins like once. What I'm basing the idea that it'll sell on is that people will spend huge amounts of money for their sports equipment, even if they don't technically need to.
Some quick research indicates that an underwater scooter is closer to $250 than $150, and only gets you another.3m/s over the 'tail'. The one I saw said '1 hour under normal usage'. So it requires charging and maintenance that this device probably doesn't need.
In the time you're strapping that to your legs I'll already have swam most of the way there at a leisurely pace(and as a bonus, I don't have some dolphin fin to remove when I arrive.
What if you don't have to remove it? The article states that it was developed from studying marine mammals. They have their shape 100% of the time, and they can do all sorts of stuff. So, baring anything unusual, you shouldn't have to remove the device for the entire dive.
If it allows the high speed as a result of increased swimming efficiency, it could help casual divers as well - increasing their speed or reducing their effort per distance traveled.
It sounds a bit like a water based bicycle - which both increases maximum speed and reduces effort.
Another dirty little part of the equation is that the bigger the electric motor(IE higher power), the more efficient it is. So far it's been found to be more economical to have a conventional driveshaft powered by one motor over having two or more smaller motors.
IE it's better to have 1 300 pound 95% efficient motor and some connecting equipment than two 200 pound 90% efficient motors at the wheels.
come up with a budget version, the $500 price-tag is going to keep me firmly in my flippers.'"
Personally, I think that a $500 price tag will result in this gaining widespread use, assuming it's as useful as the article states.
Why? People spend more than $500 all the time on bicycles, surfboards, skis, and other athletic equipment all the time. Matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the equipment for your typical diver exceeds $2k. A quick search shows new surfboards costing $300-400.
Worst case, it can be rented out to various tourists at $10/day and pay themselves off in well under a year.
My thought would be: What else in the cabinet could cause such an explosion? I mean, the equipment should be fused; there should be enough circuit breakers and fuses in the lines to prevent electricity from creating such a large bang; so a short or capacitor shouldn't do it. Properly constructed circuit boards aren't even all that flammable, much less explosive enough to destroy a cabinet.
What's the most reactive chemical area around? The battery. It's a lithium type - and warns that it could catch fire/explode if damaged.
It's certainly not a 'cheap component' - it's stated to be more expensive than other battery types.
As far as I'm concerned, they should be launching in a apollo style module, with the rest of the cargo going up on a separate rocket.
Then turn around, build a heavy duty space station in a useful orbit and do your stuff there.
As far as I'm concerned, the shuttle is a reusable space station. It shouldn't be. Design tolerances for earth systems are different than space systems, and the interface between is rough. Design, as much as possible, for one or the other. Once you have mass up into space, don't bring it back down unless you have to. If nothing else, the junk can be used as extra shielding.
I think the issue is not so much 'killing it' as not actually putting any money into the research towards developing usable electric cars.
Someone has to pay all the initial research, and I'm sure that most megacorps would prefer to put that money into something that will continue to generate revenue.
We have perfectly usable electric cars. Electric motors are used for many industrial applications; We're at the point that you could pick a suitable motor from at least a dozen manufacturers. If you're going to be building a couple thousand electric cars, they'll even custom build motors to your specifications quite economically. An electric motor also capable of acting as a generator, with 90+% efficiency that's quite able to last fifty years with minimal maintenance will only cost 20% or so more than a crate gasoline engine of similar horsepower. And the electric engine would actually be able to overpower the gasoline one quite handily in most tests due to it's superior torque curve and the fact that electric motors are rated at their maximum sustained power while gasoline engines are generally rated at their max period. 46HP sustained 105HP peak electric costs $1.5k individually, from an electric car site. This is about the same as cheapy 4 cylinder crate engines. A 100hp motor runs ~$3.5k. But that'll be able to slaughter most V6's.
Where electric falls down is with the batteries. Again, something used left and right in MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, UPS units, etc...
Building an electric car is simple mechanics at this point. Making it economical will require a breakthrough in cost per kw/h of battery storage, and the same in longevity wouldn't hurt.
