GM says 2010 for production, there's a working prototype,
Theres nothing like that. The "prototype" you are talking about has nothing of the final car, the entire powertrain is not developed, batteries are not ready by far, and the body styling is far from complete.
What you saw unveiled was an empty styling shell, moved around by a small DC motor. Its called a "Design concept", its not even close what the final car will look like.
Take a peek under the hood of this thing here
You cant call this thing a prototype, its not even a mule, commonly used by the industry to test the components of the car. First mules of Volt are supposed to be on the road sometime early 2008, and they will be based on Malibu. The final car is reportedly closer to Cobalt.
So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.
Lets start with the fact that the prime contractor for the Ares-I is ATK, who provides solid rocket booster for the thing. What Boeing got was upper stage contract.
So many aspects of the technology are protected by ITAR, that no matter of how open you may want to make any other parts, its not going to be "open" in any traditional sense.
Plus, there is high likelyhood that Ares-I will never fly, because its ( again ) grossly over its initial cost estimates, falls short of any reasonable performance goals, and is not liked by anybody but few managers and select few policicans with certain interest areas, who are shoving this completely bass-ackwards technical solution to the launch problem down everyones throats.
Just look up the DIRECT launcher concept and the discussion surrounding it, and see what i mean. It was conceived and proposed by a group within NASA under the radars to provide a sane, working alternative to the Ares-I fiasco, way sooner and way cheaper, with performance to spare.
Ares-I is the reason why the NASA lunar return plans are late, underwhelming and underperforming even before they got off the ground, and may well be in danger of cancellation, post elections.
But I would think that backing a cd up in case it gets scratched would be preferable then copying it from another site.
I have stacks of original PC game boxes here. A good percentage i havent really even played because they turn out to be turds, but thats another matter. I have bought and paid for each and every one of them. Mostly when they are older than a year already, or from bargain bins, because i never keep up with the bleeding edge hardware curve, and dont have too much time to invest in games anyway, so what i dont really like i toss aside, but for $10 i often still pick something or another up.
Some of the really good ones have went bad without me really noticing. Betrayal at Krondor, FreeSpace 2 in particular. Krondor went bad _while playing_ because the thing played music straight off the CD all the time, which wore the disc out. At the time, i didnt really have lots of spare storage space so i never made images of the CDs, neither bothered i back them up on CD-Rs because i was too lazy to verify whether i really got around the copy protection properly or not. By the way, buying original, unused releases of these things right now is practically impossible. While a small selection of good movies get remastered and rerelased now and then, nobody is rereleasing my favourite Amiga or ZX-Spectrum games anymore.
Now, with gigabytes being so cheap, i have redownloaded the broken ISOs off the torrents, and i actually have replayed the games a few times. They are still good, classic, and from the bygone era.
Anyone telling me i broke the law downloading them, can just sod off. I can also say that i would make a copy or share any of these out for anyone i know, who bothers to ask. I'd even help setting the game up on operating systems where the things wont work out of the box, and borrow my joystick.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.
They diminish, but they never disappear. Even in algorithms where you completely have to wait the results of previous computation to go on, you can still get a speedup with branch prediction. In essence, while your one core is cracking the numbers, other cores do the what if work, and even if you mispredict in lots of cases, you can still get speedups with large datasets, because in some cases, when your first core comes up with a result, you will discover that the what if computation started out with a right guess.
Hey, i hear they are doing essentially the same stuff with all those newfangled multiscalar processors and branch prediction anyway.
Look, i dont have any issue with considering the life cycle or overall effects. However, when you talk about cars, talk about cars. The problem with talking everything at once, is that its impossible to fit ALL the second and third order variables into a coherent picture. Accounting things like oil rig construction and occupying nations for the resource just gets too difficult to keep with the topic.
Of course, somebody has to do it, and everyone who has done it has found that decoupling energy production from its consumption for transportation, like we do for basically any other industry, makes perfect sense. Essentially making the consumption end zero emissions. You dont consider your clothes iron or dishwasher a particularly polluting vehicle, do you ?
