Kinda silly, but let's do the math. We will assume you can build and loft the required equipment for the stated price.
A satellite at 300 miles up is going to be overhead for maybe 10 minutes. Let's assume as in TFA it will send down a megawatt during that time. So on the average it's beaming down 166 kilowatts. A kilowatt-hour might cost as much as 20 cents on an island, so this satellite gives them about $34 per hour.
Now if they went to the UN Bank to borrow the $800 million, they might get an interest rate of 8%. The first year, the interest cost alone is $64 million. The satellite has beamed back 24 * 366 * $34 or a tad under $300,000. This plan can't pay back even 1/200th of the cost of money.
It takes a whole lot more than one prototype and a short video to make a usable car. For example:
A real car needs to have a *suspension*. So it can go over bumps and potholes without jarring the passengers against the roof or breaking a wheel. This car seems to have a very limited travel suspension.
A real car needs to be able to go in a straight line without constant driver corrections. Center-rear wheel drive cars are not very directionally stable.
A real car needs to have heating and cooling systems for the passenger area. Cooling alone will use up several horsepower and wreck the supposed "300mpg" economy.
A real car is unlikely to run very long or far with a toothed-belt drive to the rear wheel. One road pebble will gum up the works.
A real car will probably need a transmission to be usable in the hills and on the freeways.
A real car needs to have some clearance between the "fenders" and the tires, so it can go in snow.
>Utter nonsense. There are nuclear-powered wristwatches.
Um, a wristwatch needs microwatts. And it's not a reactor in there, it's either a beta-emitter or a heat-emitting bit of radioactive waste.
> The nuclear-powered pacemaker, which was safe enough to IMPLANT IN PEOPLE'S CHESTS, has been around for 40 years.
Again, we're talking low milliwatts, derived from radioactive decay, not kilowatts from a chain reaction.
>Yes, they require relatively expensive fuel.
No, they don't. Hot short-lived isotopes exist by the ton, in Hanford's storage tanks, and they'll PAY YOU to take some away.
> Weighed against it's power density and longevity, enriched uranium is fairly cheap.
WTF? We're talking here about highly enriched uranium, which would sell, if it were for sale, for much more than the $95/lb of LEU. And nobody's going to sell you HEU, it's bomb material.
>Plutonium, like they used in the pacemakers, *IS* quite expensive.
Um, no. It currently is in great oversupply. There are about 800 tons of it in storage around the world, and exactly zero demand. It cost trillions to make, and it's now worthless to anybody other than terrrorists.
> You can make a nuclear power system that as easy to use as a AA battery.
We're not talking about AA battery amounts of power. We're talking kilowatts, which requires a chain reaction, and in a small space, that requires HEU, expensive, and a bomb maker's dream.
>If nuclear power plants are such great targets, why aren't the Chechens attacking them NOW?
Maybe because they're guarded, and the fissile materials are behind a meter of concrete?
Hmm, yet another mostly ridiculous article, if you know anything about nuclear technology.
Reactors don't scale down very well. The surface area (through which you lose neutrons) goes down slower than the volume (which creates the neutrons). Anything below a Fermi-1 size reactor, you need enriched uranium ($$$$$$). For a car-sized reactor, you need highly enriched uranium ($$$$$$$$$$$). That's not only expensive as heck, but a bomb-maker's dream. LIthium as a reflector helps some, but not al that much, and has its downside too.
A few small reactors have been made. One scaled-down model for the NR-1 submarine cost about $60 million, and puts out almost 80 horsepower. Another scaled down one, for the Artic, called the SL-1, cost a bit less, but did not last very long, even with continuous maintenance, and finally blew up real good, (probably due to a careless Joe).
You need at least a couple skilled engineers, not to mention a few guards, to deploy a power station. Not exactly economical for a power plant that only makes a few dollars per hour of electricity.
A small reactor, especially one without a thick containment, is going to be easy pickings for terrorists. A thick containment dome is surprisingly expensive, making the alleged cheapness of the basic reactor quite irrelevant.
Technologies like "Pebble bed" and "intrinsically safe" reactors have been the stuff of Popular Science magazine for decades now. Not likely any of them will get built any time soon, for many very good reasons.
