The Electric Car Version seems to be made of 10 cells with 2.4 volts each. One such set will weigh 2 kg (4.4 Pounds) and contain only about 100Wh (360kJ) of energy. This is half to a third of what a Li-Ion battery is capable of at the same weight. For a Car using 30 kW of energy (Highway speeds in an economical car) to drive for two hours you would need more than 1200 kg (2600 pounds) of battery, the "more than" comes from the fact that you can't deep-draw these kinds of battery.
A generic Li-Ion Camera battery can hold about 150Wh per kg (300Wh in a 2 kg package). It may take a long time to recharge and be a firehazard but you will get a lot more distance out of it.
The only positives in this new Battery Cell is charge time and battery life.
Those plans of freezing the CO2 and launching it into space could be used to make Mars a more livable place.
I read somewhere that it would take an awful lot of gas to make a 1 bar atmosphere on mars due to its lower mass. So if we use something like a space elevator cable to dip into Venuses atmosphere and draw of the excess CO2, then freeze it in orbit and send it to crash into Mars we might at least make Mars habitable in a couple of centuries.
It would both help make working on the surface less risky (no spacesuit required, only a facemask) and probably raise the mean temperature somewhat due to the greenhouse effect.
WRONG. The chance that a chemical rocket will explode or fail to start is significantly higher than the chance of the probe seeing a threat and having the time to change the vector enough to matter.
The biggest problem with electrical thrusters is the fact that it takes ages to get a usable vectorchange, but that has more to do with the time it spends on it than any "emergency" manouvers it might have to do. The positive aspects of these engines are the weight saved on fuel and the fact that a small thrust/high impulse applied over a year gives a higher final velocity than a large thrust/small impulse aplied over a few minutes. Impulse is determined by the velocity of the gas exiting the thruster. I think it was described as "how long a pound of propelant can sustain a pound of thrust", the larger the number the better.
Ok, don't know anything about EPA and NYC air during 9/11 but one thing caught my atention, the comment "could have worn masks". Is there a way of filtering out particles small enough to be called NANO particles? Standard facemasks (as seen on Michael Jacksson and Japanese street walkers), to my knowlegde, aren't rated to catch partkles that small (at least the masks we used last summer at my job weren't).
I'm not going to touch that first part but the rest i feel I have to say something about.
It's not what the US HAS done it's what it MIGHT do.
The US right now is looking more and more of going straight to (a VERY warm place) and fast, the internet is kind of important to alot of people other than those in the US (more so looking at broadband growth) and we don't want some future Napoleon (american version) holding us all by the balls to get us to go along with his/her plans.
Didn't it say in the article that the pack forced the wearer to walk more efficiently and thus getting a normal metabolic draw.
Also, someone mentioned how hard it would be to lugg around an extra 50 pounds just to get power. Think instead of people who, right now, already cary 50+ pounds in a packpack (say a soldier on march), this would give them an extra benefit without having to cary much extra weight.
I think they're going to make loads of money on this... Say that each of these processors sit in an individual blade, each blade costing between $3-4000. If this blade gets hired more than 10 hours/day you will probably get the money you invested back inside a year.
Even if the processor isn't used that much you will make money off of it since a Sun machine is good for years and years of continuous operation (we have a couple of dozen at school) you have the time to make that money.
It would however stop you from doing anything. Put this device behind the ear of people with a history of violence and a restraining order against them, when they get to close a transmitter will activate it and the offender takes a walk in another direction.
Newsflash, Russian rocket engines are more efficient than Western engines. The russians perfected a closed cycle engine (the RD180 is a more recent example) decades ago that still astonishes western scientist because they thought the technology was "to dangerous" to develop.
One of the reasons that America beat the Russians to the moon was that the russians where developing this new engine while trying to get a mission sent to the moon. Since the Russians couldn't build the enormous open-cycle enginees used in the Saturn 5 they had to develop more efficient but smaller engines, they managed to do so in just 4 years but got beat to the moon during development.
If the Chinese are using russian engines they made a good choise. If they continue making good choices then they might just meet all their goals in space. Maybe a day will come when all astronauts will have to be able to speak chinese to get past the traffic control towers stuck in orbit.;)
Nope, not a problem. Even if the craft was coming back (which it is not) life on Earth has had billions of years of adapting to the conditions on this planet. Any alien bug that fell on the Earth would probably not do very well and promptly get eaten by some predatory amoeba.
And in adition to that, they are not talking about any such thing as a living germ or anything that complex, what they HOPE to find are the building blocks of life, amino-acids and such.
I think that ANY extra security is good... Card + Palm + Code is more secure than Card + Code. The least it will do is give the badguy an extra level to breach before he can get in.
And that those that think this will lead to people cutting of hands to beat security, thats stupid, if they cut of your hand the blood will stop circulating and the hand will become useless for identification.
