Expensive? If you are talking utility level power storage, pumped-storage is the most inexpensive per kWh stored. In fact, it is what is used now, because it is cheapest.
Batteries? If it is about photovoltaic panels, the energy can be stored using pumped-storage. If we are talking solar thermal, systems using molten salts for storage have been used.
PS: In short: electrics are more efficient and have lower emissions than ICE. The problem is the cost of the batteries, but that is expected to come down as electrics enter mass production. I expect the natural progression to be ICE -> hybrid -> electric. It may come to be a time when non-electrics will simply be banned from certain cities just because of air pollution concerns - it has been proved some time ago that tail pipe emissions are a cause for heart disease (namely stroke).
Scoring in this case has nothing to do with science. It is just the Karma bonus. Anyway, lots of people have done the math on electrics vs ICE and fact is you end up emitting less using the electric grid, any way you cut it.
For example, you count losses, but forget all electric vehicles have regenerative breaking which reduces energy use in stop and start situations such as urban settings (which is where the pollution problem is more serious to begin with). You discount the fact that just the ICE engine has about the efficiency of the whole electric system from power plant to wheel you mentioned. The ICE vehicle will have additional losses as well: transmission losses and other engine losses due to not operating at the designed RPM, which a pure electric should not have, since the engine can be connected directly to the wheels. Then there is the fact that the energy mix is not pure coal or gas fired. I do not know where you live exactly, but in the state you mentioned, California, the electric energy mix is like this:
Net Electricity Generation California
Total Net Electricity Generation 17508 thousand MWh
Petroleum-Fired 9 thousand MWh
Natural Gas-Fired 10431 thousand MWh
Coal-Fired 194 thousand MWh
Nuclear 2606 thousand MWh
Hydroelectric 2033 thousand MWh
Other Renewables 1986 thousand MWh
Sure, on a pure economic sense presently a hybrid diesel is better at this moment in time. But theoretically that is not an invariant and there is more room for efficiency improvements in electrics than ICE (which is barred by the Carnot limit for a thermal engine operating at that temperature)
That is not very important since new generation batteries can be charged in 5 minutes. You just need a fast-charging network. Besides, with electrics you can slowly charge at home, something which you cannot do with a gasoline car. That reduces the need for fast-charging (in fact it may make it as uneconomic as public pay phones).
Now a coal or gas power plant has a 40% maximum efficiency.
No it doesn't. Even a coal power plant can have efficiencies of 48%. Combined cycle natural gas power plants can have efficiencies of 60%. With Combined Heat and Power, even greater efficiencies are possible.
PS: What the heck is up with the conspiracy theories? People have tried to use ARM for desktops before and failed. Remember Netwinder? Why should Intel bother trying to sell for desktops something which cannot even run Windows XP? They invested in Atom for a reason.
XScale was NIH and known, at a time, as the fastest, yet most power hungry of the ARM compatible processors. That did not help a lot in a segment where power consumption was at a premium. Plus the market was saturated, and when ARM Cortex cores showed up it was knocked off the performance pedestal.
Because Matroska doesn't solve the codec licensing problem. It is just a container. Xiph.org (the OGG people) actually developed good audio codecs (Vorbis, FLAC, Speex) and are working on a video codec.
DivX is starting to support Matroska though. So probably all those DivX logo players you see in the market will support that container soon.
The whole thing looks cool, especially the engines. The problem is I don't expect it to fly. Ever. Much like any of the other nice spaceplane projects (HOTOL, Black Horse, X-34, etc). They are too expensive and none will fund it. The risk is high, it takes long to produce results, it discourages investment. I've heard it can take 5 years to design a rocket engine alone, but these engines are way more complex. Still, my hat's off to you for even trying such a beast. They originally said jet engines weren't possible either, and some British guy tinkered enough to get one working, even if the government made little note of it at the time, so I guess it isn't impossible.
DC-XA had an Al-Li Oxygen tank and a composite LH2 tank. The think that fscked up X-33 was indeed the shape of the tank in combination with the composite material picked. It was heavier than using Al-Li in the first place.
Dismissing the EELVs was bunk. If the reliability was bad, no commercial satellite would be launched with them. EELV could easily replace the stillborn Ares I.
If EELV reliability was that bad, why are they now using components from EELV (namely RS-68 engines) in Ares V? One Ares V uses more RS-68 engines than a Delta-4 Heavy would. So how come it has better reliability? Any person with a small notion of statistics would smell the bullshit.
Using solids is pointless anyway. This is only pork barreling to ATK Thiokol. They would have been better off resurrecting the F1 engine, or buying more RD-180 engines from the Russians. There, I said it. No solids, no bumpy ride.
Ares I is an abortion, and Ares V is being made without specific applications in mind. With the specs changing so often, I doubt either will ever fly.
Why, oh why, did NASA drop funding for SLI which was supposed to develop new generation staged combustion engines? Developing new engines is the first step in developing any new space transportation system. If we had RS-84, or something like it, it would change the game. We need to develop technologies for reliable and cheap access to orbit dammit, not gigantic White Elephants made of old tech, that is fitter for launching nuclear warheads than people.
Then there is the fact that they dropped landing, like the Russians have done for yonks, in favour of dropping into the ocean. What a retrograde step! If they couldn't make the stupid air bags light enough, they just needed to add retrorockets like the Russians. That capsule is too damn big anyway. They should shrink it into something that can fit an EELV.
Greek Ares is Roman Mars. As in Mars the Red Planet. In fact, the Ares V is big enough to send manned missions to Mars. Just don't tell anyone in congress though, or else they will get into a fit.
The N1 had several problems. Namely they did not do much testing. This was due to budget and time schedule pressures. The engines were very advanced, working at extreme pressures for their time and had teething problems (they were the first staged-combustion LOX/Kerosene engines ever made, the USA still has not made one native LOX/Kerosene engine even today, the only staged-combustion USA engine is the Space Shuttle Main Engine which uses the easier to get working LOX/Hydrogen combination). The engine designer was used to making aviation engines rather than rocket engines which did not help either. It took another iteration to get the engine working properly. So engines exploded a lot more than they should, setting off a chain reaction in the whole structure. Then manufacturing defects in piping meant it had catastrophic vibration issues, leading to broken pipes not to mention things like loose bolts due to shoddy quality control getting into the fuel intakes and so on. Last but not least, they decided midway along testing to completely change the control system with an analog computer which was bugged and took a long time in fixing. In short, each test flight was flying a completely different vehicle, making it hard to isolate and fix issues.
Compare that with SpaceX which did a separate 9 engine first stage testing with a full burn prior to launch and uses more advanced digital flight control systems and you see the problem is not quite the same. Heck, the Saturn I did not have any launch failures, and it used 8 first stage engines.
Check the launch success ratio of Boeing Delta III and then shut up. Even the alleged third success failed to insert the dummy payload in the proper orbit (20,600km instead of 26,000km orbit).
Elaborating a bit: Elon Musk said he would pledge upto $100 million of his personal fortune to SpaceX. This includes Falcon and Falcon 9 development. He also had some paying customers and an additional $30 million investment which he claims was only if there was a need for extra flights past the first three in case of cumulative failures.
Klite codec pack is not free (among other things they use the Real codec in a way that violates their EULA) and it sucks. CCCP is much better and entirely based on ffdshow.
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Expensive? If you are talking utility level power storage, pumped-storage is the most inexpensive per kWh stored. In fact, it is what is used now, because it is cheapest.
Batteries? If it is about photovoltaic panels, the energy can be stored using pumped-storage. If we are talking solar thermal, systems using molten salts for storage have been used.
PS: In short: electrics are more efficient and have lower emissions than ICE. The problem is the cost of the batteries, but that is expected to come down as electrics enter mass production. I expect the natural progression to be ICE -> hybrid -> electric. It may come to be a time when non-electrics will simply be banned from certain cities just because of air pollution concerns - it has been proved some time ago that tail pipe emissions are a cause for heart disease (namely stroke).
For example, you count losses, but forget all electric vehicles have regenerative breaking which reduces energy use in stop and start situations such as urban settings (which is where the pollution problem is more serious to begin with). You discount the fact that just the ICE engine has about the efficiency of the whole electric system from power plant to wheel you mentioned. The ICE vehicle will have additional losses as well: transmission losses and other engine losses due to not operating at the designed RPM, which a pure electric should not have, since the engine can be connected directly to the wheels. Then there is the fact that the energy mix is not pure coal or gas fired. I do not know where you live exactly, but in the state you mentioned, California, the electric energy mix is like this:
Net Electricity Generation California
Total Net Electricity Generation 17508 thousand MWh
Petroleum-Fired 9 thousand MWh
Natural Gas-Fired 10431 thousand MWh
Coal-Fired 194 thousand MWh
Nuclear 2606 thousand MWh
Hydroelectric 2033 thousand MWh
Other Renewables 1986 thousand MWh
Sure, on a pure economic sense presently a hybrid diesel is better at this moment in time. But theoretically that is not an invariant and there is more room for efficiency improvements in electrics than ICE (which is barred by the Carnot limit for a thermal engine operating at that temperature)
That is not very important since new generation batteries can be charged in 5 minutes. You just need a fast-charging network. Besides, with electrics you can slowly charge at home, something which you cannot do with a gasoline car. That reduces the need for fast-charging (in fact it may make it as uneconomic as public pay phones).
No it doesn't. Even a coal power plant can have efficiencies of 48%. Combined cycle natural gas power plants can have efficiencies of 60%. With Combined Heat and Power, even greater efficiencies are possible.
PS: What the heck is up with the conspiracy theories? People have tried to use ARM for desktops before and failed. Remember Netwinder? Why should Intel bother trying to sell for desktops something which cannot even run Windows XP? They invested in Atom for a reason.
XScale was NIH and known, at a time, as the fastest, yet most power hungry of the ARM compatible processors. That did not help a lot in a segment where power consumption was at a premium. Plus the market was saturated, and when ARM Cortex cores showed up it was knocked off the performance pedestal.
DivX is starting to support Matroska though. So probably all those DivX logo players you see in the market will support that container soon.
Geode was NIH and is low too poorly performing. So it was chopped, much like Intel chopped XScale from their lineups some time ago.
Nah, it is just that those of us who use Eclipse install it separately. It is quite easy to install anyway.
We'll see that when Ares is canceled.
The whole thing looks cool, especially the engines. The problem is I don't expect it to fly. Ever. Much like any of the other nice spaceplane projects (HOTOL, Black Horse, X-34, etc). They are too expensive and none will fund it. The risk is high, it takes long to produce results, it discourages investment. I've heard it can take 5 years to design a rocket engine alone, but these engines are way more complex. Still, my hat's off to you for even trying such a beast. They originally said jet engines weren't possible either, and some British guy tinkered enough to get one working, even if the government made little note of it at the time, so I guess it isn't impossible.
DC-XA had an Al-Li Oxygen tank and a composite LH2 tank. The think that fscked up X-33 was indeed the shape of the tank in combination with the composite material picked. It was heavier than using Al-Li in the first place.
If EELV reliability was that bad, why are they now using components from EELV (namely RS-68 engines) in Ares V? One Ares V uses more RS-68 engines than a Delta-4 Heavy would. So how come it has better reliability? Any person with a small notion of statistics would smell the bullshit.
Ares I is an abortion, and Ares V is being made without specific applications in mind. With the specs changing so often, I doubt either will ever fly.
Why, oh why, did NASA drop funding for SLI which was supposed to develop new generation staged combustion engines? Developing new engines is the first step in developing any new space transportation system. If we had RS-84, or something like it, it would change the game. We need to develop technologies for reliable and cheap access to orbit dammit, not gigantic White Elephants made of old tech, that is fitter for launching nuclear warheads than people.
Then there is the fact that they dropped landing, like the Russians have done for yonks, in favour of dropping into the ocean. What a retrograde step! If they couldn't make the stupid air bags light enough, they just needed to add retrorockets like the Russians. That capsule is too damn big anyway. They should shrink it into something that can fit an EELV.
Greek Ares is Roman Mars. As in Mars the Red Planet. In fact, the Ares V is big enough to send manned missions to Mars. Just don't tell anyone in congress though, or else they will get into a fit.
Compare that with SpaceX which did a separate 9 engine first stage testing with a full burn prior to launch and uses more advanced digital flight control systems and you see the problem is not quite the same. Heck, the Saturn I did not have any launch failures, and it used 8 first stage engines.
Try UFO: Aftermath by ALTAR Interactive.
If it proves to be as suported by the company as their EV-1 vehicle, nothing to write home about.
Uh, the government (actually the DoD) has paid for flights, so in a sense they actually funded SpaceX a bit.
Check the launch success ratio of Boeing Delta III and then shut up. Even the alleged third success failed to insert the dummy payload in the proper orbit (20,600km instead of 26,000km orbit).
Less than $100 million. Allegedly.
Elaborating a bit: Elon Musk said he would pledge upto $100 million of his personal fortune to SpaceX. This includes Falcon and Falcon 9 development. He also had some paying customers and an additional $30 million investment which he claims was only if there was a need for extra flights past the first three in case of cumulative failures.
Less than $100 million. Allegedly.
Klite codec pack is not free (among other things they use the Real codec in a way that violates their EULA) and it sucks. CCCP is much better and entirely based on ffdshow.