Bah!
All your website are belong to lightbulb.
Told ya so.
7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
LeBlanc is an excellent fit for the new Gear. I would like to know what the person who hired the squeaky vomiter was drinking. Perhaps the idea was to kill the show outright?
The real problem is that the chemistry between Clarkson, Hammond and May has been lost. The Three Idiots was what sold that show, even when it was at its most contrived and unbelievable. So the TG team deliberately set the "accidental" fire in the caravan? Coo! Who'd have guessed it?
Personally, I lived for the moments when Clarkson would shout "I've ruined m'car!" after he'd made some unwise modifications in the middle of some jungle or desert.
What will TG do to fill the gap left by the "special projects"? A show about nothing but cars has only a limited appeal, which is why the format changed all those years ago. Unless some of those cars get turned into trains or boats or space shuttles it all gets a bot boring.
Foot in the door is right, and the DHS modus operandi.
About a month ago I was driven into a rage while listening to a radio interview in which a DHS spokesman said they were formulating a plan to implement cross-agency intelligence sharing. This provoked by yet another failure of information available to spooks trickling down to lowly feds in a timely manner to the detriment of the public safety.
Why was I so uncharacteristically exercised by a government drone? Because the specific mission of the DHS when formed was to facilitate intelligence sharing between agencies in the post 9/11 anger at the compartmentalization of same held to be instrumental in the plot not being foiled.
Now we all expect empire-building and scope creep when it comes to departmental mandate in our government - it seems to be the norm whatever ideology is being pushed by the said government in question.
But the DHS represents the largest expansion of US government in history according to my sources. Funded as much by black budgets as congress-mediated funding according to some. Money by the shovel-load goes in their direction at any rate.
And they are still "working on" implementing their core reason for being, fifteen years down the pike? And still getting it wrong?
Cue roaring in the ears, screams of rage, redness of vision, and short-duration blackout from sheer apoplexy.
When I came to my senses my wife said I wasn't allowed to listen to the radio while driving any more and made me push us out of the ditch while she took the wheel.
Yes, that is generally right, but in the specific case of battery charging there are other factors involved especially in the case of Lithium battery "quick chargers", which play clever behind the scenes to make life a bit less simple.
But the real danger with Lithium batteries is that of undercharge or overcharge conditions, both of which can and will render the battery hideously dangerous. This is why phones and portable computers employ scads of electronics to prevent the conditions occurring in the first place.
This is why, for example, some airsoft guns come with shouty warnings not to leave the charging batteries (which in this case are not protected owing to the cheap and chearful battery packs and chargers supplied) unattended or on charge for more than five hours.
Drone owners employ special "balancing chargers" that ensure a local overcharge of one of the ranked batteries in their drone's battery pack doesn't take place because that would likely cause a fire, and have other devices that warn of an undercharge condition.
I rather liked the datasheet published by one manufacturer of Lion batteries which explained the built-in disc membrane that could rupture if the internal temperature of the battery exceeded 500 degrees fahrenheit, at which point "venting with flame" could occur.
I seriously doubt the design team has "thought of everything" when ity comes to dangerous failure modes of this thing.
Not every blingvice* shown on a James Bond movie is a good or desirable idea, and in movies everything ends well (or not) at the whim of plot, not the Laws of Physics.
* A device that "just is" because it looks cool in operation in the scene it is shown in. E.G. machine guns in the blinkers of your car would likely hit innocent bystanders as you careened around at high speed paying more attention to the targeting reticule than the road and a laser in your watch would likely cut the tendons in the back of your hand before the bars on your prison cell. Let's not even get into the failure modes of a passenger seat that can be fired through a car roof blown off with explosive bolts (with no thought of the damage or injury that would cause). Get a short circiut in the wiring harness of your Nissan and the GPS stops working. Get one in the DB4 and there goes your date for the evening through the sunshine roof. Brings a whole new meaning to "fly-by-night".
Answering paragraph by paragraph:
First:
a) "Flashlight": turn your Ironic Understatement Detector on
2) do the research before drawing a conclusion. That way you don't end up confusing "focus" for "path length" which - condensed to soundbite length - is where a laser loses coherency and becomes, yes, a big flashlight.
