Drive your EV on the Autobahn. Or any EV of your choice. You can't even keep 100 mph - the controller will slow the car down pretty soon to avoid overheating. Now take any modern IC car - again, any of your choice. It will run at 100 mph happily for hours.
Don't tell us that EV technology is better. It has a lot of catching up to do.
Guess why the i3 is ugly - its margins are MUCH lower than those on IC cars, so they subtly do what they can to keep sales down. The existing fleet is enough to gain practical experience, and any electric car more sold at the artificially low price (I know, low in their eyes!) means less profit.
All of them are blasting air downwards. Only that regular wings can move more air per unit of time, so they will require less downward acceleration. But the physical principle between a Jump Jet, a helicopter and a regular airplane is the same.
Initially the Wrights used a weight-driven catapult
Wrong. Not on the Flyer I in 1903.
They started to use the catapult from September 1904 on when they tried the Flyer II on Huffman prairie. They did this to compensate for the weaker wind inland; the wind in the dunes of NC was strong enough on most days to launch their aircraft without help.
We already have prototypes of autonomous air taxis that can travel for fifteen minutes plus on a charge. That's plenty of time to make short trips.
You drank too much of the Kool-aid. Those are fair-weather demonstrators, and those 15 min flights are without payload, in ideal conditions. Until you get something that the FAA will allow anyone to fly in, you need MUCH more capacity to cover reserve time and fail-safe requirements.
I have to assume you were foolish enough to invest in one of those scams and now deny reality. Good luck with that.
Wedged between two alarming messages about the urgency of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, this press release shows how far removed from reality Boeing management really is. Any form of heavier-than-air flying is much more energy intensive than surface transportation and can only realistically be powered with hydrocarbon fuel. I trust that Slashdot readers are educated enough to understand that all those battery powered electric multicopters for personal transport need an order of magnitude increase in energy density before they even start to be of any use (except for fleecing naive investors, that is).
As much as I agree with your opinion on shared documents - they are a complement to the tools available on rich clients, not a replacement for them.
I am currently editing a grant proposal and will load the final version into OO in order to polish it. Google Docs is not able to even do proper hyphenation - this and much more will be left to OO. There is no online replacement wich can compete on features, let alone response speed.
And don't get me started on the qualities of Office 365. In my installation, Outlook cannot even load a PDF of more than a few 100 KB, or loading takes forever. This is barely more than a sick joke.
Couldn't agree more, except for one thing: Playing with Legos will prevent the fine haptics for feeling surfaces from developing. Always touching only polished ABS surfaces will stunt the sensory development of the child's fingertips, so as a grown-up it will have trouble with sensing a surface's texture.
Best to let it play with wood, raw and unpolished, or cloth, stones, whatever has a texture to feel and experience.
the B777 offered better economics for 250-350 passengers which Boeing decided was the optimal passenger size for long range.
The 777 was simply the biggest twin possible with the next generation of engines back then. It was sized for the GE90 (which wasn't even ready when the 777 was). If there had been a bigger engine on the horizon, the 777 would had become even bigger.
The A380 failed simply because Airbus misread the demand for the aircraft (along with the desire to have the bragging rights on the largest airliner out there)
Now you are close to the truth. The French were green with envy for the entire existence of Airbus when they had to sell 300's and 320's without the ability to subsidise them with profits from a bigger plane like Boeing did when selling the 737 cheap because 747 profits allowed them to do so. In the end, the conclusion was reached before the studies were made, and the studies simply were massaged until they supported the rationale of a Superjumbo, made by Airbus.
I haven't seen any good information on why drone technology can't simply be scaled up in size to carry passengers. Seems like we already have the technology to solve traffic and other problems. We just need to supersize it.
Then consider this:
Quadcopters are controlled by varying the speed of their individual rotors. That is all fine as long as the rotors stay small. If they are scaled up, their moment of inertia scales with the fifth power of the dimensional change. The time-to-double of an instability, however, would only scale with the square root of the dimensional change. Result: You will need massively more torque to keep the thing under control.
No, there is hard evidence why scaling up will not work. You were just too lazy to look.
If I'm not mistaken it'd be the world's first rigid lifting body airship
Not really. All airships would create lift when the hull was inclined; up to 20% of their mass. With their low density there was enough area to create a substantial amount of lift, even with a body of rotation for a hull (which is much lighter to build than an aerofoil-shaped lifting body, by the way).