A t-shirt like you describe but with a couple of small CCD cameras and a circuit that produces shadows and colors dispersed across the surface of the t-shirt. Now you have smart camoflage.
I have a couple of questions... First does anyone have any kind of definate data on this rock? Like trajetory and speed, will it pass in front of the earth or behind it?
These are important questions, without knowing this it is quite literally impossible to figure out if it is possible to catch it (best case) or deflect it (worst case).
Propulsion may not be a problem, at least not when it comes to traveling to the asteriod in question. But do we have a propulsion technology that could (with 10 years of drive time) slow/speed up this rock until it falls into a stable orbit around the earth?
I want an extra planetary habitat for a population in at least the thousands before I'm 50 so that I can still enjoy zero-gee. This asteriod would probably make a perfect place to put such a colony.
Having this rock in orbit would probably also increase the rate at which we can build ships/habitats/other in orbit, with the bulk materials already up there we can build solar-powered smelters (basicly mirrors) and away we go.
I REALLY would like to see this rock in a stable orbit, how many of the science-fiction goals wouldn't be within reach if we just got abundant materials for buildning? (space-elevator anyone, anchor material is cheap!)
Even if you could get a processor to run at 600 GHz, what about the information it is supposed to compute? The bus to memory is barely enough as it is, how much bigger a percentage of the processors time will be spent idling if it ran at this speed?
Although a gatlin snurf gun wold be kind of fun I'm more interested in the top speed and if I could get the optional Jumpgear. Would be kind of cool to hop into one of these in the morning and walking/running/jumping to work.
Of course to defray operating costs it should have an onboard nuclear reactor instead of that puny litle 250cc bike engine. More power is ALWAYS a good thing.
Using a cranial-implant speaker and a microphone implanted in the jawbone would remove or at least reduce the chance of being detected due to "EMF". It would also reduce the energy requirements. To solve the CRT leakage I would use microwattage lasers shoting directly into the eye, I serioulsy doubt that a sensor can pick up a microwatt at any significant distance.
These techs may sound somewhat Heinlein'esqe but I suspect that it could be developed quite quikly if it where deemed nescesary. If the world was to see the kind of compressed military development that it saw during the second world war using todays tech, I wouldn't be surprised if these techs and alot of others would emerge as useful commercial technology after hostilities ended.
PS. Pardon my spelling. DS.
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The Electric Car Version seems to be made of 10 cells with 2.4 volts each. One such set will weigh 2 kg (4.4 Pounds) and contain only about 100Wh (360kJ) of energy. This is half to a third of what a Li-Ion battery is capable of at the same weight. For a Car using 30 kW of energy (Highway speeds in an economical car) to drive for two hours you would need more than 1200 kg (2600 pounds) of battery, the "more than" comes from the fact that you can't deep-draw these kinds of battery.
A generic Li-Ion Camera battery can hold about 150Wh per kg (300Wh in a 2 kg package). It may take a long time to recharge and be a firehazard but you will get a lot more distance out of it.
The only positives in this new Battery Cell is charge time and battery life.
Those plans of freezing the CO2 and launching it into space could be used to make Mars a more livable place.
I read somewhere that it would take an awful lot of gas to make a 1 bar atmosphere on mars due to its lower mass. So if we use something like a space elevator cable to dip into Venuses atmosphere and draw of the excess CO2, then freeze it in orbit and send it to crash into Mars we might at least make Mars habitable in a couple of centuries.
It would both help make working on the surface less risky (no spacesuit required, only a facemask) and probably raise the mean temperature somewhat due to the greenhouse effect.
WRONG. The chance that a chemical rocket will explode or fail to start is significantly higher than the chance of the probe seeing a threat and having the time to change the vector enough to matter.
The biggest problem with electrical thrusters is the fact that it takes ages to get a usable vectorchange, but that has more to do with the time it spends on it than any "emergency" manouvers it might have to do. The positive aspects of these engines are the weight saved on fuel and the fact that a small thrust/high impulse applied over a year gives a higher final velocity than a large thrust/small impulse aplied over a few minutes. Impulse is determined by the velocity of the gas exiting the thruster. I think it was described as "how long a pound of propelant can sustain a pound of thrust", the larger the number the better.
Ok, don't know anything about EPA and NYC air during 9/11 but one thing caught my atention, the comment "could have worn masks". Is there a way of filtering out particles small enough to be called NANO particles? Standard facemasks (as seen on Michael Jacksson and Japanese street walkers), to my knowlegde, aren't rated to catch partkles that small (at least the masks we used last summer at my job weren't).
I'm not going to touch that first part but the rest i feel I have to say something about.
It's not what the US HAS done it's what it MIGHT do.
The US right now is looking more and more of going straight to (a VERY warm place) and fast, the internet is kind of important to alot of people other than those in the US (more so looking at broadband growth) and we don't want some future Napoleon (american version) holding us all by the balls to get us to go along with his/her plans.