Somebody goofed. There is no way that they've been using an IBM 650 anytime in the last three decades. A 650 requires a full-time "customer engineer" to minister to its hundreds of type 5965 vacuum tubes and 2D21 thyratrons. I don't know the exact date, but I suspect IBM dropped support for the 650 sometime around 1966. Without IBM support for parts and service the 650 was unlikely to run for more than a week.
As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.
There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.
If the ship travels as is mentioned, it's traveling in a triangle. I'm assuming the winds don't follow the ship's path, so it's only likely to have the wind blowing in roughly the right direction about 1/3 of the time. So that's a factor of 3.
Then winds do not always blow at top speed. In fact, to be useful at all with this kite/sail, the wind has to average considerably faster than the forward speed of the ship!
I'm being somewhat generous in estimating that only HALF of the time can you expect the wind to be not only blowing int he right direction, but also blowing considerably faster than the ship.
Touching, that in this cynical era there are still some hardy Pollyannas with indominable faith-- that think big bizness makes rational decisions based on facts. Never mind the $4 trillion Internet Bubble, AOL/Time Warner, Enron, Edsel, Segway, etc... I'm going all gooey and verklempt, I swear.
I assume the 20% savings ($1,600/day) is when the wind is blowing good, and in the right direction.
Just on general principles, that's going to happen about 1/3 the time times maybe 1/2 the time.
So actual savings are going to be around 3% ($266/day)
That's about $78,000 per year. Barely enough to pay for one employee to manage the kite. Nothing left over to pay the interest ($60,000), or pay off the principal (another $75K over 10 years).
>So it looks like the do actually have something to say about what a device produces. Who would've thought?
Sigh. Let me go through this one step at a time.
A device that uses this band may not cause "harmful interference". Well, that's not quite correct or complete. If you have X of these devices sharing the same frequencies, they WILL cause harmful interference, even if they're sticking to their emission limits.
And that's not limited to just this one device type-- they all basically share the same band, so there is a great likelyhood that my $19 Target VTech phone will end up trying to use the same frequency as an XBox controller. Both devices are playing by the rules, but the rules are insufficient to prevent interference.
>Running a cost:benefit analysis on problems is a really stupid way to design something. Especially an airplane.
I specifically stated the obvious : "Sorted by frequency and severity"
>P.S. I'd like to know how you plan on safely plumbing jet engine exhaust from a jumbo airliner into the gas tanks. Hint: planes are not ships.
I'm not an Aeronautical Engineer, but one might surmise that a 13/8 inch pipe off the combustion chamber, looped around the engine a few times to cool the gases off, and running to the gas tanks, might be sufficient. We're talking about ~400PSI, so it doesn't take a very wide pipe to convey a lot of gas. And you only need enough gas to make up for the fuel level going down, which is only a bout a liter per second.
(1) Tolerate interference from other devices.
(2).... something else that I forget....
You see, the FCC does not want to have to certify that each and every $3 wireless mouse keeps its emissions within 0.2 KHz of 945.343 MHz at a field strength of no more than 330 microvolts / meter.
Exploding gas tanks are very low on the list of problems, sorted by frequency and severity. If we spend money on these less severe problems, we're taking money away from figting more serious and cost-effectively attakcable problems.
The problem is having explosive mixtures in gas tanks. Rather easily solved by plumbing a little engine exhaust gas into the tanks to displace the oxygen. Done for decades on tanker ships.
The typical sensors in airplane tanks are capacitive dielectric guages. These can easily be made to run on microwatts of signal, not enough to cause ignition.
Even if the sensors were a problem, which they're not, and you replaced them all with some new method, you'd still have all the other sources of ignition, including sulfur chemical catalsys, static discharges, lightning, friction, and more. You need to make the stuff non-explosive or ignitable, see point #1.
>As I understand it, the majority of fuel consumed in a scramjet is the air itself. The rest is a small amount of hydrogen or other catalyst.
Ah, no, air is not a fuel. You have to carry fuel. And lots of it.
>Now imagine a solar/electrolysis/hydrogen/scramjet....