Funny that you call my point myopic. Your argument leaves only one operating mode, hover, which will eat up battery charge for breakfast. Unless you just want to go from one corner of an airport to the other, this operating mode is useless for revenue flight. Yes, you can certify the thing on the basis of a new regulation, with authorities who have never applied this regulation in real life (did you ever certify an aircraft?). This is a new company with a new design and a new regulation. Unless they have a really long breath, certification is impossible.
Next, the certifiable operating mode will be close to useless if you want to operate this design as advertised. Endurance will be in the order of minutes. You know that a well-designed aircraft needs 1/20 of the thrust for vectored lift in order to fly using wings. Restricting this design to vectored lift only will cut range by a factor of at least 10 (a lot of the charge is needed just for vertical take-off and landing, so I cut you some slack here). But again - this will be useless for all practical purposes.
What do the 36 engines help when the batteries are empty? Does it have also 36 batteries to swap out in-flight? What if the engine controller has a bug? What if any other of multiple single-source error modes for engine control fail?
The number of engines helps for just one error mode. Not enough.
The upvoted answers got it right already. This thing is incapable of controlled flight using the wings alone. It needs to add vectored lift from the forward blowers, which will add a variety of failure modes which will make this design impossible to certify. And without proper certification it can neither be operated as proposed nor used for commercial purposes. To me the project looks like a scam.
The blowers sit where the flaps on a wing are. In the hover flight they are deflected fully down. Still, by sucking some air over the upper side of the wing they create a limited amount of lift. Once the flaps are moved up, the blowers will sit on the rear upper side of the wing where they are again helping to create a little more lift and will delay flow separation at high angle of attack. Again, this only works when the engines are running. Engine failure is far too frequent to rely on them for regular flight. The Lilium design is for lack of a forward lift source incapable of gliding flight and, therefore, impossible to certify.
Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
Funny that you mention Lockheed - they did what SpaceX does today one or two generations ago. With their Skunk Works division. Kelly Johnson could pick from more than 9000 highly trained engineers in Palmdale whoever was most qualified, and motivation was easy given the amazing projects they worked on.
SpaceX could not have happened with the existing rocket builders. Elon Musk just put up some amazing goals and backed them with his money (plus juicy government subsidies). And he lets engineers manage the work, not MBAs. By setting sexy goals he has the first pick of a vast pool of experienced people, and by picking the best (no mean feat!) he could accomplish the goals with far smaller teams than the MBA-led behemoths ever could hope to do.
No miracle to see here. Just common sense and making good use of the existing opportunities.
It's a shame when competent people get wasted in management.
Did you ever work for an incompetent manager? Then you know what it is worth to have competence in management. Too often, those guys only administrate, but cannot lead because they have no idea where the ship is heading. Or know who is contributing valuable stuff and who is not. I guess you need to work for a competent manager first before you can appreciate how wrong your statement is.
The original comment was more about honesty than competence which disqualifies someone from politics. That was spot on.
It truly boggles my mind how most corporates and their IT departments still continue to push its use over other OS's.
Why? It's easy to explain. Imagine you are the CIO and your importance depends on how many people you manage. You can either go for Macs and have a small department, or force everyone to use Windows PCs and have a big department. Easy choice, right?
That has worked in almost all big organisations. Generally, people who get promoted to the CIO level are not driven by helping others, but by gaining more power. They couldn't care less that your user experience sucks. All they care is that they have more power when everyone uses Windows.
Wouldn't it be much more logical to send the tanker up first, so it is ready when the people carrier follows? What if the tanker launch fails? Did nobody catch this obvious flaw in the sequence?
My 2 cents: When stuck at one problem it is of no use to focus. Better do something different, so your brain stops going in circles. However, when one task just flies along, stay with it to maximize your productivity. I try to have several tasks in parallel so I can switch between them if I am stuck at one. When I return after a while, I approach the problem from a new angle, which would not had happened when I had focused on the same task all along.
What is totally useless is to do several things in parallel. The old story of Napoleon being able to dictate a letter, read a book, have a conversation and lead a battle all at the same time is simply bullshit. Had he done so, he would had sucked at all of them, in parallel.
