Posts by MachDiamond 8833 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2012
"For example, if a lump of debris took out the radio antenna for the flight termination system, it would no longer be possible to remotely destruct the vehicle. "
The flight termination system is supposed to be autonomous. SpaceX had said it was self-contained when it turned out that it wasn't. While there can be remote activation available, the system is supposed to detect issues onboard and terminate flight with no user input.
"Remind me again, how much does your Military cost annually?"
It would be more accurate to ask how much money is spent. The cost is likely much much less. Look at the US where trillions have vanished down a black hole with no accounting to hint as which black hole that it might be.
"People are idiot for driving hundreds of kms."
They would be if it weren't that too many times taking a train is slower and more expensive. In the US, schedules can be completely rubbish so you wind up leaving mid-morning to lunchish and arrive at your destination at 1am! I always find arrival times much more important than when a train departs but Amtrak doesn't think much about it either way. They are also in need of some serious funding. I love taking the trains medium and long distances if I can. If there was a way to make it faster, less expensive with useful schedules, I'd be happy leaving my car behind.
Flying a couple of hundred kms is way more time than driving due to all of the non-flying carp one has to go through. Many airports are also a fair amount of travel from the ultimate destination. Rich corporate execs fly on private jets/turboprops often times so they can leave and arrive much closer to where they need to be/are. In the US, there are crazy numbers of small airports. The town I live in has one.
"If it's being used as part of the war effort, then Starlink's satellites become a legitimate target for Russian ASATs. Russia could attack any satellites flying over Ukraine or Russia, and that would obviously create gaps in coverage further afield. Plus it might also create more legal complications under the Space Liability Convention, depending on where wreckage lands."
Using ASATs would be doing it the hard way. The bottleneck are the ground stations. Make those non-functional and the satellites have nothing to connect up users to the internet with. If ground stations are in a country friendly to Russia, a garden sprayer filled with vinegar let loose into the electronics cabinets would make a big mess of things and won't make any noise vs just blowing the facility to bits.
" HP and IBM sold mainframes and minis that contained extra processors that could be unlocked on the fly or via a few DIP switches.... "
That means that with a few pence of DIP switches they multiply the number of offerings while at the same time getting better economies of scale by only building one model. I suppose they have to spend some money on all of the different badges they stick on to each one. A cheap way to fatten up the brochure and it's a good test to see how well the sales people are doing their jobs.
"Here in the UK, the Medium Wave frequencies it's fairly barren nowadays. It's all FM and DAB. It might be different in the south Wales valleys or up in the Highlands of Scotland where MW propagation might still be a benefit."
The main point is it's all on a chip anyway. If all cars had AM (MW), the government would collect more licensing fees. It isn't that great for music, but fine for spoken word and stations can cover most of the country which is a good thing during emergencies when many FM stations could be off the air.
"and the contact list uploaded via the Bluetooth connection from the smartphone, as well as the smartphone details, plus the location data."
Are you dead certain that your contact list is all that is getting copied when you pair your phone to the car? Wouldn't it be handy for somebody to know who you bank with by scanning what apps you have installed (I don't do banking on my phone, btw). They shouldn't be able to get into your account, but the finance company would love to know about all of the places you hold an account, just in case. Got store rewards apps? Ordering apps for takeaway/delivery?
I'd love to get my hands on a wrecked late model EV that has all of the bells and whistles (being totaled would mean it would be cheaper). I'd lay out the whole nervous system on a piece of plywood and tickle it here and there to see what it might tell me. I'd enjoy reverse engineering it and come up with a way to provide privacy patches for VIPS that don't want their car spying on them and have the money to see that it doesn't. A cheap option might just be a switch that turn off any mobile radios. A higher tier could be a way to purge data completely from time to time selectively.
"Even the radio's FM only and controlled by buttons."
That's really bizarre as radio is all on one or two chips these days with a few external parts. There's not much of a savings to not include AM, DAB and even SW. I don't use AM that much, but that's often the band the news stations use so I'll tune in for traffic information, weather and stuff if I'm sick to the teeth and going to hurl if I hear one more Beatles or Led Zepplin song on the one rock station I can pull in.
"Think of it as evolution in action. A squashed kid, a major lawsuit, one less self-driving car... After a while children will stop suddenly walking into roads. One way or another."
Evolution acts so slow that there's a greater chance of running out of kids before all that are left instinctively look both ways as they've been told a gazillion times!
I still haven't spotted the mythical superfly that can fly out of the open half of a half open window. Flies also like to bash against all the windows when they get into my car and completely avoid the window I've rolled down to get them out.
"In my 30+ years in a pediatric intensive care unit, I only saw one person killed by a motorcycle. That being said, they are a lot more dangerous for the rider, especially the first 500 miles."