Yes, but at 50 cents a track, how many people are going to a:Bother trying with the pirate networks, and b: How much promotion is needed to push a 50 cent sale as versus a $15-20 album sale?
At 50 cents a track, assuming 5 minutes/track, that's 12 tracks in an hour, or $6. I could pay that per song while at work and still make money(Minimum wage earners would have to economize, of course). I spend more on a candy bar!
Set up some sort of comparison site; such as the 'others who like the XYZ songs you've indicated you like also tend to like ABC songs, want to listen?'. JoeUser's list of what he considers the best songs, DanRomantic's list of songs 'most likely to get you laid', so on and so forth.
It'll be a while yet; I tend to redo the calculations at least semi-annually. Remember, I only made one mention of the cost of electricity.
Remember, I'm already assuming a 33% increase in the sustained price of gasoline - it's $3/gallon here. There are pressures to keep gasoline prices stable; an increase in price results in more efforts to obtain supply. Eventually they will build a new refinery or three. That's actually having a larger effect on the price of gasoline than oil prices(though that's contributing as well).
Then again, in my case I have a five year old car that I plan on keeping for ten. Even at $6/gallon gasoline, not having that $400/month car payment pays for 67 gallons or 2k miles. Per month.
If they can get the cost of a 100 mile@75mph battery pack down under $5k, I'll probably be in line to buy an electric car. I say a hundred miles because that's what I consider the minimum range I'd consider for a regular use vehicle; I'd still have to rent a different vehicle to visit anywhere.
note: this is the EV1 argument from "who killed the electric car". Because a hydrogen cell powered vehicle would mandate an engine with many replaceable parts and a company owned refueling infrastructure it would allow control and money making for the large oil corporations who killed the electric car mandate and promote hydrogen vehicles. It is simply not in their best interests to allow the consumers to get vehicles with a low maintenance cost and which they can refuel from multiple sources which make the companies little or no money.
How could the oil companies kill the electric car? The only reason I can think of is collusion between the auto companies and the oil companies. It's not like people can't install charging stations in their home and avoid the oil companies more or less completely with an electric vehicle. You'll need some lubricants, but it'd be a little difficult for them to avoid selling owners of electric vehicles machine oils.
Personally, I think that a clue is that converting a car from gasoline to electric tends to cost more than a new vehicle is worth(a recent google search was $25k to convert), as well as normally costing trunk/storage space. Even a conversion kit, minus batteries, runs ~$10k. Even considering gasoline costs in excess of $4/gallon and assuming your electricity is free you won't break even during the life of the batteries. $25k pays for more than 6k gallons of gasoline. At a moderate 30mpg, that's 180k miles, or 12 years at 15k miles/year.
Let's assume that the batteries are $10k($25k - $10k motor/parts cost -$5k install labor). At 5% interest, that's $500 of gas or 3,750 miles a year you could buy off the interest on the batteries. Let's assume that the batteries last 10 years*. A quick trip to a loan calculator tells me that the monthly payment on a $10k 10 year loan at 5% would be $106.07, or nearly 800 miles/month, 9.5k miles/year equivalent cost to gasoline@$4/gallon. So the cost of the batteries alone nearly equals the cost of gasoline. I've read quotes placing electricity cost at around a third that of gasoline. Assume gasoline costs $3/gallon, battery cost alone is equivalent to 12.7k miles a year.
I've been looking into getting an electric commuter vehicle, but I just can't make the costs match up. My general plan has been to buy a truck for my cargo needs(current vehicle is too small), using that as needed(cargo trips&foul weather). Trading out my commute car for an electric just doesn't make sense.
Hydroelectric power is pretty clean (aside from the local effects of the dam).
The local effects of the dam does tend to be large.
Maybe we can construct hydroelectric plants that generate massive amounts of electricity, and use that electricity to create H2 and then ship the H2 around the country.