Im an european by the way. The most authoritative report that i have read on this issue are Michelin Challenge Bibendum results, each year. Battery electrics basically have beaten everything else in each category each year. Dig around on their website, last year , Paris report was relatively comprehensive:
You should quit being offended because someone does not unconditionally believe in your pet tech and just agree that yes
Im not offended if people dont believe the same things that i do. Beliefs, however, have little to do with issue at hand. I do take an issue with people spreading FUD and false information, or perpetuating around bullshit gotten from tabloids, without basic fact checking.
Express an opinion, fine, but dont go twisting basic facts.
"Zero emissions" is taken to mean zero tailpipe emissions, by everyone and anyone talking about cars. Jumping up and down about them not really being zero because somewhere something was burnt to store the energy, is smoke and mirrors debating. You cant as much as sneeze ( or fart ) without some emissions being created in the process, everything we do consumes energy.
Wait.. this is still slashdot, so i guess tabloids are okay, and opinions presented as facts are okay too..
I'm too lazy to search for a link, but I have read many times that most of the resource consumption a car will have over its lifetime has already happened by the time it leaves the production plant.
Yes, you are too lazy to pay attention, and dont do your research. You are referring to the infamous CNW Marketing "Dust-to-dust" lifecycle cost analysis, which came out with a silly claim that a Hummer is greener than a prius.
Well, if you wouldnt get your news from tabloids, you would know that this was a paid "research" and has been debunked six ways to sunday.
Completely electric car has far FEWER parts than a gasoline one, less maintenance, less fluids and so on, which in itself constitutes a huge decrease in lifecycle costs, both cash and environmental impact. Of course, auto industry dont like this idea, as parts sales if often bigger cash cow for them than selling the cars themselves.
As to the battery, it depends. Lithium phosphate batteries, like the ones GM is planning for Volt plug-in, are the most environmentally benign ones possible. And they get more likely recycled than your engine oil.
Should we ever run out of metals that go into them, there are huge off-earth resources waiting to be stripmined, should we ever muster the will to go and get them. I know little about the environmental impact of current battery production, but I imagine it is not pretty
You should have stopped at "I know little"
They are zero tailpipe emissions. Effectively decoupling the energy production methods from the consumption.
Where the electricity comes from is another matter entirely, but even if it came exclusively from coal powerplants a mile driven with battery-electric produces about 60% less CO2 than a Prius.
Decoupling energy consumption for transportation from its production _allows_ fully zero emissions transportation, the battery electric takes care of the transportation end.
In case you havent noticed, bascially all large markets are regulated by governments. Oh yeah, i forgot about crackheads..
If Microsoft would state that they cant unbundle IE or Media Player from their products because they would not "make it" would anyone feel sorry ? Or RIAA complaining that without DRM sanctions, they cant make it on the music markets ?
Who gives a rats ass, there are better technology solutions waiting take over.
Its not a US vs Japanese automakers thing either. Both sides are scrambling to get electric-dominant drivetrains in their vehicles, look at GM Volt, Saab and Volvo plugin plans, even Ford plugs their SUVs in now.
Mitsubishi, Subaru, Nissan and Renault have stated that they will have none of this hybrid nonsense, they all have full battery electrics in the pipeline.
So if some sorry ass german automakers cant make it, because they have sat on their arses for too long, who will cry ?
Huh ? Each and every market, except for maybe in Burundi or Mongolia exists in a regulatory environment. Regulations are there to protect your ass.
Each and every company HAS to comply with the regulations of that market AND be able to compete. Is that news to you ?
Otherwise it would be OK for car companies to whine about passing safety tests and supplying airbags as well. Your comment is a non sequitur.
I dont think US automakers like Tesla Motors or Phoenix Motorcars will cry much about this. They are aiming for complete zero emissions vehicles anyway.
Look, the crying from automakers is silly, like the DaimlerChrysler announcement that "we cant make it". Well, tough luck. Innovate or die. Its a market and competition, you dont have any birthright to sit there and dictate things.
Auto industry is long overdue for some serious shakeup, and the ones that get with the future sooner will likely survive.
I can now do many non-complicated tasks from anywhere (such as at the bar).
