You don't want to be "one of those dead people inside a D.C. Metro train" given that this is the first passenger fatality since 1982. Compared to how many people who have been killed on the DC area highways since 1982?
The reason why you cannot take a train to the beach or to the mountains is not because there's some magical anti-train field. The reason why it takes you an extra hour to get to work were you to have taken the train is not because there's some magical friction force that only applies to trains going faster than cars.
How about you ride your bike to an electric light rail station? Relaxing the requirements of the rail system from a half-mile walk to a five mile bike ride makes it reasonably priced. And then when you hop out of the rail line on the other side, you still have your bike with you.
Sometimes it's best to keep things simple. Your average cyclist can get going faster than 20 mph on less than 100 watts of energy. 100 w-H is nothing compared to a battery pack measured in tens of kW-H.
On one hand, I'm rooting them to fail because I think that no electric car can both save us from running out of gas *AND* solve all of the other problems inherent to the automobile that are also near the bursting point (like wasting tons of money to make four-lane highways filled with cars carrying only one person).
But, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to disassembling the "fast charging" system you propose to build railguns with the big capacitors.
To me, outperform means that it will need to: 1) Hit fewer pedestrians and cyclists 2) Be drivable while drunk 3) Not result in massive traffic jams 4) Not require huge ugly parking lots and parking garages. 5) Be cheap enough so that normal people, instead of rich douchebags, can afford it 6) Require fewer tax subsidies. 7) Allow the user to get some exercise instead of getting progressively fatter.
Well, if I were a NASA engineer working on the LRO (sometimes I kinda wish I were, being the nerd I am) I'd probably ask the question to get a cheap laugh.
I'm sure at least once, somebody in the team asked "Now, you guys do know that this will show the landing sight. We really didn't fake the landing, right?"
It's not just cost-savings. Carbon-carbon is also much heavier... up to 10 times heavier. Furthermore, do remember that what brought Columbia down was impact on the Carbon-Carbon leading edge.
The options for the shuttle heat shield mostly revolved around "hot structure" using titanium and other refractory metals, which would have been incredibly heavy if it was to take the load, so it wasn't seen as a viable option. They tried an ablative coating on the X-15 and it turned out to be quite hard to maintain in a reusable craft. So the decision was mostly ablatives vs. tiles. It looked, at the time, like they could use tiles and then retreat to ablatives if the tiles turned out not to work.
I tend to be a believer in the "low-density reentry" idea, which got nixed after they ran out of money to make it fully re-usable. See, the less dense the craft re-entering, the less the thermal protection system needs to work. If the orbiter and external tank were combined, the thermal load is reduced. Maybe hot structures could be used in that case.
Note that SpaceX uses hot structure niobium nozzles in the upper stage. This is for a good reason. Regenerative nozzles are expensive and heavy. Carbon-carbon nozzles shatter. Whereas niobium nozzles can be smacked against the upper stage if the staging isn't smooth enough and it mostly works OK (of course, when that happened, tank sloshing ruined the mission anyway... but it would have been fine with just a good smack to the nozzle.
Also, budget cuts at the wrong parts of development. Replacing titanium structure with aluminum, for example.
In retrospect, the real mistake was not acting on the Shuttle II papers in the late eighties and instead concentrating on even more complicated systems like the X-30 and X-33.
Aluminum, Iron, and Titanium. All in sufficient quantities to be worth extracting. And putting a mass driver to get it up to space cheaply is not in anybody's backyard, especially if you do it on the dark side of the moon. For building large things in space (like a version of Iridium where the ERP was the same as a cellphone tower's or solar power satellites or space habitats or any number of other things) it's cheaper to mass-driver it from the moon and have a refinery in orbit than to ship it up from Earth, given that you can't be in somebody's backyard or use nuclear rockets in the atmosphere.
We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.
We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.
Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.
There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.
The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.
IMHO, were I to have been the governor, after renaming the state to Wireheaddia and instituting my birthday as a state holiday complete with nudist parade, I'd probably lean on child protective services to take Lori Drew's kids away on the grounds of her being an unsuitable parent.
There was a lot of shit going on when I was a kid between various silly kid BBSers. Most of it was stopped by parents doing.. ehrm... the exact opposite of Lori Drew.
So? I live in Silicon Valley. During some months, we get precip most days.
I've got a pair of waterproof pants. If it's raining when I leave, I'll just wear 'em. If I get caught in the rain, I'll stop and put 'em on over my jeans. And then I've got a jacket, a balaclava, and clear glasses. Eventually I'll get around to getting some neoprene overshoes to keep my shoes from getting quite as wet.
Do you get thunderstorms every day? I can see why a person might not want to bike in an electrical storm, but I don't let rain stop me from riding. Just takes correct wardrobe selection.