While your Cessna needs to run its engine on a substantial fraction of its rated power (typically 60% or more), any decent car will only need low double digit kW to cruise. Comparing the rated power is utterly misleading, and your Tesla aircraft would drain its batteries and overheat the motor within minutes.
When using floating point math you always have an imprecise representation of the actual number. You might be lucky that the finite number of bits will be able to represent the intended number exactly, but when you start with analog values and convert them to digital, you always add noise.
This "new" technology sound as if they move from double precision back to single precision. Of course it needs less circuitry and power.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't tell us that EV technology is better. It has a lot of catching up to do.
Guess why the i3 is ugly - its margins are MUCH lower than those on IC cars, so they subtly do what they can to keep sales down. The existing fleet is enough to gain practical experience, and any electric car more sold at the artificially low price (I know, low in their eyes!) means less profit.
All of them are blasting air downwards. Only that regular wings can move more air per unit of time, so they will require less downward acceleration. But the physical principle between a Jump Jet, a helicopter and a regular airplane is the same.
Initially the Wrights used a weight-driven catapult
Wrong. Not on the Flyer I in 1903. They started to use the catapult from September 1904 on when they tried the Flyer II on Huffman prairie. They did this to compensate for the weaker wind inland; the wind in the dunes of NC was strong enough on most days to launch their aircraft without help.
We already have prototypes of autonomous air taxis that can travel for fifteen minutes plus on a charge. That's plenty of time to make short trips.
You drank too much of the Kool-aid. Those are fair-weather demonstrators, and those 15 min flights are without payload, in ideal conditions. Until you get something that the FAA will allow anyone to fly in, you need MUCH more capacity to cover reserve time and fail-safe requirements.
I have to assume you were foolish enough to invest in one of those scams and now deny reality. Good luck with that.
Wedged between two alarming messages about the urgency of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide, this press release shows how far removed from reality Boeing management really is. Any form of heavier-than-air flying is much more energy intensive than surface transportation and can only realistically be powered with hydrocarbon fuel. I trust that Slashdot readers are educated enough to understand that all those battery powered electric multicopters for personal transport need an order of magnitude increase in energy density before they even start to be of any use (except for fleecing naive investors, that is).
I am currently editing a grant proposal and will load the final version into OO in order to polish it. Google Docs is not able to even do proper hyphenation - this and much more will be left to OO. There is no online replacement wich can compete on features, let alone response speed.
And don't get me started on the qualities of Office 365. In my installation, Outlook cannot even load a PDF of more than a few 100 KB, or loading takes forever. This is barely more than a sick joke.
Best to let it play with wood, raw and unpolished, or cloth, stones, whatever has a texture to feel and experience.
USI is most pushed by Intel.
the B777 offered better economics for 250-350 passengers which Boeing decided was the optimal passenger size for long range.
The 777 was simply the biggest twin possible with the next generation of engines back then. It was sized for the GE90 (which wasn't even ready when the 777 was). If there had been a bigger engine on the horizon, the 777 would had become even bigger.
The A380 failed simply because Airbus misread the demand for the aircraft (along with the desire to have the bragging rights on the largest airliner out there)
Now you are close to the truth. The French were green with envy for the entire existence of Airbus when they had to sell 300's and 320's without the ability to subsidise them with profits from a bigger plane like Boeing did when selling the 737 cheap because 747 profits allowed them to do so. In the end, the conclusion was reached before the studies were made, and the studies simply were massaged until they supported the rationale of a Superjumbo, made by Airbus.
I haven't seen any good information on why drone technology can't simply be scaled up in size to carry passengers. Seems like we already have the technology to solve traffic and other problems. We just need to supersize it.
Then consider this:
Quadcopters are controlled by varying the speed of their individual rotors. That is all fine as long as the rotors stay small. If they are scaled up, their moment of inertia scales with the fifth power of the dimensional change. The time-to-double of an instability, however, would only scale with the square root of the dimensional change. Result: You will need massively more torque to keep the thing under control.
No, there is hard evidence why scaling up will not work. You were just too lazy to look.
If I'm not mistaken it'd be the world's first rigid lifting body airship
Not really. All airships would create lift when the hull was inclined; up to 20% of their mass. With their low density there was enough area to create a substantial amount of lift, even with a body of rotation for a hull (which is much lighter to build than an aerofoil-shaped lifting body, by the way).
