One of the big advantages diesels have over gasoline engines is that they don't have a throttle plate restricting airflow at sub-optimal speeds. When used in a generator, both the gasoline and diesel engines would be run at their peak efficiency and so this throttle restriction would disappear. Now you are left with only the compression advantage of diesel. That advantage gets reduced by the higher complexity, cost, and weight of the diesel engine.
In short, it's probably not worth the 5% or so increase in efficiency. Certainly it is not in financial terms.
You can't pick a single US state and compare it to, say, Germany. Every other state in the union speaks the same language, for starters. A German has a huge disincentive to move to neighboring France, whereas a move from Pennsylvania to New Jersey is unlikely to impact an American's life in any meaningful way.
Yes, we also have a single language and have long had a single currency. We have hiring biases (e.g. gender, race, etc), but by and large not regional ones. These are good things, but they do encourage (or at least do not dissuade) movement.
I don't disagree with your analysis, but you are leaving out the huge elephant in the room: that the reason the founders reasoned we needed a right to bear arms is that they distrusted a standing army and felt that the defense of the nation should therefore be carried out by armed citizen-soldiers in the form of a militia.
This proved unworkable within a decade, when they struggled to even put down a yokel farm rebellion. The militia was shown to be ineffective several more times, and so by 30 or 40 years out the entire spirit of the 2nd amendment was gutted and we were left with a standing army. That standing army, now well into 2nd century, has not yet overthrown the Republic.
Now, I would much prefer that that we the people had chosen to properly amend the constitution to reflect the actual behavior of the country, I also recognize that the 2nd Amendment has been half-ignored for 200 years or so without ill effect. That, alarmingly to some people, shows that the founding fathers are rather fallible human beings after all. The idea that a handgun is a natural right is not one that I'm willing to accept.
You describe how guns work, but not their purpose. If there was a better way to kill, people would use that and guns would go the way of the sword. The purposes of guns, for the moment, are killing and sport.
You seem to be perfectly willing to give up your rights as long as a certain number of other people have abused that right (used it for malicious purposes).
I make a sharp distinction between natural rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) and granted rights (Bill of Rights, etc.). So your statement is true for granted rights, but not for fundamental rights. I think we should constantly revisit laws and the basis of them, including laws which grant us rights. I would argue that the laws granting us freedom of movement are justified in a cost-benefit analysis. Laws (or lack of enforcement) permitting any hoodlum living in his mom's house to pick up a handgun for $100? Not so much.
As neat as that was, it was hardly a demonstration of how menacing a drone could be as a weapon. Even if you couldn't hear it coming, accuracy looks pretty shaky, pun intended.
No, a goose cannot go through an engine without damaging it. And they flock, so two engines becoming damaged is rare, but does happen.
No drone has ever been sucked into a jet engine, and if it did happen the event would not be fatal because the other engine would still work.
A bullet would not hurt a person if it were traveling at typical baton speeds, and a baton can kill people at velocities far lower than bullets.
I'm not advocating that people be allowed to fly drones near airports, or even that they be allowed to fly over 400ft. Nor should they be allowed to deliver goods to inmates at prisons. I can understand the need for military secrecy, and by extension protecting the Commander-in-Chief. But as big as Obama and Bush's ears are, a 30 mile exclusion zone seems overkill. The entire DC area is not a sensitive locale. This is over-reach.
merely saying that the almost-not-a-problem of bird strikes does not automatically imply that drones are likewise almost-not-a-problem.
I was responding to a spat between ACs that went something like: AC #1: We've been flying model aircraft decades and have not had a problem. AC #2: But drones have only gotten popular recently, exponentially increasing the numbers of aircraft. Me: Birds dwarf the number of drones and have not been a big problem.