Second:
Apparently you just solved the problem that keeps getting these HFL wepon programs cancelled. The Pentagon poindexters would like a word. They've been trying to crack this nut since somewhen around 1980.
Third:
Where to start.
If you have solved the problem of accurately bearing on a moving target without the need for on-warhead smart automation, you really do need to talk to the Pentagon poindexters. They could use this new knowledge to punch up (to pick one weapon system at random) Phalanx so it is more parsimonious with its limited supply of ammunition.
Gyro stabilising a cannon so that other systems can attempt to bear on a target is not germane to the issue at hand, and tanks fire at relatively close range at slow moving targets and, I should point out, preferentially do so when standiing still and hull-down.
Again, I suggest researching the various problems this plan kicks up against as an interesting project for the reader.
One could start with the difference between "your", "you're" and "yore".
Yes, this works in Star Trek, but In the "real world" there are other factors at work to prevent an uncooperative target being nailed quite so easily with a steroid-grown flashlight.
One is accurately ranging and bearing on a fast moving target with a weapon that needs to be trained on the target for an appreciable time.
Another HFL* mitigating factor is something called "path length", a property of real lasers that makes long distance killing with a beam of coherent light more problematical than vaporizing something fifty feet away in a lab. I'll let you research this yourself Peter2 rather than explain it myself.
And although the laser beam is propogating at lightspeed, the altazimuthal gymbal that points it at things will be reacting at a much lower rate of speed.
* Huge Frikkin Laser
[laser beatis smoke and mirrors]
Interesting. But then, hitting a stationary target always works, even for Sergeant York and Copperhead.
When the target is moving, and moving fast, it's usually a very different and much sadder tale.
It was, when push came to shove, the final nail in the allready well-nailed coffin of the SDI project back when no-one at the MoD remembers. That also proposed huge frikkin' lasers (among a raft of other barely workable-in-the-lab ideas).
In the 70s it used to be said that England was the USA's aircraft carrier in the North Sea.
Now, in the late twenty-tens England's new aircraft carrier is the USA's aircraft carrier in the North Sea.
Progress indeed.
I'm off to watch that episode of Yes Prime Minister where they talk about how in the 70s The British Nuclear Deterrent Was a rocket on which the nose cone didn't fit.
I would have thought that not having a massive block of incompressible cast iron or aluminium in between you and the other object limits the amount of energy that can be absorbed
But the engine is held to the frame by three or sometimes four bolts, which are designed to shear in a crash. The (red hot) engine goes under the car (usually, there are some howler designs that push it up through the bonnet so it can come through the windscreen and land in the driver's lap), directed there by the slope of the firewall.
Designs with a conventional gearbox will hopefully dislodge the rear axle or the assembly may attempt to come up through the tunnel cover for a hug.
You don't want solid stuff in the way. The point of the crumply stuff is to streeeeeeeeetch out the time it takes to go from "Yeehaaohchrist!" to zero and thus reduce the force experienced by the occupants (F=ma, a=dv/dt so for a given dv the dt needs to be as long as possible to minimise F). That's why seatbelts are stretchy and airbags leak.
Interestingly, the telescopic steering column is a different case. It collapses because before they did that it was not uncommon for crashing drivers to be killed by a kung-fu punch to the chest by the steering wheel. Then the sun visors and dashboards had to become soft because with no wheel holding back the driver his/her head was free to hit them. The old plywood sun visors were first to go, followed by the wooden dashboard.
And so was born the Nanny State, where a person was no longer free to trepan themselves on the visor or do some amateur dentistry on the old instrument cluster.
Now, of course, the only serious threat to most drivers is the danger of having two small trumpets cold-stamped into their temples when the air-bag deploys and blows off the horn push.
One of the problems you have in a charged LiPo is the stored energy in the cell which complicates handling a fizzing or popped cell even if not currently burning.
Better hope your protection electronics are in good shape if you ever try charging a fully discharged LiPo battery.
This battery design is riddled with the most gotchas of any so far commercially available. When delivered in a "lightweight" configuration we are basically talking a fire waiting to happen.