Thats one of the hidden dangers of this: sysadmins tend to turn up from remote places in conditions where you dont really want or need them, they are capable of more harm than good. While im not advocating working shifts in office, it at least has one benefit to the employer: people are more reliably there in working condition when you need them.
No kidding ? Have you tried it ? With uClibc minimum static binary will be a few tens of kilobytes on ARM9, with glibc the number is just shy of half a meg. x86 code is somewhat more compact, but not terribly so.
And no, dynamic linking cant be used everywhere, and even if it could, that 500kb of C library wont fit on my 128KB on-chip flash.
uClibc ? You gotta be kidding me. Thats one of the more bloated C libs that i have worked with, only eclipsed by the at-least-half-a-megabyte-for-any-simplest-thingy glibc. Try looking into avr-libc sources and see what i mean.
And he or she has to go through that rigmarole every time anything is downloaded.
Ever used Yast, Aptitude or URPMI much ? They are kinda like download.com and tucows are for windows users, except that without crap or rigmarole as you put it.
Not so fast. Rocket engines work differently at different altitudes. Generally, nozzle that is optimized for maximum performance at sea level, does not perform well in vacuum and vice versa. Starting significantly closer to thinner air has its benefits. Also, Max-Q will occur at significantly different circumstances, providing for structural optimizations. There is a reason why SS1 is so small and lightweight, and still could go up to 100km with a weight of three passengers. Same benefits, to lesser extent apply to orbital access. Also, air launch provides some operational advantages, like getting out of the bad weather and still launching.
Both VTVL and air launched stuff have their perks, its up to market to figure out whether any of them will prove superior or something else will replace them entirely, or maybe they will peacefully coexist and fill their respective niches.
Have a look what Armadillo Aerospace has quoted for their flight costs for Pixel & other VTVL vehicles.
Rutan's designs cost that much because he chose stage-and a half, HTHL approach, with hybrid motors. There is relatively high lower bar on flight costs for such thing, because you have to replace the motor for each flight, and thats expensive.
It made sense for winning the X-Prize, because Rutan is an expert of flying craft design, which involves wings etc. so thats what was fastest, lowest-risk development path. Whether it makes sense for really low-cost spaceflight is another matter.
VTVL vehicles, like the ones that Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and a few others are building can ( on paper, at least ) approach way lower flight costs in the future, which will remain a small multiple of liquid fuel costs. Expect to see prices in $10K range in less than a decade.
I suppose you werent aware of Airlaunch LLC ?
Another possibility, as pointed out in some other posts, if you dont take passengers as payloads on SS2 but do take a payload, which is a third stage, and release it after SS2 motor burns out, you could reach orbit.
Admittedly, having a special payload-carrying version of SS2 without a passenger cabin would make third stage separation easier, but there is a reason to suspect that something like that is being considered and built by Scaled. Rutan has hinted about Tier 3 project before.
I can buy a 3 year old Camry with much better metrics all around
Um, how about NO or hell no ?
So how much do you pay to drive 10 000 miles with a 3 year old Camry ? With MiEV, you pay £50
I guess if we discuss the price of the things, then price paid per mile is relevant.
Then, you might be surprised to hear about the little thing called "congestion charge" in a few places in the world, like London. Thats £8 saved every day when commuting to work. Guess what, MiEV would be exempt from that. It would also be able to drive in US HOV lanes.
Now, i havent driven MiEV myself, but everybody who has say that it performs actually better than the gas-powered counterpart. The reasons for that are: ideal weight distribution with low placed batteries, and instant torque without any gearbox available that is the inherent characteristic of eletric motors. I havent driven a Camry on track myself, but if feels kinda heavy to drive, i would not be surprised if it got its ass handed to it by something like MiEV.
If you add this all together, and throw in the fact that its a zero ( tailpipe ) emissions* vehicle, the metrics wont exactly be all around better.
* An electric vehicle powered by the electricity from coal plants is still roughly 75% cleaner per mile than modern gas engine.
The skinny: based on popular I car ( selling very well in Europe ) Mitsubishi is planning to market a fully electric version. About 120 miles range, a bit better acceleration performance than gas version and same top speed. Announced pricetag: $24K.
