That's because at the Russia/China gauge change, they likely aren't using intermodal containers. Yes, it would still introduce some inefficiency unloading one train just to reload onto another, but these containers are the key to making the differences in gauge work at least somewhat economically. Essentially everything coming from Asia is stuffed into these containers, loaded onto a ship, transported to one of the western ports, thrown on a train to go somewhere to be regionally loaded onto a truck, anyway.
While rail might prove to be faster than open sea shipping, I would think that it would be questionable whether or not it would be more economically advantageous than by ship...even for goods to/from Russia.
It would be icing on the cake for the Canadian railroads. Canadian National is truly a full transcontinental railroad, connecting Prince Rupert and Vancouver to the Atlantic (through the Great Lakes, Halifax and Montreal), plus New Orleans and Mobile, AL. Check their system map out.
You basically read my mind from the drive home. Though, I was trying to figure out what critical point(s) could be used for detection. Helmet strap connector? It would have to be something that would still provide some ease of use and not be too prone to failure (i.e. connector starts to get flaky or the enemy can still remove it with some work, such as loosening the adjustment on the helmet strap instead of uncoupling it). Of course, there's still that duress and coercion thing.
You raise a good point. The enemy could then don the helmet and immediately find out troop positions and other intel. So what are the possible countermeasures to prevent this from happening?
Integrated biometrics so the system only works with the soldier to which the system was issued? Sounds good, but probably buggy and adds weight/expense. What would prevent the captor from detaining a soldier and coercing them to tell them information? I suppose they could be trained to give spurious responses.
Soldier login and quick disable feature? Might work if the soldier is able to deactivate the system (i.e. still alive, ambulatory). Requires the soldier to remember to deactivate in the heat of the moment.
Remote disable? This would rely upon an effective means of determining that an authorized user is in possession of the equipment.
Warface intel is great, but the more widely you make it available, the harder it becomes to contain, pretty much like any other piece of information in society.
Of course, then someone will discover that ceramics have a higher radiation emissions than furniture made of wood and plastics. This will lead to legistlation to make sure manufacturers use materials that have any minute trace, naturally-occurring, radioactive matter removed.
Calculators are definitely in. Heck, I bet that we could power all of the calculators in the office from the one my co-worker uses. He punches the silly thing routinely when he makes a mistake while using it.
Then again, with tax season reaching its climax, I would imagine that he's not the only one physically abusing a calculator.
Now, what the general public does (like the moron that got busted for searching for how to commit undetectable murder and then poisoning her husband) is another story.
FWIW, the way she was discovered was by the police rummaging through her browser history on her computer and discovering what she was searching for, not a supoena to Google, et al.
So, as you put it, she was one of the morons because she didn't cover her tracks in her own computer, let alone worry about what she was leaving in Google's logs.
...depending on how old you are. I think the concern was associated more with X-ray radiation emissions from CRT televisions, and older ones at that (prior to the introduction of the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968). I would fathom to say that most of us on this site are too young to have been plopped in front of a TV that old for large amounts of time.
Desite your reply as an AC, I have to give you credit for correcting me on this one. You pointed out something that I did miss. I did recognize that the Coanda effect was redirecting the airflow downward around the edges (I have air knives here at work that do this), but missed that the air movement over the surface would also generate a lifting force as well.
Putting that big blockage in your airflow just seems like it's going to sap power from your engine.
Agreed, however I think the possible advantage is that you can hang something directly in the center underneath, thus maintaining the center of gravity inline with the fan's center point, rather than trying to balance the payload out when placing it outside the diameter of the fan. That's a big plus. The Coanda effect just allows for them to shed the weight of the ducting by not having to worry about totally enclosing the air flow.
I think its potential applications are better suited to where you need a small, remote-controlled flying/hovering device, as compared to some huge personnel-carrying machine.
Let's say that you need to do non-secretive reconnaisance in a confined area, such as urban city streets. Flying something like this that's a couple of feet across, equipped with cameras might be the solution. You could accidentally bump it into things and not have to worry about it crashing (as opposed to a remote-controlled helicopter). Surreptition is not needed if you are using it to survey an incident involving haz-mat, fire, or some other industrial mishap.
This might not exactly be best suited as battlefield technology, but perhaps fire/rescue and law enforcement use.
If you look at the main "lift generating mechanism," it is essentially a fan/turbine, not a wing. As such, it generates its lift by forcing air downwards, developing thrust. A helicopter's main rotors are shaped liked wings (airfoil) on a fixed-wing aircraft. As such, the wing develops lift by forcing the majority of the air over the top of it to create an area of low pressure over the top of it as it rotates.
While its flight my appear to behave like a helicopter, it is not working on the same principles of flight that a helicopter uses.
From what I can tell from the picture, a small amount of the downward thrust is directed in the opposite direction of the rotation, producing the necessary counter torque.
