
Probing the depths
If you don't want surface as a verb, you should avoid submarines.
It seems appropriate here as you are retrieving you data from the deep, dark realms of the Elder Gods.
128 posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
One of the problems with EU consortiums is the concept of work share. This is where each country gets a piece of the work. I recall a semiconductor fab where the work up through the gate process was done in one country. Then the wafers were packed up and sent for the remainder of the processing in another country.
This manufacturer maintained a consistent half decade lag on US and Asian manufacturers.
Back in the days of yore, I was the delivery boy for a business machines company. I indeed hauled many Selectrics into office towers. The beast however was the Adler. Weighed about 50% more in the same footprint.
These were also the days of liquid toner in copiers. The suspension fluid was highly flammable. Many offices used it by the gallon. I'm surprised there weren't more fires.
DARPA is mostly run in that fashion. Most of the program managers are on sabbaticals from universities or industry, or on tours from the military or other parts of the DoD. There are a few political appointees at the top. The institutional memory seems to reside in the SETA (System Engineering and Technical Advisors) contractors.
Speaking of restrictions, all of this is predicated on the availability of chipsets suitable for industrial use – think microcontrollers and that sort of thing – that actually support this generation of wireless communications.
There seems to be a cognitive disconnect here. Why would a microcontroller need to support a multi-gigabit communications protocol? It would seem that they need a more reliable Bluetooth. Something I would welcome.
Gyrotrons are big. They need large magnets in order to work, so you won't be fitting one down the borehole. That means you will have to direct the microwave energy down the borehole.
The gyrotrons produce mm-wave energy. That means having to pipe it around using waveguide. Waveguide is quite lossy at those frequencies, so you need to do trickery like quasi-optics to keep losses low. This needs finely machined and polished waveguide pipe, which is very expensive.
When you get the energy to the target, you have to deal with the vaporized material. This is one of the problems with beam weapons. You puff off a cloud of vapor and immediately your beam starts heating the vapor instead of the target. So you have to get rid of the vapor, some 20km away.
Finally, you have your hole and can start producing steam. You can't run that steam directly into a turbine. It has a lot of nasty silica and acids in it. These tend to clog up the pipes. The local geothermal plant periodically cleans the scale off and sends it off for reprocessing because it has significant amounts of gold in it. So yo you need to have a heat exchanger. Only then can you produce power.
Given these difficulties, this may work sometime, but don't expect it soon.
Innovation in the US military moves with the speed of contracting and security. In other words very slow. In cases where troops in combat need something, procurement regulations are waived and things are much faster. Why this can't happen for regular procurement is that too many rice bowls would be broken.
The only saving grace is that this process is still faster and more efficient than our adversaries'.
Icon: The desired outcome of the process.
I wish them luck, growing SiC substrates is much harder than silicon. So they will always be more expensive than silicon devices.
The performance of SiC is so much better than silicon that it is worth the extra cost. These devices can handle voltages in the 1500 volt range. They have 10 times the thermal conductivity of silicon, the better to get the heat out. This is just what you need for electric cars.
GaN has better electrical performance than SiC, but is usually grown on a SiC substrate.
Decided to install Mint on an older laptop. Everything went fine until it was time to get the wifi working. Downloaded drivers from all over, but nothing worked with the obscure Broadcom wifi chip. After two days of trawling the Linux forums I finally found a series of arcane letters and numbers that had to be manually typed into an init file. After that everything worked fine.
A specific person at Amazon made the decision to implement a change to the payroll system knowing it was illegal. It should also have gone through a change control board before being implemented. All those involved should be charged with grand larceny. Illegal acts pierce the corporate veil.
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