Fully crashtested to european standards at least, performs as well as gas counterpart.
The prototypes are in fleet testing by Tokyo Electric Power Company ( TEPCO ) right now.
There is some competition from Subaru in the form of R1E and Nissan with the Mixim.
I guess the reviewer does not subscribe to ABG electric vehicle news.
Seriously. Its a low gravity, 1/6th of earth gravity environment. When i get old older ( and maybe fatter ) i want to lighten up.
Moon would be ideal.
Also, low gravity would enable sports never possible on earth. Human being could fly around just flapping wings, like they all tried in the middle ages, under atmosphere-filled dome.
The possibilities are endless.
And that does not even touch on the vistas yet.. no, not THAT Vista.
Seriously, Moon, if developed, would be one real nice resort for old age.
That, and oh, providing all those valuable resources, like platinum group metals, possibly helium-3 and abundant solar power to earth perhaps. But thats up to robots to run and maintain, humans should be the overlords relaxing and kicking back low-g margueritas.
The only reason i have Win XP on by box, Vista and Longhorn under a VirtualPC and a copy of Win 2003 running in the corner, is that i need to do development on it. People order me to write software that does stuff under windows. I try to be a good boy and keep it crossplatform nowadays, but much of it is really windows specific by definition ( like, Sharepoint extensions or apps that plug into Active Directory features, or drivers and browser plugins ) Another reason why i keep running windows is the fact that i like Visual Studio ( 2005 as of now ) C ide over something like CodeBlocks ( which is good, but debugger isnt really as good ) or hellisly slow Eclipse. I dont really have time to play much time sinking games nowadays, and if i do i have my Wii and PSP.
All these years later, and its still no match for the original Bitchin' fast 3d! 2000
Livin' la Video loca con Puerto Para Garficios Acelerados Gigante!
Slashdot Mirror
GM says 2010 for production, there's a working prototype,
Theres nothing like that. The "prototype" you are talking about has nothing of the final car, the entire powertrain is not developed, batteries are not ready by far, and the body styling is far from complete.
What you saw unveiled was an empty styling shell, moved around by a small DC motor. Its called a "Design concept", its not even close what the final car will look like.
Take a peek under the hood of this thing here
You cant call this thing a prototype, its not even a mule, commonly used by the industry to test the components of the car. First mules of Volt are supposed to be on the road sometime early 2008, and they will be based on Malibu. The final car is reportedly closer to Cobalt.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf82.html
So the USSR, US and french have designed and built small spaceworthy reactors before. Some of these things have flown on actual space missions, particularly the russian Topaz-I system, weighing only 320kg.
They even built and tested nuclear powered aircraft both in US and USSR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_aircraft
Wonder why it never went anywhere ?
Lets start with the fact that the prime contractor for the Ares-I is ATK, who provides solid rocket booster for the thing. What Boeing got was upper stage contract.
So many aspects of the technology are protected by ITAR, that no matter of how open you may want to make any other parts, its not going to be "open" in any traditional sense.
Plus, there is high likelyhood that Ares-I will never fly, because its ( again ) grossly over its initial cost estimates, falls short of any reasonable performance goals, and is not liked by anybody but few managers and select few policicans with certain interest areas, who are shoving this completely bass-ackwards technical solution to the launch problem down everyones throats.
Just look up the DIRECT launcher concept and the discussion surrounding it, and see what i mean. It was conceived and proposed by a group within NASA under the radars to provide a sane, working alternative to the Ares-I fiasco, way sooner and way cheaper, with performance to spare.
Ares-I is the reason why the NASA lunar return plans are late, underwhelming and underperforming even before they got off the ground, and may well be in danger of cancellation, post elections.
But I would think that backing a cd up in case it gets scratched would be preferable then copying it from another site.
I have stacks of original PC game boxes here. A good percentage i havent really even played because they turn out to be turds, but thats another matter. I have bought and paid for each and every one of them. Mostly when they are older than a year already, or from bargain bins, because i never keep up with the bleeding edge hardware curve, and dont have too much time to invest in games anyway, so what i dont really like i toss aside, but for $10 i often still pick something or another up.