Didn't it say in the article that the pack forced the wearer to walk more efficiently and thus getting a normal metabolic draw. Also, someone mentioned how hard it would be to lugg around an extra 50 pounds just to get power. Think instead of people who, right now, already cary 50+ pounds in a packpack (say a soldier on march), this would give them an extra benefit without having to cary much extra weight.
I think they're going to make loads of money on this... Say that each of these processors sit in an individual blade, each blade costing between $3-4000. If this blade gets hired more than 10 hours/day you will probably get the money you invested back inside a year. Even if the processor isn't used that much you will make money off of it since a Sun machine is good for years and years of continuous operation (we have a couple of dozen at school) you have the time to make that money.
It would however stop you from doing anything. Put this device behind the ear of people with a history of violence and a restraining order against them, when they get to close a transmitter will activate it and the offender takes a walk in another direction.
Newsflash, Russian rocket engines are more efficient than Western engines. The russians perfected a closed cycle engine (the RD180 is a more recent example) decades ago that still astonishes western scientist because they thought the technology was "to dangerous" to develop.
;)
One of the reasons that America beat the Russians to the moon was that the russians where developing this new engine while trying to get a mission sent to the moon. Since the Russians couldn't build the enormous open-cycle enginees used in the Saturn 5 they had to develop more efficient but smaller engines, they managed to do so in just 4 years but got beat to the moon during development.
If the Chinese are using russian engines they made a good choise. If they continue making good choices then they might just meet all their goals in space. Maybe a day will come when all astronauts will have to be able to speak chinese to get past the traffic control towers stuck in orbit.
Nope, not a problem. Even if the craft was coming back (which it is not) life on Earth has had billions of years of adapting to the conditions on this planet. Any alien bug that fell on the Earth would probably not do very well and promptly get eaten by some predatory amoeba.
And in adition to that, they are not talking about any such thing as a living germ or anything that complex, what they HOPE to find are the building blocks of life, amino-acids and such.
I think that ANY extra security is good... Card + Palm + Code is more secure than Card + Code. The least it will do is give the badguy an extra level to breach before he can get in.
And that those that think this will lead to people cutting of hands to beat security, thats stupid, if they cut of your hand the blood will stop circulating and the hand will become useless for identification.
A t-shirt like you describe but with a couple of small CCD cameras and a circuit that produces shadows and colors dispersed across the surface of the t-shirt. Now you have smart camoflage.
Not quite Predator but we're getting there.
I have a couple of questions... First does anyone have any kind of definate data on this rock? Like trajetory and speed, will it pass in front of the earth or behind it?
These are important questions, without knowing this it is quite literally impossible to figure out if it is possible to catch it (best case) or deflect it (worst case).
Propulsion may not be a problem, at least not when it comes to traveling to the asteriod in question. But do we have a propulsion technology that could (with 10 years of drive time) slow/speed up this rock until it falls into a stable orbit around the earth?
I want an extra planetary habitat for a population in at least the thousands before I'm 50 so that I can still enjoy zero-gee. This asteriod would probably make a perfect place to put such a colony.
Having this rock in orbit would probably also increase the rate at which we can build ships/habitats/other in orbit, with the bulk materials already up there we can build solar-powered smelters (basicly mirrors) and away we go.
I REALLY would like to see this rock in a stable orbit, how many of the science-fiction goals wouldn't be within reach if we just got abundant materials for buildning? (space-elevator anyone, anchor material is cheap!)
Even if you could get a processor to run at 600 GHz, what about the information it is supposed to compute? The bus to memory is barely enough as it is, how much bigger a percentage of the processors time will be spent idling if it ran at this speed?
Although a gatlin snurf gun wold be kind of fun I'm more interested in the top speed and if I could get the optional Jumpgear. Would be kind of cool to hop into one of these in the morning and walking/running/jumping to work. Of course to defray operating costs it should have an onboard nuclear reactor instead of that puny litle 250cc bike engine. More power is ALWAYS a good thing.
Using a cranial-implant speaker and a microphone implanted in the jawbone would remove or at least reduce the chance of being detected due to "EMF". It would also reduce the energy requirements. To solve the CRT leakage I would use microwattage lasers shoting directly into the eye, I serioulsy doubt that a sensor can pick up a microwatt at any significant distance. These techs may sound somewhat Heinlein'esqe but I suspect that it could be developed quite quikly if it where deemed nescesary. If the world was to see the kind of compressed military development that it saw during the second world war using todays tech, I wouldn't be surprised if these techs and alot of others would emerge as useful commercial technology after hostilities ended. PS. Pardon my spelling. DS.
Yep, and as soon as you reach up to scratch your nose the screen goes blank and your watch beeps out a connection lost message.