Just to clarify a common misconception about wind and "windage": many people seem to think that wind affects airplanes the same way as cars, needing more power to keep moving in a headwind. That is not the case
True, but misleading - while they don't need more power to maintain speed relative to the airflow, they do need more power to maintain speed over ground. (To "make headway" as the sentence you quoted states.) Airships (and the occasional small HTA craft) have been observed making negative speed over ground while maintaining a positive speed relative to the local airflow.*
So headwinds don't affect the airship any more than it affects a small plane with a cruising speed of 80 kts.
All your irrelevant handwaving bullshit aside, you've left one absolutely vital factor out of your idealized calculation - an airship isn't a small plane. It had a sail area orders of magnitude (or more) higher, which means the effects of a given wind (head, tail, or cross) are much higher than they are for a small plane. While a heavier than air craft might have to increase power 5% to overcome a given headwind and maintain speed over ground, the larger sail area of a lighter than aircraft means it may have to increase power by 100% or more (and it goes without saying that they rarely have that much reserve power).
Or to put it another way, you're wrong. Wind (head, tail, or cross) do affect airships more than they do small planes. Airships can be, and have been, blown all over creation by rather modest winds which a heavier than air craft simply plows right through. The concerns over their ability to make speed over ground (headway) and maintain course are based on observation and engineering reality, not "misconceptions".
*This difference between speed over ground and speed versus local airflow is why aircraft carriers turn into the wind for launch and recovery operations.
However, when reading articles about the Airliner, it is always about the technical gobbledegook that engineers and airship geeks get off on... never does it cover the things that matter to the potential investor
If the potential investor isn't interested in the technical gobbledegook, he probably shouldn't be investing. Or at least he shouldn't be at this point, when the technology is still unproven and the hardware still in the prototype stage.
On top of the irony that on a site for "news for nerds" a comment is highly rated which complains the article is "too technical" rather than sounding like a marketing pitch designed to "fire the imagination of twelve year olds".
Seriously, there's nothing there anyone who knows even the basics of accounting wouldn't recognize. It's just wrapped in a high-tech packaging.
Exactly this. Accountants have been dealing with multiple currencies, currency exchange, etc... for centuries. Bitcoin is nothing new, nor particularly complicated from an accounting point of view.
The grandparent just sounds like a variant of the typical Bitcoin fan's anti-goverment rhetoric. He doesn't even grasp that the Chinese goverment didn't try and regulate Bitcoin - it just made it illegal for banks to trade in Bitcoin. (Sensible, given it's inherent volatility.)
Yeah, we're up to 2 busted nuclear plants in the whole world.
Chernobyl, Fukishima, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Fermi... that's 5sites just off the top of my head. We've only had two major accidents - but enough serious incidents and close misses that only a fool would talk about how having only two "busted"plants is proof of anything.
So, when the Wright Brothers were building their plane you were standing their telling them it couldn't be done eh?
Nope. Unpowered flight already existed by the time the Wright brothers headed to Kitty Hawk, and powered flight was right on the edge of possibility. The drives you propose, aren't. The problem is, you don't grasp that fundamental difference and thus assume that people who aren't as egregiously ignorant as you are the ones in the wrong.
Just because there isn't off the shelf technology at the moment doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for longer term solutions to interplanetary travel.
True. But those solutions must fall within the bounds of physics and chemistry - and nuclear reactors and ion engines, for the reasons I outlined, don't. Absent new physics, they never will.
Regardless of the propulsion system, having electrical power, lots of it, is the difference between coasting from A to B in a tin can vs something that could actually be called a Ship.
Only to someone who doesn't grasp physics in general as well as the mathematics behind orbital mechanics. Absent new physics, all vehicles in space are going to spend far more time coasting than under power.