Imagine if you wish. But the numbers don't look good. If you had a plane with 1000 square meters of solar cells, you're going to get about 20% converted to electricity, then electrolysis gives you about 20% of that as Hydrogen, and that gets converted to thrust at about 35% efficiency. Do we have about 1400 horsepower times 20% times 20% times 35%, or about 19 horsepower. You're going to need about 40,000 times that much to run a plane at Mach 5.
Then there's the small matter of flying at night:)
A structure that can hold all the required fuel, and still have low drag.
As far as I know, if you want to go above Mach 2.X, you have to switch to titanium alloys as aluminum softens at about that amount of friction. Mucho $$$ and much bother in construction and maintenance.
Also scramjet engines tend to burn out really quickly-- the temperatures you need in there are beyond the ability of most metals, at least for longevity.
There's a heck of a safety issue too-- scramjets can flame-out and are not easily restarted.
It's also a challenge to stuff as much fuel as you need into a low-drag airframe. You need long range as there's no point in short hops when it's going to take many kilomiles to get up to speed and altitude. But people don't like cramped cabins, so you need more fuel to allow a bigger fuselage.
Also it's going to be hard to find people willing to pay maybe 15 times the usual amount to get there a few hours faster.
So we're spending millions to put up a weapon system of dubious effectiveness, good only for setting small fires. Don't we have good-ol magnesium bombs that cost 1/1000th as much and work even through clouds, rain, and smoke?
And call me an idealist, but isn't it more likely we'd get the natives cooperation a whole lot easier and cheaper if we dropped like food and medicine and maybe a well-drilling kit?
There are still a few stages in the receiving chain that have to be analog.
In particular the first few stages of input filtering, RF amplification, and mixing all HAVE to be analog, and delicate, tricky analog at that.
Someday we may have 5Gig sample/second 32-bit floating-point A/D converters with microvolt sensitivity, but until then radio receivers can't be quite as flexible as the term "software defined radio" implies.
This looks like yet another fairy-tale concept looking for funding.
If you make just a few generous assumptions about wave heights, strength of materials, corrosion, and construction costs, the numbers are really dismal. Let's assume you have a 100-ton buoy rising and falling with the waves, averaging twenty foot waves 8 hrs a day, one wave every ten seconds. Note, that's quite optimistic. Assume (low) construction costs of $1,800 per ton.
I get a net generation of $36K of power per year and costs of $34K per year. That's assuming everything goes well, which it never does.
Too bad they don't have a physicist on the team to inform them of the basic and irreducible problems of scale. In that arena surface tension dwarfs any mechanical device that can be forseen.
And nature has built millions of models of nanorobots although their time-to-market has been less than exemplary.
Perhaps there would be less frivolous legislation proposed if the bill drafters would maybe compare their bill against the US Constitution. There seems to be a rather basic conflict between confiscation of property and the "due process" clause of the Constitution.
Not to mention that other countries tend to have laws and Constitutions and claims of sovreignity over their land and inhabitants.
Just a little advance reading could spare a us a whole lot of floundering and discussion.
I vaguely recall from several decades ago that earthquake researchers have been using this same method now for a couple decades.
So this may not be all that new a discovery.
Have someone light up one of those nasty Russian cigarettes while somebody outside looks for puffs of smoke.
If the hole is actually about 2m in estimated size, something about the consistency of pancake syrup should plug it quite nicely. A fine aerosol of Aunt Jemima in the general area should get sucked into the hole within an hour or so. Cleaning up the rest is left as an exercise to the occupants.
Maglev doesnt seem to have much to offer in the wind turbine arena. Plain old ball bearings have very low friction, not much can be gained by lowering the friction to zero.
And what's the deal with "1000 times the power"? The power is proportional to the swept area, so you'd need a windmill 33 times bigger. And its weight would go up as the cube of 33, which wul dbe mighty unweildly.
Sorry, I slipped the decimal point one place. The plant might make $400 an hour when it's running.
Nuclear plants are very poor at following changes in load, due to xenon poisoning and thermal stress issues, so you don't get to charge peaking power rates.
And the record for "revolutionary" nuclear plant designs isn't good, in fact it's horrible. Fermi melted down, Fort Vrain cracked, the US breeders never got running, and the Swiss nuke in the mountain burst its pipes. I would not invest my retirement money on any new nuke designs.