In the USA, indeed most of the world, we've installed dams pretty much wherever practical, and a few places that aren't so practical. Enviromentalists are complaining about the ecological damage caused by a number of dams, indeed some have been demolished because of their negative impact. We only have so much water, and it's need for so many things. It's part of why they're looking into tidal power.
Re: Solar Panels - sure they require petroleum to produce, but don't they last for a really long time?
I don't think that they actually require petroleum, but they do require a number of nasty chemicals and quite a bit of energy to produce. They're simply very uneconomical in most situations today.
Most of Earth is totally unpopulated. So it's not "sheer luck" that the Tunguska impact wasn't deadly.
The land surface of the Earth, at this point, is most definitly not 'mostly totally unpopulated'. That's only true if you include the ocean and polar regions. An asteroid impact is fairly unlikely to hit in the polar regions due to orbital mechanics, and a Tunguska event hitting an ocean would cause a tsunami that would most likely cause fatalities.
Even for the time, Tunguska was unusual as to how unpopulated it was.
I'd prefer to find out if we have an asteroid/comet on a collision course, and preferably early enough to divert it rather than take the risk.
And I'm saying that their cultural differences didn't make much a difference in their ecological impact. It was their limited technological abilities that did so. Of course they'd have made different things, better in some ways, worse in others.
Europeans knew the benefits of game conservation back in the middle ages; many aborigines didn't.
No, they did it because they were hungry and it was the easiest way to get food. Cattle are indeed renewable, as is most game if you handle them right. Did they have models/simulations? Nope - from reading interviews with people of similar cultures, they'd quite happily hunt their main game animals to extinction - fully believing that more would appear, that game has simply been scarce for a while.
What I'm talking about is that native americans, and most aboriginal cultures were more ecological than us only because they didn't have the technology or knowledge to exploit resources to the point of causing significant damage. There was nothing magical, they weren't especially ecologically minded.
However, we're improving. We've finally gotten to the point where we care, where we take action to limit the damage we cause, to understand the consequences of changes we make. Sometimes changes we make are positive, and help an ecosystem, sometimes it's neutral, sometimes it's negative. The air has been cleaned up significantly since I was a child, much less when my grandparents were children.
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Common mistake. The fuel is for the thermonuclear winter that's scheduled after the war.
Wait a minute...
HEY GUYS!!!! I've found the cure for global warming!
It's been a joke of mine that it costs the phone companies more to bill you for a phone call than it does for them to provide the phone call.
IE they could charge everybody a flat rate, not have 'detailed billing', charge people less money overall and still make more money than under the current system.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
You most certainly do, seeing as how you mostly managed to restate what I said.
Elecrticity does not explode
No it doesn't, but under the right circumstances it can heat something so fast and hard that it effectively explodes. Saw/heard it once when they tried replacing a fuse on a power line that had shorted closed next to our building(we were on generator at the time). It sounded enough like a gunshot to make me duck.
which can make semiconductors explode, but not on nearly so grand a scale as this.
My point. In order to get the other components in the cabinet to 'explode' at such a scale would require modification to the point of being obvious; or more likely access the physics labs that make things like hundreds of thousands of volts available.
I was looking through the pictures for something else that I was very surprised I did not see.
Nice long rant that missed the type of battery in the cabinet completely. It says right in the article that the batteries we're talking about are lithium-metal polymer (LMP), built by a bankrupt company by the name of Avestor. It's a solid state battery meant to last for at least 10 years. Oh yeah, and anybody moving them around should have hazmat qualifications as they can catch fire if they get too hot or 'become unstable' if damaged by movement.
Don't get me wrong -- you can rent a whole package, get some safety training, etc., for like $50 to $100 a day, all over the Caribbean, if you don't mind doing the group thing. But you ought to be able to get the lecture, pool lesson, equipment and a good day's worth of a reef dive for under a hundred bucks at pretty much any resort.
Resort equipment is going to be selected for ease of use; adaptability; safety; and cost effectiveness*. Good equipment should be able to withstand heave use for years; at a resort it's likely to see that use. $5k @ $100/rental fee per session is only 50 sessions for break even.