My point was to support AC #1. Despite decades of model aircraft flying around, there have been no fatalities in manned aircraft. Zero. Bird strikes occasionally kill, but unlike birds drones do not flock, so they are not likely to cause the same sorts of fatalities as Canada geese have. The popular drones weigh almost nothing - you might as well worry about a flock of starlings. Sucking even a single drone through your jet engine is an impossibly low probability event - two is not going to happen in our lifetimes unless it is deliberate.
If things are deliberate, then a no-fly zone is pointless - it's already illegal to try to bring down an airplane.
No, I'm saying there is no significant danger. No low hanging fruit to even pick. Drones have killed zero people in the air. Zero. Model aircraft as a whole have killed perhaps half a dozen on the ground over the last 20 years. I'd argue that's not worth going after either, but at least there is something to argue about. All I'm asking is for a cost-benefit analysis that counts drone death equally to, say, high school football deaths (11 this year). What is happening right now is unfounded CYA rulemaking. Government regulations - even trivial ones about toys - should have some basis in empirical data.
I don't really count myself as anti-gun, so the criticism doesn't really sting.
But I do think the similarities are quite limited. Guns have two demonstrable purposes: killing and sport. Drones - at least in the context we are discussing them - have only the sport aspect. You can theorize ways to use a drone to kill, but until we have tens of thousands of drone deaths (or even just "tens"), I'll take a pass on the direct analogy.
Yes, there have been instances of idiots pestering firefighters with drones here in the US as well. I agree this is a matter that can and should be attacked with existing law - at this point there is no widespread problem to address with mandates and regulation.
Since drones don't typically flock, an event like the 1995 incident is pretty unlikely.
I'm not arguing that all regulations for drones are stupid. Far from it - I'm just not terribly worried about some kid with a $40 supermarket drone that he's going to break after a couple of uses - let alone that he'll manage to get into a flight path. The crappy remote won't let it fly that far anyway. The more expensive drones have more capability to get to altitude, but then so did more expensive model airplanes - and I don't think there is a single instance of a collision, let alone fatality, between a manned aircraft and a remote control aircraft.
There have been half a dozen fatalities on the ground, though - so perhaps efforts would be better spent making them safer to people on the ground?
If I wanted to "wake up" and use a drone in a violent way, no FAA restriction would stop me. This has been true for at least 20 years with fixed wing and helicopter hobby aircraft. That we have such a long streak without incident either tells me that the risk is very low, or that the limitations of a model aircraft make such attacks pointless.
The point is that birds are not going away and they dwarf the threat to aircraft posed by drones. If you have a whole system in place which can accommodate birds, that same system can handle drones. Drones as a threat to aviation only exists in the imagination, or in a tiny number on a risk assessment spreadsheet.
It does make sense, since the same kind of precautions you have to take for birds also will avoid drone damage. And a wildfire is a bit contrived, since not too many drones are flying in the wilderness to begin with - especially where it isn't safe to be a bird, let alone a human drone operator. This is a solution with no evidence of a problem.
Anyway, I'm going to come back and accuse you of not reading since you did me the favor. Look at the comment I was responding to, suggesting that drones have a government-controlled chip in them to enforce no-fly zones. But take your "drone pistol" and throw it in there along with bird strikes as the kind of CYA thinking that is infecting us.
Unless my info is out of date, tethered drones are classified as "moored balloons" at the moment. Slightly more restricted than kites. Key points:
Stay under 150 ft, unless you notify air traffic control - in which case stay under 500 ft. If you go higher than 150 ft, you need to light or flag the tether.
Stay 5 miles away from an airport
If you are within 250 ft of a tall structure, you can go as high as that structure.
Only fly in daylight unless you have a lit tether and drone.
There has to be a fail-safe where the drone descends if the tether breaks.
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I was talking about the electric portion of the drivetrain, not the diesel. Diesel's advantages over steam are, as you say, legion.
Well, naturally. Though if you move from Philly to South Jersey, it's all still Iggles/Flyers/Phils (Sixers?) territory.