Some of the really good ones have went bad without me really noticing. Betrayal at Krondor, FreeSpace 2 in particular. Krondor went bad _while playing_ because the thing played music straight off the CD all the time, which wore the disc out. At the time, i didnt really have lots of spare storage space so i never made images of the CDs, neither bothered i back them up on CD-Rs because i was too lazy to verify whether i really got around the copy protection properly or not. By the way, buying original, unused releases of these things right now is practically impossible. While a small selection of good movies get remastered and rerelased now and then, nobody is rereleasing my favourite Amiga or ZX-Spectrum games anymore.
Now, with gigabytes being so cheap, i have redownloaded the broken ISOs off the torrents, and i actually have replayed the games a few times. They are still good, classic, and from the bygone era.
Anyone telling me i broke the law downloading them, can just sod off. I can also say that i would make a copy or share any of these out for anyone i know, who bothers to ask. I'd even help setting the game up on operating systems where the things wont work out of the box, and borrow my joystick.
I hope they get the the ending right this time.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.
They diminish, but they never disappear. Even in algorithms where you completely have to wait the results of previous computation to go on, you can still get a speedup with branch prediction. In essence, while your one core is cracking the numbers, other cores do the what if work, and even if you mispredict in lots of cases, you can still get speedups with large datasets, because in some cases, when your first core comes up with a result, you will discover that the what if computation started out with a right guess.
Hey, i hear they are doing essentially the same stuff with all those newfangled multiscalar processors and branch prediction anyway.
Look, i dont have any issue with considering the life cycle or overall effects. However, when you talk about cars, talk about cars. The problem with talking everything at once, is that its impossible to fit ALL the second and third order variables into a coherent picture. Accounting things like oil rig construction and occupying nations for the resource just gets too difficult to keep with the topic.
Of course, somebody has to do it, and everyone who has done it has found that decoupling energy production from its consumption for transportation, like we do for basically any other industry, makes perfect sense. Essentially making the consumption end zero emissions. You dont consider your clothes iron or dishwasher a particularly polluting vehicle, do you ?
Im an european by the way. The most authoritative report that i have read on this issue are Michelin Challenge Bibendum results, each year. Battery electrics basically have beaten everything else in each category each year. Dig around on their website, last year , Paris report was relatively comprehensive:
You should quit being offended because someone does not unconditionally believe in your pet tech and just agree that yes
.. this is still slashdot, so i guess tabloids are okay, and opinions presented as facts are okay too..
Im not offended if people dont believe the same things that i do. Beliefs, however, have little to do with issue at hand. I do take an issue with people spreading FUD and false information, or perpetuating around bullshit gotten from tabloids, without basic fact checking.
Express an opinion, fine, but dont go twisting basic facts.
"Zero emissions" is taken to mean zero tailpipe emissions, by everyone and anyone talking about cars. Jumping up and down about them not really being zero because somewhere something was burnt to store the energy, is smoke and mirrors debating. You cant as much as sneeze ( or fart ) without some emissions being created in the process, everything we do consumes energy.
Wait
I'm too lazy to search for a link, but I have read many times that most of the resource consumption a car will have over its lifetime has already happened by the time it leaves the production plant. Yes, you are too lazy to pay attention, and dont do your research. You are referring to the infamous CNW Marketing "Dust-to-dust" lifecycle cost analysis, which came out with a silly claim that a Hummer is greener than a prius. Well, if you wouldnt get your news from tabloids, you would know that this was a paid "research" and has been debunked six ways to sunday.
Completely electric car has far FEWER parts than a gasoline one, less maintenance, less fluids and so on, which in itself constitutes a huge decrease in lifecycle costs, both cash and environmental impact. Of course, auto industry dont like this idea, as parts sales if often bigger cash cow for them than selling the cars themselves.
As to the battery, it depends. Lithium phosphate batteries, like the ones GM is planning for Volt plug-in, are the most environmentally benign ones possible. And they get more likely recycled than your engine oil.
Should we ever run out of metals that go into them, there are huge off-earth resources waiting to be stripmined, should we ever muster the will to go and get them.