It's time to stop jetting around the solar system on chemical rockets. Designers and funding should be directed towards lofting and running multi-megawatt reactors. They would be used to power multiple ION engines
Yes... let's develop heavy power sources in order to power weak propulsion systems - what a great idea! Multiple ones aren't much better, you still need to power them, and you have to multiply a small number (thrust per engine) by dozens (or more) to get a usefully large number (thrust) for any significant spacecraft. (Which will still be far short, by orders of magnitude, for a useful size for a manned mission.)
Their extraordinary ISP is very attractive from an academic point of view and when considered in isolation... but real world vehicles aren't academic and the engines are but one part of the whole vehicle. When you start to design an actual vehicle and an actual mission, their extraordinarily low thrust-to-weight ratio precludes them from being useful except in a few very specific circumstances.
As an engineer I want to reuse and expand and not throw anything away.
If you were truly an engineer (a real one, not just someone with an overinflated title), you'd know that things age and wear out.
NASA can't build tin cans that can survive in space for a hundred years? There are planes from WW2 that are still flying and those rattle.
A real engineer grasps the impact of parts count and complexity. Not only is the ISS not just a "tin can", those planes are orders of magnitude simpler than the ISS.
Not to mention that those planes take hundreds of man hours a year to maintain in flyable condition - and man hours in space cost tens of thousands per.
Things get at least a hundred times cheaper when they don't have to survive the stresses of liftoff.
Sure, as any engineer knows, you can easily manufacture things given enough infrastructure. Since you're an "engineer", you should be able to estimate the cost of developing a (currently non existent) weightless capable factory complex, and the costs of placing hundreds to thousands of tons on orbit, and the ongoing costs of logistics, support, and maintenance needed to produce those "hundreds of times cheaper" parts. You'll also be able to understand that a space craft is made of hundreds of different kinds of materials, only a few of which are amenable to recycling.
She has every right to delete email she sends and receives. Saying she doesn't is a slippery slope towards making all of us responsible for data retention wrt our own email.
That's the thing, these weren't her emails. They were the official communications of an elected official, OUR emails.
Middle of nowhere? He lives in a county with 250k people and about an average of 650 people per square mile.
Yes, the middle of nowhere. (I live in Kitsap County as well.) That average is misleading because most of the people are concentrated in one of three major 'metro' areas, much of the county is low density or practically empty. (And he lives in one of the low density areas, in an area which county residents regard as being 'backwoods'.)
DSL in his area is CenturyLink. The DSLAM that coves his house is in "Permanent Exhaust" meaning it's oversubscribed so far even CenturyLink won't add more subscribers, and they have made the business decision to NOT increase the bandwidth to the DSLAM cabinet further to be able to support more hardware. I.E. "I'm sorry, we're full. No, we're not adding any more capacity. Ever. Goodbye."
I live in Kitsap County and I looked up his address, and I can't say I'm surprised. He lives in a very low density area, and given current land use restrictions, that's not going to change. There's no money to be had in expanding capacity.
And ComCast is flat-out refusing to service his house/area entirely. Full-stop: Since they can't charge him the full line-extension fee ($50-60k) the portion they have to pay by law is too high so they'd rather refuse him service entirely. Welcome to the edge-case downside of regulation preventing the full cost from landing on the end-user.
No, welcome to the "edge case" of living in a very low density area outside of town rather than in a suburb.
Point-to-Point wireless no longer covers his area due to a new tall building being built between their regional tower and his subdivision.
He doesn't live in a subdivision - he lives in the woods outside the built up area of town.
Seriously, I've said it three different ways but I'll repeat it a fourth time because it's important to grasp - he lives in very low residential density area outside of town. He doesn't live in the suburbs or a subdivision. I give and grant that Comcast is incompetent - but his options are narrowed and/or blocked as much by the fact of where he chose to live as by any law or regulation. The north end isn't Palo Alto or Mountain View.
Not really. Thirty years ago Gen Con was indeed all that and one of the premier cons of nerd world. Nowadays, with the rise of Multiple Comic Conventions, multiple anime conventions, and multiple incarnations of PAX... it's decidedly in the second tier and edging towards irrelevance.