If you bike those 4 miles, you skip out on the parking costs and won't show up a sweaty mess and, given that town driving is usually slowed down largely by red lights, won't even lose much time.
So? I bike 5.8 miles each way on my bicycle. Any added risk from idiot drivers has been well offset by improved quality of life and reduced risk of health problems down the road.
It's not 10x, either. Not if you actually wear safety gear and don't moto like a moron.
Then I realized that any overweight nerd can be put on a bike and they'll make it at least 5 miles, probably 10 miles, easy.
Now I wonder why I wasn't biking the whole time.
OTOH, I've been no more than 5-10 miles from a station with decent hours. It's a systemic problem, but I think there's actually a lighter weight solution. It's a "Guaranteed ride home" program. The expectation is that you take transit, but if something comes up, they'll send you a car. Usually employer sponsored, but no reason why the city can't buy a few vans.
You know, given that I bike all over the place, when "my" car (defined as the old not epsecially reliable American car my wife's parents sent us off to California in that I need to remind myself needs to be driven) finally dies, I'm starting to think that I ought to buy an SUV. I could buy a hummer and, given my driving patterns, still get better mileage than a hybrid.
Well, I know that this is not something a good chunk of the slashdot crowd would have experience with, but a lot of people are living together or married.
Slashdot Mirror
So, let me get this straight...
You don't want to be "one of those dead people inside a D.C. Metro train" given that this is the first passenger fatality since 1982. Compared to how many people who have been killed on the DC area highways since 1982?
The reason why you cannot take a train to the beach or to the mountains is not because there's some magical anti-train field. The reason why it takes you an extra hour to get to work were you to have taken the train is not because there's some magical friction force that only applies to trains going faster than cars.
I've got a better idea.
How about you ride your bike to an electric light rail station? Relaxing the requirements of the rail system from a half-mile walk to a five mile bike ride makes it reasonably priced. And then when you hop out of the rail line on the other side, you still have your bike with you.
Sometimes it's best to keep things simple. Your average cyclist can get going faster than 20 mph on less than 100 watts of energy. 100 w-H is nothing compared to a battery pack measured in tens of kW-H.
On one hand, I'm rooting them to fail because I think that no electric car can both save us from running out of gas *AND* solve all of the other problems inherent to the automobile that are also near the bursting point (like wasting tons of money to make four-lane highways filled with cars carrying only one person).
But, on the other hand, I'm looking forward to disassembling the "fast charging" system you propose to build railguns with the big capacitors.
To me, outperform means that it will need to:
1) Hit fewer pedestrians and cyclists
2) Be drivable while drunk
3) Not result in massive traffic jams
4) Not require huge ugly parking lots and parking garages.
5) Be cheap enough so that normal people, instead of rich douchebags, can afford it
6) Require fewer tax subsidies.
7) Allow the user to get some exercise instead of getting progressively fatter.
Well, if I were a NASA engineer working on the LRO (sometimes I kinda wish I were, being the nerd I am) I'd probably ask the question to get a cheap laugh.
I'm sure at least once, somebody in the team asked "Now, you guys do know that this will show the landing sight. We really didn't fake the landing, right?"
Not necessarily. Artificial gravity gives you Coriolis forces and differing levels of artificial gravity at different levels from the hub.
It's not just cost-savings. Carbon-carbon is also much heavier... up to 10 times heavier. Furthermore, do remember that what brought Columbia down was impact on the Carbon-Carbon leading edge.
The options for the shuttle heat shield mostly revolved around "hot structure" using titanium and other refractory metals, which would have been incredibly heavy if it was to take the load, so it wasn't seen as a viable option. They tried an ablative coating on the X-15 and it turned out to be quite hard to maintain in a reusable craft. So the decision was mostly ablatives vs. tiles. It looked, at the time, like they could use tiles and then retreat to ablatives if the tiles turned out not to work.
I tend to be a believer in the "low-density reentry" idea, which got nixed after they ran out of money to make it fully re-usable. See, the less dense the craft re-entering, the less the thermal protection system needs to work. If the orbiter and external tank were combined, the thermal load is reduced. Maybe hot structures could be used in that case.
Note that SpaceX uses hot structure niobium nozzles in the upper stage. This is for a good reason. Regenerative nozzles are expensive and heavy. Carbon-carbon nozzles shatter. Whereas niobium nozzles can be smacked against the upper stage if the staging isn't smooth enough and it mostly works OK (of course, when that happened, tank sloshing ruined the mission anyway... but it would have been fine with just a good smack to the nozzle.
Also, budget cuts at the wrong parts of development. Replacing titanium structure with aluminum, for example.