Next, the certifiable operating mode will be close to useless if you want to operate this design as advertised. Endurance will be in the order of minutes. You know that a well-designed aircraft needs 1/20 of the thrust for vectored lift in order to fly using wings. Restricting this design to vectored lift only will cut range by a factor of at least 10 (a lot of the charge is needed just for vertical take-off and landing, so I cut you some slack here). But again - this will be useless for all practical purposes.
The number of engines helps for just one error mode. Not enough.
The upvoted answers got it right already. This thing is incapable of controlled flight using the wings alone. It needs to add vectored lift from the forward blowers, which will add a variety of failure modes which will make this design impossible to certify. And without proper certification it can neither be operated as proposed nor used for commercial purposes. To me the project looks like a scam.
The blowers sit where the flaps on a wing are. In the hover flight they are deflected fully down. Still, by sucking some air over the upper side of the wing they create a limited amount of lift. Once the flaps are moved up, the blowers will sit on the rear upper side of the wing where they are again helping to create a little more lift and will delay flow separation at high angle of attack. Again, this only works when the engines are running. Engine failure is far too frequent to rely on them for regular flight. The Lilium design is for lack of a forward lift source incapable of gliding flight and, therefore, impossible to certify.
Those two simple things allow them to pull off what are being called engineering miracles, but they're not miraculous. It's just that our standards have become so absymally low thanks to decades of bumbling by Lockheed, Boeing, and yes, NASA, that when we encounter competence, it appears amazing.
Funny that you mention Lockheed - they did what SpaceX does today one or two generations ago. With their Skunk Works division. Kelly Johnson could pick from more than 9000 highly trained engineers in Palmdale whoever was most qualified, and motivation was easy given the amazing projects they worked on.
SpaceX could not have happened with the existing rocket builders. Elon Musk just put up some amazing goals and backed them with his money (plus juicy government subsidies). And he lets engineers manage the work, not MBAs. By setting sexy goals he has the first pick of a vast pool of experienced people, and by picking the best (no mean feat!) he could accomplish the goals with far smaller teams than the MBA-led behemoths ever could hope to do.
No miracle to see here. Just common sense and making good use of the existing opportunities.
It's a shame when competent people get wasted in management.
Did you ever work for an incompetent manager? Then you know what it is worth to have competence in management. Too often, those guys only administrate, but cannot lead because they have no idea where the ship is heading. Or know who is contributing valuable stuff and who is not. I guess you need to work for a competent manager first before you can appreciate how wrong your statement is.
The original comment was more about honesty than competence which disqualifies someone from politics. That was spot on.
It truly boggles my mind how most corporates and their IT departments still continue to push its use over other OS's.
Why? It's easy to explain. Imagine you are the CIO and your importance depends on how many people you manage. You can either go for Macs and have a small department, or force everyone to use Windows PCs and have a big department. Easy choice, right?
That has worked in almost all big organisations. Generally, people who get promoted to the CIO level are not driven by helping others, but by gaining more power. They couldn't care less that your user experience sucks. All they care is that they have more power when everyone uses Windows.
Wouldn't it be much more logical to send the tanker up first, so it is ready when the people carrier follows? What if the tanker launch fails? Did nobody catch this obvious flaw in the sequence?
Just because it is Microsoft's tool doesn't make it my preferred tool. Actually, just the opposite.
For a gripping account how it feels to operate on only one half of the brain, watch Jill Bolte Taylor's TED talk. Highly recommended!
What is totally useless is to do several things in parallel. The old story of Napoleon being able to dictate a letter, read a book, have a conversation and lead a battle all at the same time is simply bullshit. Had he done so, he would had sucked at all of them, in parallel.
While your Cessna needs to run its engine on a substantial fraction of its rated power (typically 60% or more), any decent car will only need low double digit kW to cruise. Comparing the rated power is utterly misleading, and your Tesla aircraft would drain its batteries and overheat the motor within minutes.
Wave drag is primarily and effect in the *transonic* from about M0.8 to 1.1 or 1.2, and then basically disappears at speeds above that.
Wrong. Why don't you do some basic fact-checking yourself before wrongly accusing others?
This "new" technology sound as if they move from double precision back to single precision. Of course it needs less circuitry and power.