Have you ever actually studied nuclear weapons design? (By which I mean the unclassified stuff that's available.) Yes, designing the bombs is a problem, especially if you want anything more than a very crude, large, and heavy device. (One that's virtually undeliverable by modern standards.) It's not an insurmountable problem, granted, but is a problem.
And it's an even bigger problem for thermonuclear designs.
There's two ways around the problem though... the first is to explode a lot of bombs and thus gain experience and information. The second is to "borrow" the experience and information from somebody else. The difficulty of obtaining sufficient material makes the first impractical in many cases, and what the feds are trying to do is make the second as difficult as possible as well.
They're going to be constantly replacing LiOn packs on any appreciable sized system. Why not go with a NiFe battery system that will last for fifty years?
Because Elon Musk owns Tesla - and a giga factory designed to turn out LiOn batteries like Carter's churns out little pills.
But at its heart it's the result of the dramatic slashing of the NASA budget after Apollo, the end of the "space race," and constant political interference (mostly in the form of pork projects that Congressmen wanted NASA to lend credibility to).
Well, no. Not really.
Pretty much all of the Saturn V pads and buildings are still there, and still in use - having been repurposed multiple times. The Saturn I pads were abandoned in the late 60's because nobody thought we'd ever use them again. (And then along came Skylab.)
Other pads were abandoned for a wide variety of reasons... For example, we don't need as many as we used to because we don't have vehicles sitting on the pad as long as we used to. Others were abandoned because rockets don't blow up nearly as often, so we don't need "hot spares". Others were abandoned because the booster was replaced by a different one and the activity shifted to a different pad. Yet others because not only do rockets not blow up so often, their payloads fail less often and have a longer lifetime, so we don't need much of the the frenetic launch pace of the 60's. (Or multiple combinations of these.) Etc... etc...
The number of pads required aren't pushed by raw budget, they're pulled by user requirements. Now, I won't disagree that budgets effect the pull rate, but so do a variety of other factors.
People where hostile to people with Cell phones in the 1980's, In college back in my day, if a student went to class with a Laptop we were hostile towards them. Portable technology takes a while to get into the culture.
Walkman's and portable CD players too... However the feeling was less about the technology or being portable (or new), and more about the price tag and what it was perceived to say about the owner. People walking about with expensive portable technology were classed alongside those walking about with expensive wristwatches - pretentious yuppie assholes with more money than sense.
You saw the same thing when iPods first hit the market, and again with iPhones, and again with iWatch.
The biggest threat to Amazon right now is companies like Walmart realizing that their stores can also serve as warehouses and getting their IT up to snuff.
There's a lot of retailers who have realized it - and who have gotten their IT up to snuff and offer "order online, pickup in store in an hour" services. (Concentrating on getting the customer in the store isn't a mistake.)
The problem for these retailers isn't IT (as it so often isn't), it's the infrastructure and overhead involved in setting up an Amazon delivery type of operation. Amazon already has the back-end, a very efficient warehousing, picking, and packing operation - all they had to do was add to front end (dispatch, vehicles, and drivers). Not only does Walmart not have the back or front ends... a retail store isn't a warehouse, and the picking and packing will be much more difficult (and labor intensive, since they can't use the robots and conveyor systems that Amazon does). Amazon could simply build on their existing operations, Wal-Mart would have to start from scratch and be fighting with one foot in a bucket of cement.
That way people have something to do while their car recharges.
This. Range anxiety isn't just about not having enough amp-hours to go there and back again - it's also about cooling your heels and doing nothing while waiting for your car to charge.
I already know the problems presented: The infected area is usually in some third-world shithole with little-to-no infrastructure, much of the equipment is big, heavy, and expensive, etc... but much of it can be made portable with sufficient engineering, and a good chunk of it doesn't even have to be brought along, or can be minimized (e.g. the ventilation/filtering systems that the centers here have to keep quarantine)
If Bill Gates wants to do something with all that cash, maybe he can hire a few engineers an medical types to build a deployable care center that can be flown out to $3rdWorldShitHole in less than 24 hours, and be put to use immediately when an epidemic strikes.