In retrospect, the real mistake was not acting on the Shuttle II papers in the late eighties and instead concentrating on even more complicated systems like the X-30 and X-33.
Aluminum, Iron, and Titanium. All in sufficient quantities to be worth extracting. And putting a mass driver to get it up to space cheaply is not in anybody's backyard, especially if you do it on the dark side of the moon. For building large things in space (like a version of Iridium where the ERP was the same as a cellphone tower's or solar power satellites or space habitats or any number of other things) it's cheaper to mass-driver it from the moon and have a refinery in orbit than to ship it up from Earth, given that you can't be in somebody's backyard or use nuclear rockets in the atmosphere.
We still haven't established what happens long-term in low-gravity. We know that zero-g is not someplace you could live forever. Is lunar gravity sufficient? We don't actually know. And it's one thing to follow the science fiction cliche that the martians and moonies couldn't adapt to Earth gravity anymore.... it's another thing if the first moonie baby is horribly disfigured.
We don't even know if, were you to raise ten generations of rats in a 1-g centerfuge and ten generations on Earth if the centerfuge rats would be healthy by comparison.
Helium-3 is also present on Earth. You can buy it by the tank. If just getting access to Helium-3 was enough to make fusion possible, we'd at least have one pilot reactor that was able to produce a decent sized net energy gain.
There was a significant concern inside of NASA that our flawless luck of moon launches would run out. What if we had done a few more missions and 19 left us with dead astronauts on the moon when the LM couldn't lift off? Do you think we'd have continued at that point? Remember, there could have been one more moon landing with the hardware we had but NASA didn't want to launch it.
The problem is, cutting off the Apollo program in favor of the Space Shuttle made fairly good sense at the time and awful sense in retrospect. Even a fool can predict the past.
IMHO, were I to have been the governor, after renaming the state to Wireheaddia and instituting my birthday as a state holiday complete with nudist parade, I'd probably lean on child protective services to take Lori Drew's kids away on the grounds of her being an unsuitable parent.
There was a lot of shit going on when I was a kid between various silly kid BBSers. Most of it was stopped by parents doing.. ehrm... the exact opposite of Lori Drew.
Well, she had been under the care of a mental health professional, plus was on three different medications.
There are limits to how much a parent, teacher, neighbor, or peer can do.
That's totally something for one's resume. It's a mark of distinction.
I can picture it now:
AT&T Research, San Jose (1999-2010)
* Made things suck less
* Shuffled papers
* Almost got killed by rotten office fridge.
Do you have statistics to back up your assertion?
So? I live in Silicon Valley. During some months, we get precip most days.
I've got a pair of waterproof pants. If it's raining when I leave, I'll just wear 'em. If I get caught in the rain, I'll stop and put 'em on over my jeans. And then I've got a jacket, a balaclava, and clear glasses. Eventually I'll get around to getting some neoprene overshoes to keep my shoes from getting quite as wet.
Tell that to the people who were first on the layoff list because they telecommuted.
Can't just wave a magic wand here.
So? A nice sized chunk of my income and sales tax money goes to pay for highways that I cannot bike on, walk on, or even take a bus down.
Do you get thunderstorms every day? I can see why a person might not want to bike in an electrical storm, but I don't let rain stop me from riding. Just takes correct wardrobe selection.
If you bike those 4 miles, you skip out on the parking costs and won't show up a sweaty mess and, given that town driving is usually slowed down largely by red lights, won't even lose much time.
So? I bike 5.8 miles each way on my bicycle. Any added risk from idiot drivers has been well offset by improved quality of life and reduced risk of health problems down the road.
It's not 10x, either. Not if you actually wear safety gear and don't moto like a moron.
Dude, that's less than an hour on the bike.
Trains and busses aren't the only alternatives to a car.
I was laboring under that assumption as well.
Then I realized that any overweight nerd can be put on a bike and they'll make it at least 5 miles, probably 10 miles, easy.
Now I wonder why I wasn't biking the whole time.
OTOH, I've been no more than 5-10 miles from a station with decent hours. It's a systemic problem, but I think there's actually a lighter weight solution. It's a "Guaranteed ride home" program. The expectation is that you take transit, but if something comes up, they'll send you a car. Usually employer sponsored, but no reason why the city can't buy a few vans.
You know, given that I bike all over the place, when "my" car (defined as the old not epsecially reliable American car my wife's parents sent us off to California in that I need to remind myself needs to be driven) finally dies, I'm starting to think that I ought to buy an SUV. I could buy a hummer and, given my driving patterns, still get better mileage than a hybrid.
Well, I know that this is not something a good chunk of the slashdot crowd would have experience with, but a lot of people are living together or married.
One car per family starts to become practical.