I know little about the environmental impact of current battery production, but I imagine it is not pretty
You should have stopped at "I know little"
They are zero tailpipe emissions. Effectively decoupling the energy production methods from the consumption.
Where the electricity comes from is another matter entirely, but even if it came exclusively from coal powerplants a mile driven with battery-electric produces about 60% less CO2 than a Prius.
Decoupling energy consumption for transportation from its production _allows_ fully zero emissions transportation, the battery electric takes care of the transportation end.
In case you havent noticed, bascially all large markets are regulated by governments. Oh yeah, i forgot about crackheads ..
If Microsoft would state that they cant unbundle IE or Media Player from their products because they would not "make it" would anyone feel sorry ? Or RIAA complaining that without DRM sanctions, they cant make it on the music markets ?
Who gives a rats ass, there are better technology solutions waiting take over.
Its not a US vs Japanese automakers thing either. Both sides are scrambling to get electric-dominant drivetrains in their vehicles, look at GM Volt, Saab and Volvo plugin plans, even Ford plugs their SUVs in now.
Mitsubishi, Subaru, Nissan and Renault have stated that they will have none of this hybrid nonsense, they all have full battery electrics in the pipeline.
So if some sorry ass german automakers cant make it, because they have sat on their arses for too long, who will cry ?
Huh ? Each and every market, except for maybe in Burundi or Mongolia exists in a regulatory environment. Regulations are there to protect your ass.
Each and every company HAS to comply with the regulations of that market AND be able to compete. Is that news to you ?
Otherwise it would be OK for car companies to whine about passing safety tests and supplying airbags as well. Your comment is a non sequitur.
I dont think US automakers like Tesla Motors or Phoenix Motorcars will cry much about this. They are aiming for complete zero emissions vehicles anyway.
Look, the crying from automakers is silly, like the DaimlerChrysler announcement that "we cant make it". Well, tough luck. Innovate or die. Its a market and competition, you dont have any birthright to sit there and dictate things.
Auto industry is long overdue for some serious shakeup, and the ones that get with the future sooner will likely survive.
I can now do many non-complicated tasks from anywhere (such as at the bar). Thats one of the hidden dangers of this: sysadmins tend to turn up from remote places in conditions where you dont really want or need them, they are capable of more harm than good. While im not advocating working shifts in office, it at least has one benefit to the employer: people are more reliably there in working condition when you need them.
No kidding ? Have you tried it ? With uClibc minimum static binary will be a few tens of kilobytes on ARM9, with glibc the number is just shy of half a meg. x86 code is somewhat more compact, but not terribly so. And no, dynamic linking cant be used everywhere, and even if it could, that 500kb of C library wont fit on my 128KB on-chip flash.
uClibc ? You gotta be kidding me. Thats one of the more bloated C libs that i have worked with, only eclipsed by the at-least-half-a-megabyte-for-any-simplest-thingy glibc.
Try looking into avr-libc sources and see what i mean.
And he or she has to go through that rigmarole every time anything is downloaded. Ever used Yast, Aptitude or URPMI much ? They are kinda like download.com and tucows are for windows users, except that without crap or rigmarole as you put it.
Not so fast. Rocket engines work differently at different altitudes. Generally, nozzle that is optimized for maximum performance at sea level, does not perform well in vacuum and vice versa.
Starting significantly closer to thinner air has its benefits. Also, Max-Q will occur at significantly different circumstances, providing for structural optimizations.
There is a reason why SS1 is so small and lightweight, and still could go up to 100km with a weight of three passengers. Same benefits, to lesser extent apply to orbital access.
Also, air launch provides some operational advantages, like getting out of the bad weather and still launching.
Both VTVL and air launched stuff have their perks, its up to market to figure out whether any of them will prove superior or something else will replace them entirely, or maybe they will peacefully coexist and fill their respective niches.
Have a look what Armadillo Aerospace has quoted for their flight costs for Pixel & other VTVL vehicles.
Rutan's designs cost that much because he chose stage-and a half, HTHL approach, with hybrid motors. There is relatively high lower bar on flight costs for such thing, because you have to replace the motor for each flight, and thats expensive.