Let's see... the existing system uses minimal investment (mainly in transportable isolation units) to transport a small number of exposed or critically ill people to locations where an existing army of people and mountain of equipment already exists and has supporting infrastructure in place. Your proposed system has us spending tens of millions of dollars (if not more) to transport a (currently non existent) army of people and (currently non existent) mountain of equipment to a place without supporting infrastructure and requiring massive (and currently non existent) logistics pipeline to maintain to support a small number of exposed or critically ill people.
Other than the clueless paranoia displayed in this sub-thread, why on earth would you propose such a back-asswards system?
You, and the OP, are confusing two different problems. The first, moving the most critically ill people to treatment and isolating exposed individuals, is largely a solved problem. The second, quarantine and minimizing the spread of disease among the local population is a very different problem... and even so, it can be largely handled with existing systems. The problem with the Ebola outbreak in Africa was failure to recognize the problem followed up by a "too little, too late" response from the West, combined with cultural issues and behaviors which facilitated the spread of disease. You can't fix either by simply throwing money at them.
I'm with the grandparent - NASA should get out of the earth science business (and probably astronomy, and energy efficient houses, and all the pies the bureaucrat have stuck their hands in), leave that to more appropriate agencies.
Translation: "Russia can't even afford the power points for it's super heavy booster, so it's going to concentrate on the development of an unproven booster that budget crunches have already delayed for over two decades."
Slashdot Mirror
True, but misleading - while they don't need more power to maintain speed relative to the airflow, they do need more power to maintain speed over ground. (To "make headway" as the sentence you quoted states.) Airships (and the occasional small HTA craft) have been observed making negative speed over ground while maintaining a positive speed relative to the local airflow.*
All your irrelevant handwaving bullshit aside, you've left one absolutely vital factor out of your idealized calculation - an airship isn't a small plane. It had a sail area orders of magnitude (or more) higher, which means the effects of a given wind (head, tail, or cross) are much higher than they are for a small plane. While a heavier than air craft might have to increase power 5% to overcome a given headwind and maintain speed over ground, the larger sail area of a lighter than aircraft means it may have to increase power by 100% or more (and it goes without saying that they rarely have that much reserve power).
Or to put it another way, you're wrong. Wind (head, tail, or cross) do affect airships more than they do small planes. Airships can be, and have been, blown all over creation by rather modest winds which a heavier than air craft simply plows right through. The concerns over their ability to make speed over ground (headway) and maintain course are based on observation and engineering reality, not "misconceptions".
*This difference between speed over ground and speed versus local airflow is why aircraft carriers turn into the wind for launch and recovery operations.
If the potential investor isn't interested in the technical gobbledegook, he probably shouldn't be investing. Or at least he shouldn't be at this point, when the technology is still unproven and the hardware still in the prototype stage.
On top of the irony that on a site for "news for nerds" a comment is highly rated which complains the article is "too technical" rather than sounding like a marketing pitch designed to "fire the imagination of twelve year olds".
Exactly this. Accountants have been dealing with multiple currencies, currency exchange, etc... for centuries. Bitcoin is nothing new, nor particularly complicated from an accounting point of view.
The grandparent just sounds like a variant of the typical Bitcoin fan's anti-goverment rhetoric. He doesn't even grasp that the Chinese goverment didn't try and regulate Bitcoin - it just made it illegal for banks to trade in Bitcoin. (Sensible, given it's inherent volatility.)
Um.... the X-37B is a satellite.
Too lazy to go look up the exact numbers, but conventional recce birds have been doing that on a regular basis since the 1970's.
Chernobyl, Fukishima, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Fermi... that's 5sites just off the top of my head. We've only had two major accidents - but enough serious incidents and close misses that only a fool would talk about how having only two "busted"plants is proof of anything.
Nope. Unpowered flight already existed by the time the Wright brothers headed to Kitty Hawk, and powered flight was right on the edge of possibility. The drives you propose, aren't. The problem is, you don't grasp that fundamental difference and thus assume that people who aren't as egregiously ignorant as you are the ones in the wrong.