Aside: My dad used to teach industrial electronics at college level. He came home one night to report that a discharged Duracell Alkaline AA battery (then a fairly recent innovation) had been sitting on his lab eye-level shelf when it spontaneously exploded. His students changed their trousers, then theorised an internal short, but thereafter he had them swap out the batteries on the instruments before they discharged beyond a certain point. Student eyeballs were two a penny it was true, but a decent multimeter was hard to replace.
You mean having the batteries well inside the crumple zones, in the area of the car specifically designed to avoid having to absorb the impact from an accident, because it also happens to be where the occupants are?
No, I mean what I actually wrote, explicitly. The Tesla's batteries are in the floorpan which is anything but "inside the crumple zone". Two Tesla fires that I can remember came about because of the road contacting the floorpan at speed. No crumpling was involved, but there was plenty of burning.
The crazy idea you seem to feel is worse than sticking sheets of lithium under the seats is the way other manufacturers are doing the trick. The reason the Tesla isn't is so that the car has some luggage space, a problem with those other vehicle designs. Tesla is also enabling people to drive much faster than people do in those other designs.
Which is why they need that proximity-triggered "Yeehaa!" klaxon.
Well not for nuthin' but my years in the lab at Climategate University, (East Anglia) proved time and again that even the concentrated form of Sulphuric Acid gave me plenty of time to get to the tap to wash it off, and I had terrible eczema at the time which made my skin super-sensitive*. Absent a nearby water supply I suppose you'd be in trouble eventually. Eyes are a whole different class of problem, as is ingestion of course.
I stand by what I said about the relative safety of lead acid batteries, the automotive iteration being engineered and over-engineered to be robust under a welter of adverse conditions that would have a Lithium battery "venting with flame" (actual language from manufacturer's fact sheet). About the only thing you can do to endanger your life while handling one is to short the terminals, then not notice.
Internal shorts are rare with a car-type lead acid battery because under the heavy load a starter motor puts on one the plates actually try and move to touch each other, and so are separated by non-conductive baffles. I used to have a see-through Lucas battery of the type, and it was an education to use and charge it, I can tell you.
* I did get a nasty skin burn off concentrated "nitrating mixture" when the bottle spat at me once in that same lab, but they don't put that stuff in batteries, thank Tesla.
I believe that it's not the voltage of the battery that is the primary concern, but the energy density of the cells that compose it and the failure modes of those cells.
A lead acid battery has a relatively low energy density under most conditions when compared to a lithium battery, and a very sturdy housing (but can still weld a spanner across its terminals if you are a clown when handling them and may explode as the electrolyte boils when that happens) but the Lithium batteries used in EVs have an extraordinarily high energy density which is barely contained by the housing.
When a lead acid battery fails it may include a fire. When a lithium battery fails it almost always includes a fierce fire comparable in visuals to an Estes solid fuel rocket motor.
Lithium batteries also have many more failure modes that are potentially fire-causing than a lead acid accumulator (though I just had a lead/acid gel battery that when connected to a UPS - which turned out to be faulty - got so hot I sustained a serious burn while disconnecting it).over-discharge, over-charge and physical damage will all cause fires (in the case of over-discharge, when the charger is next connected if it doesn't include the necessary circuitry).
A lead acid battery will typically survive such conditions without catching fire, though it may not work ever again if you boil off the electrolyte or punch a hole in it (all been done in my sight by the way). Lead acid gel batteries have different issues but again rarely catch fire (though I've seen one burst).
Well, not if the batteries are not arrayed across the floor pan. if they are in the trunk/boot or under he hood/bonnet there is a reasonable expectation that the batteries will be better protected in a crash (probably wishful thinking on my part) and will stay in place while the rescue team is working. The Tesla's innovative layout poses some special concerns.
But your point about a lithium battery is a lithium battery is well taken.
Interesting. I was recently informed that firemen in our neck o't' woods will let any house with solar panels on the roof burn because they are mighty afeared of electrocution. In a conventionally powered house they can cut the breaker at the pole and isolate the home from the grid.
Perhaps a new dialog needs to be opened with said firemen on how best to address the issue of not zapping firemen when they want to squirt water on a blaze when new technologies are deployed?
So the fact that the entire movie was a retelling of an episode screened years before isn't a massive strike against it?
Was for me "in the day".
The second movie took an episode and developed the idea. Better in every way, down to the wardrobe department, though the TMP score comes close to the one for WoK for brillance.