While the reactor core may be "the size of a hot tub", the shielding, piping, pumps, containment, and control equipment needed will be hundreds of times larger in mass and volume.
Small reactors are very inefficient and uneconomical. The smaller the reactor, the more enriched the Uranium required. A 25 megawatt thermal reactor might put out 8 megawatts electrical, that's $40 an hour of electricity. That will not pay one hundredth the running and maintenance costs or one thousandth the cost of interest. Financially incredible.
Any running reactor needs to be monitored and guarded. You don't want any bad guys stealing the Uranium or Plutonium.
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Now if they went to the UN Bank to borrow the $800 million, they might get an interest rate of 8%. The first year, the interest cost alone is $64 million. The satellite has beamed back 24 * 366 * $34 or a tad under $300,000. This plan can't pay back even 1/200th of the cost of money.
Um, a wristwatch needs microwatts. And it's not a reactor in there, it's either a beta-emitter or a heat-emitting bit of radioactive waste.
> The nuclear-powered pacemaker, which was safe enough to IMPLANT IN PEOPLE'S CHESTS, has been around for 40 years.
Again, we're talking low milliwatts, derived from radioactive decay, not kilowatts from a chain reaction.
>Yes, they require relatively expensive fuel.
No, they don't. Hot short-lived isotopes exist by the ton, in Hanford's storage tanks, and they'll PAY YOU to take some away.
> Weighed against it's power density and longevity, enriched uranium is fairly cheap.
WTF? We're talking here about highly enriched uranium, which would sell, if it were for sale, for much more than the $95/lb of LEU. And nobody's going to sell you HEU, it's bomb material.
>Plutonium, like they used in the pacemakers, *IS* quite expensive.
Um, no. It currently is in great oversupply. There are about 800 tons of it in storage around the world, and exactly zero demand. It cost trillions to make, and it's now worthless to anybody other than terrrorists.
> You can make a nuclear power system that as easy to use as a AA battery.
We're not talking about AA battery amounts of power. We're talking kilowatts, which requires a chain reaction, and in a small space, that requires HEU, expensive, and a bomb maker's dream.
>If nuclear power plants are such great targets, why aren't the Chechens attacking them NOW?
Maybe because they're guarded, and the fissile materials are behind a meter of concrete?
One survey found something like:
As for applications, there's no way they ran anything mentioned in the article on the 650. All those apps require megabytes of memory and mass storage, the 650 had less than a thousandth of that.
There's only the most tenuous of connections between whatever was retired and the 650.
Then winds do not always blow at top speed. In fact, to be useful at all with this kite/sail, the wind has to average considerably faster than the forward speed of the ship!
I'm being somewhat generous in estimating that only HALF of the time can you expect the wind to be not only blowing int he right direction, but also blowing considerably faster than the ship.
So that's another factor of 2.
Touching, that in this cynical era there are still some hardy Pollyannas with indominable faith-- that think big bizness makes rational decisions based on facts. Never mind the $4 trillion Internet Bubble, AOL/Time Warner, Enron, Edsel, Segway, etc... I'm going all gooey and verklempt, I swear.
Just on general principles, that's going to happen about 1/3 the time times maybe 1/2 the time. So actual savings are going to be around 3% ($266/day) That's about $78,000 per year. Barely enough to pay for one employee to manage the kite. Nothing left over to pay the interest ($60,000), or pay off the principal (another $75K over 10 years).
Sigh. Let me go through this one step at a time.
A device that uses this band may not cause "harmful interference". Well, that's not quite correct or complete. If you have X of these devices sharing the same frequencies, they WILL cause harmful interference, even if they're sticking to their emission limits.
And that's not limited to just this one device type-- they all basically share the same band, so there is a great likelyhood that my $19 Target VTech phone will end up trying to use the same frequency as an XBox controller. Both devices are playing by the rules, but the rules are insufficient to prevent interference.
I specifically stated the obvious : "Sorted by frequency and severity"
>P.S. I'd like to know how you plan on safely plumbing jet engine exhaust from a jumbo airliner into the gas tanks. Hint: planes are not ships.