True. But those solutions must fall within the bounds of physics and chemistry - and nuclear reactors and ion engines, for the reasons I outlined, don't. Absent new physics, they never will.
Only to someone who doesn't grasp physics in general as well as the mathematics behind orbital mechanics. Absent new physics, all vehicles in space are going to spend far more time coasting than under power.
Yes... let's develop heavy power sources in order to power weak propulsion systems - what a great idea! Multiple ones aren't much better, you still need to power them, and you have to multiply a small number (thrust per engine) by dozens (or more) to get a usefully large number (thrust) for any significant spacecraft. (Which will still be far short, by orders of magnitude, for a useful size for a manned mission.)
Their extraordinary ISP is very attractive from an academic point of view and when considered in isolation... but real world vehicles aren't academic and the engines are but one part of the whole vehicle. When you start to design an actual vehicle and an actual mission, their extraordinarily low thrust-to-weight ratio precludes them from being useful except in a few very specific circumstances.
If you were truly an engineer (a real one, not just someone with an overinflated title), you'd know that things age and wear out.
A real engineer grasps the impact of parts count and complexity. Not only is the ISS not just a "tin can", those planes are orders of magnitude simpler than the ISS.
Not to mention that those planes take hundreds of man hours a year to maintain in flyable condition - and man hours in space cost tens of thousands per.
Sure, as any engineer knows, you can easily manufacture things given enough infrastructure. Since you're an "engineer", you should be able to estimate the cost of developing a (currently non existent) weightless capable factory complex, and the costs of placing hundreds to thousands of tons on orbit, and the ongoing costs of logistics, support, and maintenance needed to produce those "hundreds of times cheaper" parts. You'll also be able to understand that a space craft is made of hundreds of different kinds of materials, only a few of which are amenable to recycling.
That's the thing, these weren't her emails. They were the official communications of an elected official, OUR emails.
Yes, the middle of nowhere. (I live in Kitsap County as well.) That average is misleading because most of the people are concentrated in one of three major 'metro' areas, much of the county is low density or practically empty. (And he lives in one of the low density areas, in an area which county residents regard as being 'backwoods'.)
I live in Kitsap County and I looked up his address, and I can't say I'm surprised. He lives in a very low density area, and given current land use restrictions, that's not going to change. There's no money to be had in expanding capacity.
No, welcome to the "edge case" of living in a very low density area outside of town rather than in a suburb.
He doesn't live in a subdivision - he lives in the woods outside the built up area of town.
Seriously, I've said it three different ways but I'll repeat it a fourth time because it's important to grasp - he lives in very low residential density area outside of town. He doesn't live in the suburbs or a subdivision. I give and grant that Comcast is incompetent - but his options are narrowed and/or blocked as much by the fact of where he chose to live as by any law or regulation. The north end isn't Palo Alto or Mountain View.
Not really. Thirty years ago Gen Con was indeed all that and one of the premier cons of nerd world. Nowadays, with the rise of Multiple Comic Conventions, multiple anime conventions, and multiple incarnations of PAX... it's decidedly in the second tier and edging towards irrelevance.
Have you ever actually studied nuclear weapons design? (By which I mean the unclassified stuff that's available.) Yes, designing the bombs is a problem, especially if you want anything more than a very crude, large, and heavy device. (One that's virtually undeliverable by modern standards.) It's not an insurmountable problem, granted, but is a problem.
And it's an even bigger problem for thermonuclear designs.
There's two ways around the problem though... the first is to explode a lot of bombs and thus gain experience and information. The second is to "borrow" the experience and information from somebody else. The difficulty of obtaining sufficient material makes the first impractical in many cases, and what the feds are trying to do is make the second as difficult as possible as well.
Because Elon Musk owns Tesla - and a giga factory designed to turn out LiOn batteries like Carter's churns out little pills.