Without the atmosphere, the earth's blackbody temp would be 255K/-18C/0F.
Stupid question on my part: How do places on earth regularly get below this temperature with an atmosphere?
Solar wind chill? (I joke).
In all seriousness, if that temperature is a correct fact, and the atmosphere is our blanket to keep us warmer than -18C/0F, how do we radiate more heat to get below that background temperature?
(Yeah, it's been mentioned already. The article is light on details.)
What's the longevity of this stuff? Does it fade? What other degradation issues does it face? Silicon-based cells also DO degrage over time,too...at least their output diminishes somewhat. Is the rejuvenation process as easy as slopping on a new coat of paint?
Cool stuff, just curious as to what are the caveats when comparing implementation costs to traditional solar photovoltaics.
Experience and education. (Electrical Engineer, Amateur Radio Operator, and I've designed and built small transmitters and receivers)
Your TV, radio, stereo, fall under Part 15 of FCC regs (your mic/headset probably does as well). They must accept any interference, even if it causes undesired operation. As cheap as most consumer electronics are manufactured today (little/no shielding, lack of good reciever selectivity and rejection, noise filtering, lack of RF decoupling in audio amplifiers), it's no surprise that anything that produces a reasonable RF emission is creating interference.
Avionics are built to much more stringent rules than part 15 (thankfully!).
In the examples you mentioned, RF energy is likely getting into the input of the audio amplifier. Unshielded input leads work very nicely as an antenna. The "antenna" picks up the RF, it goes into the audio amp, and creates all sorts of wierd distortion. The fix is usually fairly simple. Just put a toroid choke on the end of the lead. This filters out almost all the RF energy and prevents it from entering the amplifier input.
If you're interested, pick one of these up and snap it on to your headset leads on the end closest to the amplifier. It should do the trick.
Nah, since it's likely that the people developing these things will be in close proximity to them for extended periods of time, I'll just let natural selection run its course.
Well, FWIW, I *DID* read the story. Guess what? There's no mention of any of these issues in it. Wouldn't it be appropriate to bring them up for discussion? The article reads pretty much like the typical Popular Science/Popular Mechanics hype, touting the "coolness factor" and pretty much glossing over some of the other hurdles that would make something like this feasible for mass implementation.
I'm not objecting that what this handful of people are proposing is "wrong." I'm just making light of some oversights that aren't mentioned *at all* in the article. I work with people that propose lots of things that aren't wrong, just that their ideas overlook some very important aspects that would be show-stoppers. In a few instances, they purposefully overlook these things because they make the assumption that somehow a solution will magically appear and solve the problems that the implementation of their idea created.
And probably most of all, in the last paragraph of the story:
Any promise of such cheap energy has to be treated with scepticism, and all these projects are still a long way from the full-scale test rigs needed to prove they will succeed.
So here I am, introducing a couple insightful points to consider (as well as several other posters) about some things that might rule this concept impractical. Maybe these guys thought of these problems, maybe not...but it's not covered in the story.
Well, the technical hurdle is capturing the energy from a massive electrical discharge and then releasing it in a controlled form. You can't just send it through some super transformer to knock down the voltage because, even if you could, the voltage rise/fall time is so fast that the inductive impedance of the transformer would probably make it quite ineffective. Even if you could down convert the voltage of the lightning, you'd have difficulty building a device that could accept such a large inrush of current in such a short period of time. Direct application of the electrical energy is most likely out.
I would think that a solution for capturing this energy would reside in a less direct solution, such as dissipating the energy into a medium (i.e. specialized oil, or vaporization of a liquid) as heat, then using standard thermodynamic heat flow to mechanically spin a turbine or something. There's several forms of energy conversion in the whole process of something like that, but it would be done to better manage the storage and release of the captured energy.
Of course, the next problem is finding a relatively abundant source of atmospheric electrical discharge to make something like this economically feasible.
You know what else tends to reside in the path of the jet stream? Storm systems.
I bet that these things would make excellent conductors for lightning. Take them down when storms approach and put them back up afterwards? Probably not feasible.
Then again, they would probably build up a heck of a static charge themselves just with the wind flowing over them.
Oh yeah, would ice build-up be a problem? Maybe not at the windmill itself, but on the tether, perhaps.
Seems to me there's a few (obvious) technical hurdles to address, first./p.
Draw a right triangle. One right side is 5 miles, this half the usual distance between cell towers (rural, though oftentimes less). The other right side is 5 to 10 miles, this is the altitude of the plane. This triangle would represent your worst case scenario.
If you are directly overhead of a cell tower (perpendicular - best case). Your effective velocity towards the tower nears zero, and the shift is minimal. At worst case, you're 45 off, creating making your effective velocity 0.7 x speed of the aircraft.