What I figured the $2k would get you would be new decent(not great) quality equipment needed to go coral diving and such. Not deep diving, not wreck or cave diving, just basic low depth diving to see the pretty fishes in person. I wasn't including air fare, travel accommodation's, boat, or anything else. Basically - the scuba version of the $150 bicycle.
I don't have a clue, really. It was a good post.
Explains a lot as to why they're using AC motors, even if they do have to spend a couple percentage points of energy to run the DC from the batteries through an inverter.
I've been diving for a couple of decades and this includes rare specialties where covering a lot of distance is useful. For normal recreational diving traveling around fast generally indicates a newbie. The point of diving is to enjoy the scenery and as divers become more experienced they generally slow down and become "lazy" and try to leverage currents and surges as much as possible.
;-)
I was thinking 'the next bend of reef over distances'. Of course experienced divers are going to learn all the tricks to make moving easy.
A dolphin kick is something that divers occasionally do with normal fins to vary muscle usage and avoid fatigue and cramps. So many of us are somewhat familiar with the general style. The problem with this style is that it is quite limited with respect to maneuverability. Divers often use their legs/fins asymmetrically or at odd angles. This far more useful than going fast.
Which would indeed be a concern, and might kill this device for normal usage. Still, if it can be made to still allow you to do that...
Finally, anything that makes your silhouette look even more like a seal to a shark is a bad idea.
Agreed, though remember, this thing faces backwards. Didn't look too seal-like to me. More like a hook.
It may be a controller issue; I can only report what I've seen. Thus far all builds I've seen by auto manufacturers have used AC motors, and even the home brew electric car sites place AC conversions as more effective and efficient than DC conversions. Just more expensive.
Reading through more sites, AC motors are more efficient, last longer, and emit less pollution. Apparently brushes wear out and can spark, leading to ozone creation.
From browsing conversion sites, another reason for using an AC motor over a DC one is the ability to do regenerative braking. The DC kits don't offer it. Apparently it's a lot easier to run an AC motor as a generator than a DC one.
I suggest getting an account.
Gear for diving costs approximately $1500 for basic cheap new equipment (including your life support stuff, basic suit and other crap).
So I wasn't far off. When posting prices for stuff like this, I tend to assume new equipment, as that's easiest to get and more stable in price than used. I also tend to take a step or two up from the cheapest(with research into quality). So $2k is about right.
Unless there is a marked improvement with this device it probably is not worth it.
There's a difference between 'not worth it' and 'people won't buy it'. There's all sorts of useless junk people will buy, as well as useful stuff that'll sit on the shelf forever.
I would probably put my $500 into getting a slightly better BC or regulator. For $500 one can pick up a computer.
But what do you do once you have the better BC, regulator, and computer?
The biggest benefit would be decreased air consumption if it requires substantially less energy to move with this thing
According to one poster, it's 85% efficient as opposed to 10% efficient with normal fins. I figure 20% for 'good' fins - so it'd cut your expenditures in movement by a factor of four. Still not a lot over the air demands for simply keeping you alive, but it's something.
I do not think that most recreational divers go anywhere near max ventilation or even a level that a reduced load would lower air consumption enough to warrant the price
I would tend to think that 'tourist divers' would use these things(assuming it's usage doesn't take long to learn), more because it makes swimming around easier, increasing their range due to limited muscle fitness for swimming than any air demand(which they won't push).
I am sort of diving on a budget though. This shit is expensive.
I know. I'm agonizing over buying a $500-700 bike coming up. My old one is just worn out. The $150 walmart special doesn't cut it for me though.
But with no budget maybe I would check something like this out. Most people who dive can afford to spend an extra $500 though. If it is easy to use and does not encumber the individual it will can on. Dive shops love to sell the newest thing. It is a hobby for people who have too much money and happen to live near water.
My point. Offer it as a rental, offer free lessons, and you'll get people buying it. Especially if it works. If the price eventually drops to $200, so much the better for us. Meanwhile let the rich yuppies buy them. Until then, you might eventually be able to pick up a used one cheap.