Yah, that was implicit in your post, I thought I'd state it explicitly for the slower and Musk worshipers among us.
Because Tesla, not coincidentally also owned by Musk, uses lithium batteries.
Well, no. Not really.
Pretty much all of the Saturn V pads and buildings are still there, and still in use - having been repurposed multiple times. The Saturn I pads were abandoned in the late 60's because nobody thought we'd ever use them again. (And then along came Skylab.)
Other pads were abandoned for a wide variety of reasons... For example, we don't need as many as we used to because we don't have vehicles sitting on the pad as long as we used to. Others were abandoned because rockets don't blow up nearly as often, so we don't need "hot spares". Others were abandoned because the booster was replaced by a different one and the activity shifted to a different pad. Yet others because not only do rockets not blow up so often, their payloads fail less often and have a longer lifetime, so we don't need much of the the frenetic launch pace of the 60's. (Or multiple combinations of these.) Etc... etc...
The number of pads required aren't pushed by raw budget, they're pulled by user requirements. Now, I won't disagree that budgets effect the pull rate, but so do a variety of other factors.
Walkman's and portable CD players too... However the feeling was less about the technology or being portable (or new), and more about the price tag and what it was perceived to say about the owner. People walking about with expensive portable technology were classed alongside those walking about with expensive wristwatches - pretentious yuppie assholes with more money than sense.
You saw the same thing when iPods first hit the market, and again with iPhones, and again with iWatch.
There's a lot of retailers who have realized it - and who have gotten their IT up to snuff and offer "order online, pickup in store in an hour" services. (Concentrating on getting the customer in the store isn't a mistake.)
The problem for these retailers isn't IT (as it so often isn't), it's the infrastructure and overhead involved in setting up an Amazon delivery type of operation. Amazon already has the back-end, a very efficient warehousing, picking, and packing operation - all they had to do was add to front end (dispatch, vehicles, and drivers). Not only does Walmart not have the back or front ends... a retail store isn't a warehouse, and the picking and packing will be much more difficult (and labor intensive, since they can't use the robots and conveyor systems that Amazon does). Amazon could simply build on their existing operations, Wal-Mart would have to start from scratch and be fighting with one foot in a bucket of cement.
This. Range anxiety isn't just about not having enough amp-hours to go there and back again - it's also about cooling your heels and doing nothing while waiting for your car to charge.
Let's see... the existing system uses minimal investment (mainly in transportable isolation units) to transport a small number of exposed or critically ill people to locations where an existing army of people and mountain of equipment already exists and has supporting infrastructure in place. Your proposed system has us spending tens of millions of dollars (if not more) to transport a (currently non existent) army of people and (currently non existent) mountain of equipment to a place without supporting infrastructure and requiring massive (and currently non existent) logistics pipeline to maintain to support a small number of exposed or critically ill people.
Other than the clueless paranoia displayed in this sub-thread, why on earth would you propose such a back-asswards system?
You, and the OP, are confusing two different problems. The first, moving the most critically ill people to treatment and isolating exposed individuals, is largely a solved problem. The second, quarantine and minimizing the spread of disease among the local population is a very different problem... and even so, it can be largely handled with existing systems. The problem with the Ebola outbreak in Africa was failure to recognize the problem followed up by a "too little, too late" response from the West, combined with cultural issues and behaviors which facilitated the spread of disease. You can't fix either by simply throwing money at them.
"Aeronautics" != "[Enviroment|Climate|Earth Science]".
One that has a considerable research arm.
I'm with the grandparent - NASA should get out of the earth science business (and probably astronomy, and energy efficient houses, and all the pies the bureaucrat have stuck their hands in), leave that to more appropriate agencies.
So? I mean seriously, what is that elementary school level reply meant to accomplish?
More dependable than anyone else - by about .2%, much celebrated by the clueless, irrelevant in the real world.
Translation: "Russia can't even afford the power points for it's super heavy booster, so it's going to concentrate on the development of an unproven booster that budget crunches have already delayed for over two decades."