Okay, speculation on my part. At present time, I don't believe that handset data speeds are high enough for airplane speeds to create a serious problem. With future revisions of EV-DO, et al, having higher data rates, it may become a technical hurdle.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because at the Russia/China gauge change, they likely aren't using intermodal containers. Yes, it would still introduce some inefficiency unloading one train just to reload onto another, but these containers are the key to making the differences in gauge work at least somewhat economically. Essentially everything coming from Asia is stuffed into these containers, loaded onto a ship, transported to one of the western ports, thrown on a train to go somewhere to be regionally loaded onto a truck, anyway.
While rail might prove to be faster than open sea shipping, I would think that it would be questionable whether or not it would be more economically advantageous than by ship...even for goods to/from Russia.
It would be icing on the cake for the Canadian railroads. Canadian National is truly a full transcontinental railroad, connecting Prince Rupert and Vancouver to the Atlantic (through the Great Lakes, Halifax and Montreal), plus New Orleans and Mobile, AL. Check their system map out.
You basically read my mind from the drive home. Though, I was trying to figure out what critical point(s) could be used for detection. Helmet strap connector? It would have to be something that would still provide some ease of use and not be too prone to failure (i.e. connector starts to get flaky or the enemy can still remove it with some work, such as loosening the adjustment on the helmet strap instead of uncoupling it). Of course, there's still that duress and coercion thing.
You raise a good point. The enemy could then don the helmet and immediately find out troop positions and other intel. So what are the possible countermeasures to prevent this from happening?
Warface intel is great, but the more widely you make it available, the harder it becomes to contain, pretty much like any other piece of information in society.
Of course, then someone will discover that ceramics have a higher radiation emissions than furniture made of wood and plastics. This will lead to legistlation to make sure manufacturers use materials that have any minute trace, naturally-occurring, radioactive matter removed.
Well, you will be glad to know that in Wisconsin you can now proceed through a red light after allowing 45 seconds to pass.
In regard to the red light camera, if the traffic signal sensor fails to trip, the camera might fail to trip as well.
Calculators are definitely in. Heck, I bet that we could power all of the calculators in the office from the one my co-worker uses. He punches the silly thing routinely when he makes a mistake while using it.
Then again, with tax season reaching its climax, I would imagine that he's not the only one physically abusing a calculator.
So will something like this eventually render captchas used as a security/anti-spam measure obsolete?
Not like something wasn't bound to eventually come out to counter that idea, anyway.
FWIW, the way she was discovered was by the police rummaging through her browser history on her computer and discovering what she was searching for, not a supoena to Google, et al.
So, as you put it, she was one of the morons because she didn't cover her tracks in her own computer, let alone worry about what she was leaving in Google's logs.
You are correct about the lead. According to this site, a CRT can have 5-8 pounds of lead in it.
...depending on how old you are. I think the concern was associated more with X-ray radiation emissions from CRT televisions, and older ones at that (prior to the introduction of the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act of 1968). I would fathom to say that most of us on this site are too young to have been plopped in front of a TV that old for large amounts of time.
Desite your reply as an AC, I have to give you credit for correcting me on this one. You pointed out something that I did miss. I did recognize that the Coanda effect was redirecting the airflow downward around the edges (I have air knives here at work that do this), but missed that the air movement over the surface would also generate a lifting force as well.
Agreed, however I think the possible advantage is that you can hang something directly in the center underneath, thus maintaining the center of gravity inline with the fan's center point, rather than trying to balance the payload out when placing it outside the diameter of the fan. That's a big plus. The Coanda effect just allows for them to shed the weight of the ducting by not having to worry about totally enclosing the air flow.
I think its potential applications are better suited to where you need a small, remote-controlled flying/hovering device, as compared to some huge personnel-carrying machine.
Let's say that you need to do non-secretive reconnaisance in a confined area, such as urban city streets. Flying something like this that's a couple of feet across, equipped with cameras might be the solution. You could accidentally bump it into things and not have to worry about it crashing (as opposed to a remote-controlled helicopter). Surreptition is not needed if you are using it to survey an incident involving haz-mat, fire, or some other industrial mishap.
This might not exactly be best suited as battlefield technology, but perhaps fire/rescue and law enforcement use.
If you look at the main "lift generating mechanism," it is essentially a fan/turbine, not a wing. As such, it generates its lift by forcing air downwards, developing thrust. A helicopter's main rotors are shaped liked wings (airfoil) on a fixed-wing aircraft. As such, the wing develops lift by forcing the majority of the air over the top of it to create an area of low pressure over the top of it as it rotates.
While its flight my appear to behave like a helicopter, it is not working on the same principles of flight that a helicopter uses.
From what I can tell from the picture, a small amount of the downward thrust is directed in the opposite direction of the rotation, producing the necessary counter torque.
Stupid question on my part: How do places on earth regularly get below this temperature with an atmosphere?