Diesel electric trains are popular because mechanically coupling wheels to a 3000 horsepower engine is not trivial :)
It also lets the locomotive run on electrified rails if available - though in practice this has been abandoned for freight since the early 80s.
One of the big advantages diesels have over gasoline engines is that they don't have a throttle plate restricting airflow at sub-optimal speeds. When used in a generator, both the gasoline and diesel engines would be run at their peak efficiency and so this throttle restriction would disappear. Now you are left with only the compression advantage of diesel. That advantage gets reduced by the higher complexity, cost, and weight of the diesel engine.
In short, it's probably not worth the 5% or so increase in efficiency. Certainly it is not in financial terms.
They'll still kill more than 30,000 every year - whereas when public transit kills anyone at all it makes the news.
You can't pick a single US state and compare it to, say, Germany. Every other state in the union speaks the same language, for starters. A German has a huge disincentive to move to neighboring France, whereas a move from Pennsylvania to New Jersey is unlikely to impact an American's life in any meaningful way.
Yes, we also have a single language and have long had a single currency. We have hiring biases (e.g. gender, race, etc), but by and large not regional ones. These are good things, but they do encourage (or at least do not dissuade) movement.
Why would acidification hurt algae?
I don't disagree with your analysis, but you are leaving out the huge elephant in the room: that the reason the founders reasoned we needed a right to bear arms is that they distrusted a standing army and felt that the defense of the nation should therefore be carried out by armed citizen-soldiers in the form of a militia.
This proved unworkable within a decade, when they struggled to even put down a yokel farm rebellion. The militia was shown to be ineffective several more times, and so by 30 or 40 years out the entire spirit of the 2nd amendment was gutted and we were left with a standing army. That standing army, now well into 2nd century, has not yet overthrown the Republic.
Now, I would much prefer that that we the people had chosen to properly amend the constitution to reflect the actual behavior of the country, I also recognize that the 2nd Amendment has been half-ignored for 200 years or so without ill effect. That, alarmingly to some people, shows that the founding fathers are rather fallible human beings after all. The idea that a handgun is a natural right is not one that I'm willing to accept.
Please continue to live in ignorance of the sea change in both quantity of, and quality of piloting involved in, unmanned aerial systems.
There are so many that the airliners are just falling from the sky!
Look up in the sky at the time of your choosing - even in the city - and count the number of drones vs. the number of birds.
QED.
Congratulations.
You describe how guns work, but not their purpose. If there was a better way to kill, people would use that and guns would go the way of the sword. The purposes of guns, for the moment, are killing and sport.
You seem to be perfectly willing to give up your rights as long as a certain number of other people have abused that right (used it for malicious purposes).
I make a sharp distinction between natural rights (life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) and granted rights (Bill of Rights, etc.). So your statement is true for granted rights, but not for fundamental rights. I think we should constantly revisit laws and the basis of them, including laws which grant us rights. I would argue that the laws granting us freedom of movement are justified in a cost-benefit analysis. Laws (or lack of enforcement) permitting any hoodlum living in his mom's house to pick up a handgun for $100? Not so much.
As neat as that was, it was hardly a demonstration of how menacing a drone could be as a weapon. Even if you couldn't hear it coming, accuracy looks pretty shaky, pun intended.
No, a goose cannot go through an engine without damaging it. And they flock, so two engines becoming damaged is rare, but does happen.
No drone has ever been sucked into a jet engine, and if it did happen the event would not be fatal because the other engine would still work.
A bullet would not hurt a person if it were traveling at typical baton speeds, and a baton can kill people at velocities far lower than bullets.
I'm not advocating that people be allowed to fly drones near airports, or even that they be allowed to fly over 400ft. Nor should they be allowed to deliver goods to inmates at prisons. I can understand the need for military secrecy, and by extension protecting the Commander-in-Chief. But as big as Obama and Bush's ears are, a 30 mile exclusion zone seems overkill. The entire DC area is not a sensitive locale. This is over-reach.
merely saying that the almost-not-a-problem of bird strikes does not automatically imply that drones are likewise almost-not-a-problem.