It made sense for winning the X-Prize, because Rutan is an expert of flying craft design, which involves wings etc. so thats what was fastest, lowest-risk development path. Whether it makes sense for really low-cost spaceflight is another matter.
VTVL vehicles, like the ones that Armadillo, Masten Space Systems, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and a few others are building can ( on paper, at least ) approach way lower flight costs in the future, which will remain a small multiple of liquid fuel costs. Expect to see prices in $10K range in less than a decade.
I suppose you werent aware of Airlaunch LLC ?
Another possibility, as pointed out in some other posts, if you dont take passengers as payloads on SS2 but do take a payload, which is a third stage, and release it after SS2 motor burns out, you could reach orbit. Admittedly, having a special payload-carrying version of SS2 without a passenger cabin would make third stage separation easier, but there is a reason to suspect that something like that is being considered and built by Scaled. Rutan has hinted about Tier 3 project before.
I can buy a 3 year old Camry with much better metrics all around
Um, how about NO or hell no ?
So how much do you pay to drive 10 000 miles with a 3 year old Camry ? With MiEV, you pay £50
I guess if we discuss the price of the things, then price paid per mile is relevant.
Then, you might be surprised to hear about the little thing called "congestion charge" in a few places in the world, like London. Thats £8 saved every day when commuting to work. Guess what, MiEV would be exempt from that. It would also be able to drive in US HOV lanes.
Now, i havent driven MiEV myself, but everybody who has say that it performs actually better than the gas-powered counterpart. The reasons for that are: ideal weight distribution with low placed batteries, and instant torque without any gearbox available that is the inherent characteristic of eletric motors. I havent driven a Camry on track myself, but if feels kinda heavy to drive, i would not be surprised if it got its ass handed to it by something like MiEV.
If you add this all together, and throw in the fact that its a zero ( tailpipe ) emissions* vehicle, the metrics wont exactly be all around better.
* An electric vehicle powered by the electricity from coal plants is still roughly 75% cleaner per mile than modern gas engine.
Lots of coverage on AutoBlogGreen and some videos up on YouTube ( more tubiness)
The skinny: based on popular I car ( selling very well in Europe ) Mitsubishi is planning to market a fully electric version. About 120 miles range, a bit better acceleration performance than gas version and same top speed. Announced pricetag: $24K.
Fully crashtested to european standards at least, performs as well as gas counterpart.
The prototypes are in fleet testing by Tokyo Electric Power Company ( TEPCO ) right now.
There is some competition from Subaru in the form of R1E and Nissan with the Mixim.
I guess the reviewer does not subscribe to ABG electric vehicle news.
Seriously. Its a low gravity, 1/6th of earth gravity environment. When i get old older ( and maybe fatter ) i want to lighten up. Moon would be ideal. Also, low gravity would enable sports never possible on earth. Human being could fly around just flapping wings, like they all tried in the middle ages, under atmosphere-filled dome. The possibilities are endless. And that does not even touch on the vistas yet .. no, not THAT Vista.
Seriously, Moon, if developed, would be one real nice resort for old age.
That, and oh, providing all those valuable resources, like platinum group metals, possibly helium-3 and abundant solar power to earth perhaps. But thats up to robots to run and maintain, humans should be the overlords relaxing and kicking back low-g margueritas.
The only reason i have Win XP on by box, Vista and Longhorn under a VirtualPC and a copy of Win 2003 running in the corner, is that i need to do development on it. People order me to write software that does stuff under windows.
I try to be a good boy and keep it crossplatform nowadays, but much of it is really windows specific by definition ( like, Sharepoint extensions or apps that plug into Active Directory features, or drivers and browser plugins )
Another reason why i keep running windows is the fact that i like Visual Studio ( 2005 as of now ) C ide over something like CodeBlocks ( which is good, but debugger isnt really as good ) or hellisly slow Eclipse.
I dont really have time to play much time sinking games nowadays, and if i do i have my Wii and PSP.
All these years later, and its still no match for the original Bitchin' fast 3d! 2000 Livin' la Video loca con Puerto Para Garficios Acelerados Gigante!