Solar wind chill? (I joke).
In all seriousness, if that temperature is a correct fact, and the atmosphere is our blanket to keep us warmer than -18C/0F, how do we radiate more heat to get below that background temperature?
Perhaps you meant this story:
New Solar Panel Technology Gaining Momentum(Yeah, it's been mentioned already. The article is light on details.)
What's the longevity of this stuff? Does it fade? What other degradation issues does it face? Silicon-based cells also DO degrage over time,too...at least their output diminishes somewhat. Is the rejuvenation process as easy as slopping on a new coat of paint?
Cool stuff, just curious as to what are the caveats when comparing implementation costs to traditional solar photovoltaics.
Experience and education. (Electrical Engineer, Amateur Radio Operator, and I've designed and built small transmitters and receivers)
Your TV, radio, stereo, fall under Part 15 of FCC regs (your mic/headset probably does as well). They must accept any interference, even if it causes undesired operation. As cheap as most consumer electronics are manufactured today (little/no shielding, lack of good reciever selectivity and rejection, noise filtering, lack of RF decoupling in audio amplifiers), it's no surprise that anything that produces a reasonable RF emission is creating interference.
Avionics are built to much more stringent rules than part 15 (thankfully!).
In the examples you mentioned, RF energy is likely getting into the input of the audio amplifier. Unshielded input leads work very nicely as an antenna. The "antenna" picks up the RF, it goes into the audio amp, and creates all sorts of wierd distortion. The fix is usually fairly simple. Just put a toroid choke on the end of the lead. This filters out almost all the RF energy and prevents it from entering the amplifier input.
If you're interested, pick one of these up and snap it on to your headset leads on the end closest to the amplifier. It should do the trick.
Nah, since it's likely that the people developing these things will be in close proximity to them for extended periods of time, I'll just let natural selection run its course.
Well, FWIW, I *DID* read the story. Guess what? There's no mention of any of these issues in it. Wouldn't it be appropriate to bring them up for discussion? The article reads pretty much like the typical Popular Science/Popular Mechanics hype, touting the "coolness factor" and pretty much glossing over some of the other hurdles that would make something like this feasible for mass implementation.
I'm not objecting that what this handful of people are proposing is "wrong." I'm just making light of some oversights that aren't mentioned *at all* in the article. I work with people that propose lots of things that aren't wrong, just that their ideas overlook some very important aspects that would be show-stoppers. In a few instances, they purposefully overlook these things because they make the assumption that somehow a solution will magically appear and solve the problems that the implementation of their idea created.
And probably most of all, in the last paragraph of the story:
Any promise of such cheap energy has to be treated with scepticism, and all these projects are still a long way from the full-scale test rigs needed to prove they will succeed.So here I am, introducing a couple insightful points to consider (as well as several other posters) about some things that might rule this concept impractical. Maybe these guys thought of these problems, maybe not...but it's not covered in the story.
Well, the technical hurdle is capturing the energy from a massive electrical discharge and then releasing it in a controlled form. You can't just send it through some super transformer to knock down the voltage because, even if you could, the voltage rise/fall time is so fast that the inductive impedance of the transformer would probably make it quite ineffective. Even if you could down convert the voltage of the lightning, you'd have difficulty building a device that could accept such a large inrush of current in such a short period of time. Direct application of the electrical energy is most likely out.
I would think that a solution for capturing this energy would reside in a less direct solution, such as dissipating the energy into a medium (i.e. specialized oil, or vaporization of a liquid) as heat, then using standard thermodynamic heat flow to mechanically spin a turbine or something. There's several forms of energy conversion in the whole process of something like that, but it would be done to better manage the storage and release of the captured energy.
Of course, the next problem is finding a relatively abundant source of atmospheric electrical discharge to make something like this economically feasible.
You know what else tends to reside in the path of the jet stream? Storm systems.
I bet that these things would make excellent conductors for lightning. Take them down when storms approach and put them back up afterwards? Probably not feasible.
Then again, they would probably build up a heck of a static charge themselves just with the wind flowing over them.
Oh yeah, would ice build-up be a problem? Maybe not at the windmill itself, but on the tether, perhaps.
Seems to me there's a few (obvious) technical hurdles to address, first./p.
Draw a right triangle. One right side is 5 miles, this half the usual distance between cell towers (rural, though oftentimes less). The other right side is 5 to 10 miles, this is the altitude of the plane. This triangle would represent your worst case scenario.
If you are directly overhead of a cell tower (perpendicular - best case). Your effective velocity towards the tower nears zero, and the shift is minimal. At worst case, you're 45 off, creating making your effective velocity 0.7 x speed of the aircraft.
Okay, speculation on my part. At present time, I don't believe that handset data speeds are high enough for airplane speeds to create a serious problem. With future revisions of EV-DO, et al, having higher data rates, it may become a technical hurdle.