Dude - either uncheck the AC comment or get an account. This is a good post.
Good point about the cost of normal fins. That was part of my point - $500 is relatively cheap for many forms of sporting equipment.
Not to mention that during the fun part of the dive people like to be able to go at a slow speed so they can see things so they'd need to bring normal fins too.
The way I see this operating, it'd be a lot like a more efficient type of fin. It's not like they couldn't just flip it slower if they wanted to go slower. IE if they want to look at something a little ways away, they can travel there faster with less effort. Without going back to the scooter
I did some research - human swimming speed record is 2.29 m/s, which is around double the 'More than 2 knots' quoted in the article. While unaided - Tom Jager also wasn't encumbered by air tanks and only covered 50 meters in his run.
Still, I doubt their guinea pig was a world-class swimmer or diver.
If it really does increase efficiency from 10%(tourist fins) to 85% like another poster said, I can see it being really popular among serious divers. For one thing, it's probably less intrusive than a scooter.
But, all those things you listed are necessary for their respective activities. You can't ski without skis or surf without a surfboard.
.3m/s over the 'tail'. The one I saw said '1 hour under normal usage'. So it requires charging and maintenance that this device probably doesn't need.
Golf clubs? Monogrammed golf balls? Bowling Balls? Basketball shoes? MP3 players(and impact resistant CD players before that), treadmills, stationary bikes, etc...
I can go to walmart and buy a perfectly usable bike for $150, or go to a specialized bike shop and spend $2k or more for a really, really good bike. The same thing with golf clubs and bowling balls. Heck, look at archery. There's all sorts of sights and release aids that aren't strictly necessary that people willingly spend money on.
However, you *can* swim underwater without the Powerswim. How much more effective is the Powerswim than ordinary flippers? Is it worth the $490 increase in price?
I wouldn't know, I'm not a diver nor a power swimmer. I like to swim, but I've only used fins like once. What I'm basing the idea that it'll sell on is that people will spend huge amounts of money for their sports equipment, even if they don't technically need to.
Some quick research indicates that an underwater scooter is closer to $250 than $150, and only gets you another
In the time you're strapping that to your legs I'll already have swam most of the way there at a leisurely pace(and as a bonus, I don't have some dolphin fin to remove when I arrive.
What if you don't have to remove it? The article states that it was developed from studying marine mammals. They have their shape 100% of the time, and they can do all sorts of stuff. So, baring anything unusual, you shouldn't have to remove the device for the entire dive.
If it allows the high speed as a result of increased swimming efficiency, it could help casual divers as well - increasing their speed or reducing their effort per distance traveled.
It sounds a bit like a water based bicycle - which both increases maximum speed and reduces effort.
Another dirty little part of the equation is that the bigger the electric motor(IE higher power), the more efficient it is. So far it's been found to be more economical to have a conventional driveshaft powered by one motor over having two or more smaller motors.
IE it's better to have 1 300 pound 95% efficient motor and some connecting equipment than two 200 pound 90% efficient motors at the wheels.
come up with a budget version, the $500 price-tag is going to keep me firmly in my flippers.'"
Personally, I think that a $500 price tag will result in this gaining widespread use, assuming it's as useful as the article states.
Why? People spend more than $500 all the time on bicycles, surfboards, skis, and other athletic equipment all the time. Matter of fact, I wouldn't be surprised if all the equipment for your typical diver exceeds $2k. A quick search shows new surfboards costing $300-400.
Worst case, it can be rented out to various tourists at $10/day and pay themselves off in well under a year.
My thought would be: What else in the cabinet could cause such an explosion? I mean, the equipment should be fused; there should be enough circuit breakers and fuses in the lines to prevent electricity from creating such a large bang; so a short or capacitor shouldn't do it. Properly constructed circuit boards aren't even all that flammable, much less explosive enough to destroy a cabinet.
What's the most reactive chemical area around? The battery. It's a lithium type - and warns that it could catch fire/explode if damaged.