I was responding to a spat between ACs that went something like:
AC #1: We've been flying model aircraft decades and have not had a problem.
AC #2: But drones have only gotten popular recently, exponentially increasing the numbers of aircraft.
Me: Birds dwarf the number of drones and have not been a big problem.
My point was to support AC #1. Despite decades of model aircraft flying around, there have been no fatalities in manned aircraft. Zero. Bird strikes occasionally kill, but unlike birds drones do not flock, so they are not likely to cause the same sorts of fatalities as Canada geese have. The popular drones weigh almost nothing - you might as well worry about a flock of starlings. Sucking even a single drone through your jet engine is an impossibly low probability event - two is not going to happen in our lifetimes unless it is deliberate.
If things are deliberate, then a no-fly zone is pointless - it's already illegal to try to bring down an airplane.
No, I'm saying there is no significant danger. No low hanging fruit to even pick. Drones have killed zero people in the air. Zero. Model aircraft as a whole have killed perhaps half a dozen on the ground over the last 20 years. I'd argue that's not worth going after either, but at least there is something to argue about. All I'm asking is for a cost-benefit analysis that counts drone death equally to, say, high school football deaths (11 this year). What is happening right now is unfounded CYA rulemaking. Government regulations - even trivial ones about toys - should have some basis in empirical data.
I don't really count myself as anti-gun, so the criticism doesn't really sting.
But I do think the similarities are quite limited. Guns have two demonstrable purposes: killing and sport. Drones - at least in the context we are discussing them - have only the sport aspect. You can theorize ways to use a drone to kill, but until we have tens of thousands of drone deaths (or even just "tens"), I'll take a pass on the direct analogy.
The answer to government CYA culture invading our lives is more government.
Yes, there have been instances of idiots pestering firefighters with drones here in the US as well. I agree this is a matter that can and should be attacked with existing law - at this point there is no widespread problem to address with mandates and regulation.
Since drones don't typically flock, an event like the 1995 incident is pretty unlikely.
I'm not arguing that all regulations for drones are stupid. Far from it - I'm just not terribly worried about some kid with a $40 supermarket drone that he's going to break after a couple of uses - let alone that he'll manage to get into a flight path. The crappy remote won't let it fly that far anyway. The more expensive drones have more capability to get to altitude, but then so did more expensive model airplanes - and I don't think there is a single instance of a collision, let alone fatality, between a manned aircraft and a remote control aircraft.
There have been half a dozen fatalities on the ground, though - so perhaps efforts would be better spent making them safer to people on the ground?
If I wanted to "wake up" and use a drone in a violent way, no FAA restriction would stop me. This has been true for at least 20 years with fixed wing and helicopter hobby aircraft. That we have such a long streak without incident either tells me that the risk is very low, or that the limitations of a model aircraft make such attacks pointless.
My point was not made, then.
The point is that birds are not going away and they dwarf the threat to aircraft posed by drones. If you have a whole system in place which can accommodate birds, that same system can handle drones. Drones as a threat to aviation only exists in the imagination, or in a tiny number on a risk assessment spreadsheet.
It does make sense, since the same kind of precautions you have to take for birds also will avoid drone damage. And a wildfire is a bit contrived, since not too many drones are flying in the wilderness to begin with - especially where it isn't safe to be a bird, let alone a human drone operator. This is a solution with no evidence of a problem.
A drone pistol? Seriously?
Anyway, I'm going to come back and accuse you of not reading since you did me the favor. Look at the comment I was responding to, suggesting that drones have a government-controlled chip in them to enforce no-fly zones. But take your "drone pistol" and throw it in there along with bird strikes as the kind of CYA thinking that is infecting us.
Unless my info is out of date, tethered drones are classified as "moored balloons" at the moment. Slightly more restricted than kites. Key points: