So this thing takes up 3D space to collect 2D air. Doesn't sound like anything that is going to scale up, it's going to top out at a pretty small size. Propeller efficiency is a very well studied field and this certainly isn't a top performer.
Way back Intel took some architectural advice from the old Burroughs mainframes, and put into the 286 chip 4096 special segments, where each segment had its own base and length limits. Smart compilers could be written to allocate a separate segment for each struct or array, as could malloc(), automatically preventing buffer overflows with only minor hardware overhead. Unfortunately the protect mode on the 286 was hard to get into and out of, and 4096 segments was just too few for comfort, and yo'd have to rewrite DOS and Windows a fair amount to work in that mode, and it didn't integrate well with existing real-mode code, so it never really caught on. So we abandoned safety 30+ years ago and never looked back.
Someone forgot to mention in the lede, any electrolytic process is going to use scads of electricity, just like aluminum refining, and places with iron ore are like down by the seashore, where there is little or no cheap hydro power available. So you're going to have to build HUGE solar or middling nuke plants to refine steel this way. And price is still going to be an issue, as steel at aluminum prices isn't going to fly, not by a factor of 5 or worse,
The complaints are not unlike the air traffic controller's complaints about IBM's computer system, on which billions had been spent. Nobody thought to consult the end-users. When they were shown the prototype, they just said "Nope, those planes are coming at me at 500MPH, I don't have the time to fill out all those fields".
Minor correction: A modem chip takes in digital data and converts it to a serial analog baseband data stream. Then a RF mixer up-converts the baseband analog spectrum up to RF frequencies, in this case REALLY high analog RF frequencies, like six times higher than a typical CPU clock rate. It's a bit of a stretch to call something that puts out 39GHz a "modem" chip.
It was pretty much figured out centuries ago that trade is a good thing. Otherwise we would be paying $$ for each lousy Made In the USA banana or avocado and Boeing planes would likely cost 50% more and not be so fuel-efficient.
The big wheel of forgetting turns surely, if slowly. Plenty of countries have sunk bill-bucks into sodium reactors, and they all decided, nope, too unreliable, too risky, too radioactive, bye, Felicia. From Fermi 1, through the Soviet Alphas and others, through Japan, and I forget who else. They seem attractive at first, with their low pressures and high outlet temps but then the enthusiasm falls quickly with sodium leaks, sodium fires, and radioactivity. One can hope a new generation will learn from and surpass the old, but I'm not buying any stock.
They forgot I think to think about the trivial countermeasures, like lining the suitcases with aluminum foil, or using aluminum suitcases, or putting absorbent ferrite sheets in instead. You can't see what doesn't reflect or reflects all or absorbs a lot.
Even with numbered runways, the occasinal pilot still goofs things up. They're supposed to check their compass against the runway numbers when they're at the takeoff point. Even so, one pilot long ago had his compass set not SIX degrees of magnetic variation, but SIXTY. Instead of landing in London they ended up running out of gas over the Sahara. Another time, a cargo plane took off in the 180 direction from Marseilles, and they crashed into a tall hill miles away.
Least impressively, it will take a cheap human out of the decision loop, making it more likely that the wrong decision will be made by some possibly buggy software, like, say the $400 million Ariane blowup of yore.
Sorry, but your basic physics and biology make this idea a no-go. Re biology, it takes just milliwatts per square centimeter to cause cataracts. Most remote-power uses require a lot more than a few milliwatts per square cm of receiving antenna. Regarding the physics, you need area to capture power and the power goes down as the square of the distance. Those two main issues combined mean you can't send much power more than a few inches.
As the story goes, German-born rocket guru Werner Von Braun asked his ( mostly-german) rocket engineers whether the Saturn 5 was going to meet it's 99.999% reliability goal, and they said down the line "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
Actually, it did really well, with 13 successful or at least survivable launches.
Now with Elon's 9 engines, again it's time to ask, and even more so, the likely answer is "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
The narrative and conclusions are a big dodgy. Everybody knew beforehand that batteries can jump in immediately to supply power. And the batteries did not stop a complete collapse, electrical networks are thoroughly analyzed and simulated and braced against major consequences if any one unit trips out. Major outages are quite rare over the decades, and all done without a single battery. Gas turbines can come on-line within 60 seconds and other interconnected plants often have enough reserve capacity to tide over small outages. Batteries are welcome as an immediate source, but they are still awfully expensive and awfully small in GWH.
You know how on CSI they can zoom in on a 640x480 video camera and see the filed-off serial number on a gun? Sending lots of information over an AC power line is like that. There are many basic electromagnetic hurdles, many of them quite intractable. You have the issues of bandwidth over bare wires, bandwith through transformers, all the noise-supression capacitors across the power line, line noise from light-dimmers, fluourescent tubes, dozens of nearby switching-mode power supplies, lightning, salt on power-line insulators, corona on high-voltage lines, power-factor-compensated switching-mode power supplies that switch all through the AC cycle, LED lamps, streetlights, light-switches, brushed and brushless electric motors, illegal transmission and interference with amateur, land-mobile, radio-telescope and CB, and more.
Hey, some of us old-timers used to sneakily buy copies of Playboy or Oui. Those cost like $10 in today's money each. And the environmental costs of 200 pages of glossy paper and ink (about 1.5 pounds ) is a whole lot more than the 0.0014 kilograms of CO2 used to run an iPad for 20 minutes.
Hmm, I wonder why no-one has mentioned the need for space suits. The military, even in time of war, requires U-2 pilots to wear full space suits. One baseball sized hole in the capsule and everybody is soon dead. It doesn't sound economical or practical to outfit each passenger in a full spacesuit. Also, you wanna wear a spacesuit someone just got out of?
Google Maps says that if he leaves right now, the trip from his HQ to LA airport takes 12 to 16 minutes, by road. Going by his tunnel, maybe half that, if the car elevators at each end are really quick or if he leaves his cars pre-positioned at the tunnel level. If we assume he uses the tunnel twice a week, say 100 times a year, for the next 10 years, that's 2,000 trips, or about 14,000 minutes, or about 200 hours. If he can built it at 1/20th the cost per mile of the chunnel, that would be right around $1 billion. So it's going to cost him $5 million dollars for every saved hour. Is Elon's time worth $5 million an hour? Oh, he's going to open the tunnel to general use? How many cars an hour can the elevators position? Even if you figure one car per minute, that's still a very underutilized and uneconomical tunnel!
We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of previous generations, it seems. The Hindenburg, the best of German engineering, needed special mooring masts, could not survive and had to evade rough weather, and overall had a horrible safety record, around a thousand times worse than modern planes.
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So this thing takes up 3D space to collect 2D air. Doesn't sound like anything that is going to scale up, it's going to top out at a pretty small size. Propeller efficiency is a very well studied field and this certainly isn't a top performer.
Way back Intel took some architectural advice from the old Burroughs mainframes, and put into the 286 chip 4096 special segments, where each segment had its own base and length limits. Smart compilers could be written to allocate a separate segment for each struct or array, as could malloc(), automatically preventing buffer overflows with only minor hardware overhead. Unfortunately the protect mode on the 286 was hard to get into and out of, and 4096 segments was just too few for comfort, and yo'd have to rewrite DOS and Windows a fair amount to work in that mode, and it didn't integrate well with existing real-mode code, so it never really caught on. So we abandoned safety 30+ years ago and never looked back.
.... or you send more than one bit per wire, with like four voltage levels, as already done by some pin-limited chips.
Far too many postulates! And ridiculous/meaningless ones at that.
Someone forgot to mention in the lede, any electrolytic process is going to use scads of electricity, just like aluminum refining, and places with iron ore are like down by the seashore, where there is little or no cheap hydro power available. So you're going to have to build HUGE solar or middling nuke plants to refine steel this way. And price is still going to be an issue, as steel at aluminum prices isn't going to fly, not by a factor of 5 or worse,
The complaints are not unlike the air traffic controller's complaints about IBM's computer system, on which billions had been spent. Nobody thought to consult the end-users. When they were shown the prototype, they just said "Nope, those planes are coming at me at 500MPH, I don't have the time to fill out all those fields".
Minor correction: A modem chip takes in digital data and converts it to a serial analog baseband data stream. Then a RF mixer up-converts the baseband analog spectrum up to RF frequencies, in this case REALLY high analog RF frequencies, like six times higher than a typical CPU clock rate. It's a bit of a stretch to call something that puts out 39GHz a "modem" chip.
It was pretty much figured out centuries ago that trade is a good thing. Otherwise we would be paying $$ for each lousy Made In the USA banana or avocado and Boeing planes would likely cost 50% more and not be so fuel-efficient.
The Chinese don't really need to grab anything, they own many Airbus and Boeing planes with those engines.
Back in the 1960's they bought a few British passenger planes and made literally Chinese copies of the engines just fine.
The big wheel of forgetting turns surely, if slowly. Plenty of countries have sunk bill-bucks into sodium reactors, and they all decided, nope, too unreliable, too risky, too radioactive, bye, Felicia. From Fermi 1, through the Soviet Alphas and others, through Japan, and I forget who else. They seem attractive at first, with their low pressures and high outlet temps but then the enthusiasm falls quickly with sodium leaks, sodium fires, and radioactivity. One can hope a new generation will learn from and surpass the old, but I'm not buying any stock.
They forgot I think to think about the trivial countermeasures, like lining the suitcases with aluminum foil, or using aluminum suitcases, or putting absorbent ferrite sheets in instead. You can't see what doesn't reflect or reflects all or absorbs a lot.
Even with numbered runways, the occasinal pilot still goofs things up. They're supposed to check their compass against the runway numbers when they're at the takeoff point. Even so, one pilot long ago had his compass set not SIX degrees of magnetic variation, but SIXTY. Instead of landing in London they ended up running out of gas over the Sahara. Another time, a cargo plane took off in the 180 direction from Marseilles, and they crashed into a tall hill miles away.
Least impressively, it will take a cheap human out of the decision loop, making it more likely that the wrong decision will be made by some possibly buggy software, like, say the $400 million Ariane blowup of yore.
Sorry, but your basic physics and biology make this idea a no-go. Re biology, it takes just milliwatts per square centimeter to cause cataracts. Most remote-power uses require a lot more than a few milliwatts per square cm of receiving antenna. Regarding the physics, you need area to capture power and the power goes down as the square of the distance. Those two main issues combined mean you can't send much power more than a few inches.
As the story goes, German-born rocket guru Werner Von Braun asked his ( mostly-german) rocket engineers whether the Saturn 5 was going to meet it's 99.999% reliability goal, and they said down the line "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
Actually, it did really well, with 13 successful or at least survivable launches.
Now with Elon's 9 engines, again it's time to ask, and even more so, the likely answer is "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
The narrative and conclusions are a big dodgy. Everybody knew beforehand that batteries can jump in immediately to supply power. And the batteries did not stop a complete collapse, electrical networks are thoroughly analyzed and simulated and braced against major consequences if any one unit trips out. Major outages are quite rare over the decades, and all done without a single battery. Gas turbines can come on-line within 60 seconds and other interconnected plants often have enough reserve capacity to tide over small outages. Batteries are welcome as an immediate source, but they are still awfully expensive and awfully small in GWH.
We have very good information on EXACTLY how much they drank, so we don't need very indirect info, like the size of wine glasses that have survived.
We have real info from things like George Washington's expense account, the manifests for ships, etc.
You know how on CSI they can zoom in on a 640x480 video camera and see the filed-off serial number on a gun? Sending lots of information over an AC power line is like that. There are many basic electromagnetic hurdles, many of them quite intractable. You have the issues of bandwidth over bare wires, bandwith through transformers, all the noise-supression capacitors across the power line, line noise from light-dimmers, fluourescent tubes, dozens of nearby switching-mode power supplies, lightning, salt on power-line insulators, corona on high-voltage lines, power-factor-compensated switching-mode power supplies that switch all through the AC cycle, LED lamps, streetlights, light-switches, brushed and brushless electric motors, illegal transmission and interference with amateur, land-mobile, radio-telescope and CB, and more.
Hey, some of us old-timers used to sneakily buy copies of Playboy or Oui. Those cost like $10 in today's money each. And the environmental costs of 200 pages of glossy paper and ink (about 1.5 pounds ) is a whole lot more than the 0.0014 kilograms of CO2 used to run an iPad for 20 minutes.
... and after the rise you can cashout of BitCoin and invest in tulip bulbs....
If each engine is x% reliable against kabooming the whole mess, then the chances of success are:
% Chance of success
99 76%
98 57%
97 43%
96 33%
95 25%
There is a rather dismal history on many-engine rockets. The USSR's attempt at that failed rather miserably.
Hmm, I wonder why no-one has mentioned the need for space suits. The military, even in time of war, requires U-2 pilots to wear full space suits. One baseball sized hole in the capsule and everybody is soon dead. It doesn't sound economical or practical to outfit each passenger in a full spacesuit. Also, you wanna wear a spacesuit someone just got out of?
Google Maps says that if he leaves right now, the trip from his HQ to LA airport takes 12 to 16 minutes, by road. Going by his tunnel, maybe half that, if the car elevators at each end are really quick or if he leaves his cars pre-positioned at the tunnel level. If we assume he uses the tunnel twice a week, say 100 times a year, for the next 10 years, that's 2,000 trips, or about 14,000 minutes, or about 200 hours. If he can built it at 1/20th the cost per mile of the chunnel, that would be right around $1 billion. So it's going to cost him $5 million dollars for every saved hour. Is Elon's time worth $5 million an hour? Oh, he's going to open the tunnel to general use? How many cars an hour can the elevators position? Even if you figure one car per minute, that's still a very underutilized and uneconomical tunnel!
We are doomed to repeat the same mistakes of previous generations, it seems. The Hindenburg, the best of German engineering, needed special mooring masts, could not survive and had to evade rough weather, and overall had a horrible safety record, around a thousand times worse than modern planes.
With Trump's limited vocabulary, how many bits do we need to represent every word to make a nice compact dictionary? 8? 9? Fewer?