It's certainly not a 'cheap component' - it's stated to be more expensive than other battery types.
As far as I'm concerned, they should be launching in a apollo style module, with the rest of the cargo going up on a separate rocket.
Then turn around, build a heavy duty space station in a useful orbit and do your stuff there.
As far as I'm concerned, the shuttle is a reusable space station. It shouldn't be. Design tolerances for earth systems are different than space systems, and the interface between is rough. Design, as much as possible, for one or the other. Once you have mass up into space, don't bring it back down unless you have to. If nothing else, the junk can be used as extra shielding.
I think the issue is not so much 'killing it' as not actually putting any money into the research towards developing usable electric cars.
Someone has to pay all the initial research, and I'm sure that most megacorps would prefer to put that money into something that will continue to generate revenue.
We have perfectly usable electric cars. Electric motors are used for many industrial applications; We're at the point that you could pick a suitable motor from at least a dozen manufacturers. If you're going to be building a couple thousand electric cars, they'll even custom build motors to your specifications quite economically. An electric motor also capable of acting as a generator, with 90+% efficiency that's quite able to last fifty years with minimal maintenance will only cost 20% or so more than a crate gasoline engine of similar horsepower. And the electric engine would actually be able to overpower the gasoline one quite handily in most tests due to it's superior torque curve and the fact that electric motors are rated at their maximum sustained power while gasoline engines are generally rated at their max period.
46HP sustained 105HP peak electric costs $1.5k individually, from an
electric car site. This is about the same as cheapy 4 cylinder crate engines. A 100hp motor runs ~$3.5k. But that'll be able to slaughter most V6's.
Where electric falls down is with the batteries. Again, something used left and right in MP3 players, cell phones, laptops, UPS units, etc...
Building an electric car is simple mechanics at this point. Making it economical will require a breakthrough in cost per kw/h of battery storage, and the same in longevity wouldn't hurt.
Yes, but at 50 cents a track, how many people are going to a:Bother trying with the pirate networks, and b: How much promotion is needed to push a 50 cent sale as versus a $15-20 album sale?
At 50 cents a track, assuming 5 minutes/track, that's 12 tracks in an hour, or $6. I could pay that per song while at work and still make money(Minimum wage earners would have to economize, of course). I spend more on a candy bar!
Set up some sort of comparison site; such as the 'others who like the XYZ songs you've indicated you like also tend to like ABC songs, want to listen?'. JoeUser's list of what he considers the best songs, DanRomantic's list of songs 'most likely to get you laid', so on and so forth.
It'll be a while yet; I tend to redo the calculations at least semi-annually. Remember, I only made one mention of the cost of electricity.
Remember, I'm already assuming a 33% increase in the sustained price of gasoline - it's $3/gallon here. There are pressures to keep gasoline prices stable; an increase in price results in more efforts to obtain supply. Eventually they will build a new refinery or three. That's actually having a larger effect on the price of gasoline than oil prices(though that's contributing as well).
Then again, in my case I have a five year old car that I plan on keeping for ten. Even at $6/gallon gasoline, not having that $400/month car payment pays for 67 gallons or 2k miles. Per month.
If they can get the cost of a 100 mile@75mph battery pack down under $5k, I'll probably be in line to buy an electric car. I say a hundred miles because that's what I consider the minimum range I'd consider for a regular use vehicle; I'd still have to rent a different vehicle to visit anywhere.
So I'm not buying a new vehicle anytime soon.
note: this is the EV1 argument from "who killed the electric car". Because a hydrogen cell powered vehicle would mandate an engine with many replaceable parts and a company owned refueling infrastructure it would allow control and money making for the large oil corporations who killed the electric car mandate and promote hydrogen vehicles. It is simply not in their best interests to allow the consumers to get vehicles with a low maintenance cost and which they can refuel from multiple sources which make the companies little or no money.
How could the oil companies kill the electric car? The only reason I can think of is collusion between the auto companies and the oil companies. It's not like people can't install charging stations in their home and avoid the oil companies more or less completely with an electric vehicle. You'll need some lubricants, but it'd be a little difficult for them to avoid selling owners of electric vehicles machine oils.