I'm not an Aeronautical Engineer, but one might surmise that a 13/8 inch pipe off the combustion chamber, looped around the engine a few times to cool the gases off, and running to the gas tanks, might be sufficient. We're talking about ~400PSI, so it doesn't take a very wide pipe to convey a lot of gas. And you only need enough gas to make up for the fuel level going down, which is only a bout a liter per second.
Something along the lines of:
(1) Tolerate interference from other devices. (2) .... something else that I forget....
You see, the FCC does not want to have to certify that each and every $3 wireless mouse keeps its emissions within 0.2 KHz of 945.343 MHz at a field strength of no more than 330 microvolts / meter.
Welcome to the Republican Spectrum of the Future.
Ah, no, air is not a fuel. You have to carry fuel. And lots of it.
>Now imagine a solar/electrolysis/hydrogen/scramjet ....
Imagine if you wish. But the numbers don't look good. If you had a plane with 1000 square meters of solar cells, you're going to get about 20% converted to electricity, then electrolysis gives you about 20% of that as Hydrogen, and that gets converted to thrust at about 35% efficiency. Do we have about 1400 horsepower times 20% times 20% times 35%, or about 19 horsepower. You're going to need about 40,000 times that much to run a plane at Mach 5.
Then there's the small matter of flying at night :)
- A need to go that fast.
- An economic way to pay for it.
- A structure that can tolerate the heat.
- Engines that can run for a long time.
- A structure that can hold all the required fuel, and still have low drag.
As far as I know, if you want to go above Mach 2.X, you have to switch to titanium alloys as aluminum softens at about that amount of friction. Mucho $$$ and much bother in construction and maintenance.Also scramjet engines tend to burn out really quickly-- the temperatures you need in there are beyond the ability of most metals, at least for longevity.
There's a heck of a safety issue too-- scramjets can flame-out and are not easily restarted.
It's also a challenge to stuff as much fuel as you need into a low-drag airframe. You need long range as there's no point in short hops when it's going to take many kilomiles to get up to speed and altitude. But people don't like cramped cabins, so you need more fuel to allow a bigger fuselage.
Also it's going to be hard to find people willing to pay maybe 15 times the usual amount to get there a few hours faster.
And call me an idealist, but isn't it more likely we'd get the natives cooperation a whole lot easier and cheaper if we dropped like food and medicine and maybe a well-drilling kit?
There are still a few stages in the receiving chain that have to be analog.
In particular the first few stages of input filtering, RF amplification, and mixing all HAVE to be analog, and delicate, tricky analog at that.
Someday we may have 5Gig sample/second 32-bit floating-point A/D converters with microvolt sensitivity, but until then radio receivers can't be quite as flexible as the term "software defined radio" implies.
If you make just a few generous assumptions about wave heights, strength of materials, corrosion, and construction costs, the numbers are really dismal. Let's assume you have a 100-ton buoy rising and falling with the waves, averaging twenty foot waves 8 hrs a day, one wave every ten seconds. Note, that's quite optimistic. Assume (low) construction costs of $1,800 per ton.
I get a net generation of $36K of power per year and costs of $34K per year. That's assuming everything goes well, which it never does.
Too bad they don't have a physicist on the team to inform them of the basic and irreducible problems of scale. In that arena surface tension dwarfs any mechanical device that can be forseen. And nature has built millions of models of nanorobots although their time-to-market has been less than exemplary.
Not to mention that other countries tend to have laws and Constitutions and claims of sovreignity over their land and inhabitants.
Just a little advance reading could spare a us a whole lot of floundering and discussion.
I vaguely recall from several decades ago that earthquake researchers have been using this same method now for a couple decades. So this may not be all that new a discovery.
And what's the deal with "1000 times the power"? The power is proportional to the swept area, so you'd need a windmill 33 times bigger. And its weight would go up as the cube of 33, which wul dbe mighty unweildly.
Sorry, I slipped the decimal point one place. The plant might make $400 an hour when it's running. Nuclear plants are very poor at following changes in load, due to xenon poisoning and thermal stress issues, so you don't get to charge peaking power rates. And the record for "revolutionary" nuclear plant designs isn't good, in fact it's horrible. Fermi melted down, Fort Vrain cracked, the US breeders never got running, and the Swiss nuke in the mountain burst its pipes. I would not invest my retirement money on any new nuke designs.