Personally, I think that a clue is that converting a car from gasoline to electric tends to cost more than a new vehicle is worth(a recent google search was $25k to convert), as well as normally costing trunk/storage space. Even a conversion kit, minus batteries, runs ~$10k. Even considering gasoline costs in excess of $4/gallon and assuming your electricity is free you won't break even during the life of the batteries. $25k pays for more than 6k gallons of gasoline. At a moderate 30mpg, that's 180k miles, or 12 years at 15k miles/year.
Let's assume that the batteries are $10k($25k - $10k motor/parts cost -$5k install labor). At 5% interest, that's $500 of gas or 3,750 miles a year you could buy off the interest on the batteries. Let's assume that the batteries last 10 years*. A quick trip to a loan calculator tells me that the monthly payment on a $10k 10 year loan at 5% would be $106.07, or nearly 800 miles/month, 9.5k miles/year equivalent cost to gasoline@$4/gallon. So the cost of the batteries alone nearly equals the cost of gasoline. I've read quotes placing electricity cost at around a third that of gasoline. Assume gasoline costs $3/gallon, battery cost alone is equivalent to 12.7k miles a year.
I've been looking into getting an electric commuter vehicle, but I just can't make the costs match up. My general plan has been to buy a truck for my cargo needs(current vehicle is too small), using that as needed(cargo trips&foul weather). Trading out my commute car for an electric just doesn't make sense.
*Currently would be a high estimate.
Hydroelectric power is pretty clean (aside from the local effects of the dam).
The local effects of the dam does tend to be large.
Maybe we can construct hydroelectric plants that generate massive amounts of electricity, and use that electricity to create H2 and then ship the H2 around the country.
In the USA, indeed most of the world, we've installed dams pretty much wherever practical, and a few places that aren't so practical. Enviromentalists are complaining about the ecological damage caused by a number of dams, indeed some have been demolished because of their negative impact. We only have so much water, and it's need for so many things. It's part of why they're looking into tidal power.
Re: Solar Panels - sure they require petroleum to produce, but don't they last for a really long time?
I don't think that they actually require petroleum, but they do require a number of nasty chemicals and quite a bit of energy to produce. They're simply very uneconomical in most situations today.
Most of Earth is totally unpopulated. So it's not "sheer luck" that the Tunguska impact wasn't deadly.
The land surface of the Earth, at this point, is most definitly not 'mostly totally unpopulated'. That's only true if you include the ocean and polar regions. An asteroid impact is fairly unlikely to hit in the polar regions due to orbital mechanics, and a Tunguska event hitting an ocean would cause a tsunami that would most likely cause fatalities.
Even for the time, Tunguska was unusual as to how unpopulated it was.
I'd prefer to find out if we have an asteroid/comet on a collision course, and preferably early enough to divert it rather than take the risk.
And I'm saying that their cultural differences didn't make much a difference in their ecological impact. It was their limited technological abilities that did so. Of course they'd have made different things, better in some ways, worse in others.
Europeans knew the benefits of game conservation back in the middle ages; many aborigines didn't.
No, they did it because they were hungry and it was the easiest way to get food. Cattle are indeed renewable, as is most game if you handle them right. Did they have models/simulations? Nope - from reading interviews with people of similar cultures, they'd quite happily hunt their main game animals to extinction - fully believing that more would appear, that game has simply been scarce for a while.
What I'm talking about is that native americans, and most aboriginal cultures were more ecological than us only because they didn't have the technology or knowledge to exploit resources to the point of causing significant damage. There was nothing magical, they weren't especially ecologically minded.
However, we're improving. We've finally gotten to the point where we care, where we take action to limit the damage we cause, to understand the consequences of changes we make. Sometimes changes we make are positive, and help an ecosystem, sometimes it's neutral, sometimes it's negative. The air has been cleaned up significantly since I was a child, much less when my grandparents were children.