I worked as an EMT for a year. I hated it and saw far too many motorcycle crash idiots with souped up ricer burners or where lane splitting on their hog and somebody made a rapid lane change right in front of them. They can be hard to see especially at certain times of the day. I've been surprised a few times when I didn't see one that may have been hidden by a pillar of the car at the moment I checked to see if I was ok to move over/make a turn. Cars being much larger/wider are less likely to be occluded.
"For cities, the two-wheeled transport that’s needed is bicycles, and it’s relatively easy to install space for them to keep cars away from bicycles, and the bicycles away from pedestrians."
Weather is still an issue and what to do with your bike at the destination. If train stations had bike lockers to secure the whole bike, people might be more amenable to taking their bike on a nice day. The same might go for places of work where a bike rack is too exposed to somebody with a pair of bolt cutters and 2 minutes to work them. Even some thieves carry battery powered cut-off tools that work on many high security locks/chains. An eBike is much more expensive than a pedal bike and some cost more than a decent second hand motorbike.
" which is why traffic is so horrible in US cities without good mass transit (i.e., nearly all of them). "
In cities that do have public transportation, much of it doesn't connect up either in space, time or both. You either have to get a taxi from one form of transportation to the depot where you can get another. I love taking the train, but I can't take a bus to the train station as the busses aren't running for that first train out and all subsequent trains have a hour plus layover where I need to change. There's also that little thing about the bus schedule being very tight on their last run vs. the train schedule so I'd be stranded and calling a cab if the train is late. The nice thing about the Amtrak connecting buses is that if the train is late, the bus waits for it. My issue is a city bus and a commuter rail line (not Amtrak). Ideally, it would be awesome of one could go from bus to tram to train to airport in comfort and safety, with luggage.
"Now, we are tweaking and perfecting the engineering, but not the science. We cannot increase power density without sacrificing energy density or safety. We can't increase safety without sacrificing power or energy density. It's just a classic "Engineering Triangle"."
Don't forget number of cycles, calendar life, temperature tolerance and cost.
Energy density may be close to tops when considering many of the other factors. That doesn't mean that there aren't improvements to be made elsewhere in the system as a whole. What's the mass difference between a glass roof, sheet steel or aluminum? Tyres with lower rolling resistance. Aerodynamics (not just making the door handles a point of failure). I could do without 90% of the "features" that makers are loading into the latest EV's. Power windows, a basic key fob and a backup camera are about as fancy as I need.
"Sodium ion batteries might hugely reduce the raw material issue but they are not as energy dense as lithium. Again lower cost."
Energy density is only a factor if you have limited space or the mass is a problem. Fuel cells for cars are massively expensive since they need to be made from more exotic materials to keep the size and weight down, but fixed installation cells are far less expensive per watt.
Reuse of EV packs for fixed installation is still a good use of them until there is so much degradation that they need to be recycled. That could push Sodium-Ion aside at some point in the future depending on all sorts of variables.
"FITs always belonged in the seventh circle of moronic Hell. Not because renewables themselves are intrinsically uneconomic. But because *retail renewables* are inevitably and fundamentally always less economic than *wholesale renewables* at the exact instant when they might ever be called upon."
There is a case to be made for residential feed-in making sense. Where I am, we are on the end of a long distribution line. As the city grows, if people are adding solar, it means those lines may not need to be upgraded for some time. I have a chest freezer in the garage that's solar powered with a battery back up and the grid backing all of that up. It was a fun project and still a work in progress. The warehouse grocery is 50 miles away so it's cost effective to buy in bulk especially when they have something on sale. It would be very un-cost effective if the power were to go out and everything in the freezer becomes suspect. The power it takes to run the freezer is minimal. Most modern chest freezers are very efficient. The big cost would be getting sick from food that thawed out and refroze or having to pitch all of the contents. All of the bits were purchased second hand or salvaged. The battery pack was made from cells I harvested from duff laptop packs. I bought the solar panel non-functional and found there was a break in the internal leads so I jumped that section out and lost a bit of performance, but got the panel so cheap it didn't matter. I'd like to do the same thing for the fridge/freezer in the kitchen. Nothing is worse than a big gulp of morning coffee only to find the milk had gone off.
" but on a very small, lightweight car such as the one being discussed, it very well may have some valid and practical use cases. "
Many bog standard cars have a good 3sqm of top side that is moderately flat. The model that Apetera is showing on their website is highly curved which makes for shadowing and off-axis cells. The sun racers that drive across Australia are designed with nice big flat surfaces so they can be angled towards the sun. I can't recall if they're allowed to configure the angle while driving, but I have seen them taking a break and tilting the whole car to get as much sun as possible to recharge the batteries. The mechanism might weigh more that it's worth to angle the panels on the car. It really takes optimization to the most extreme to compete in those races.
"Think of it as the electrical equivalent of a toll road. Pay more for the wider, faster network If you can afford it."
Yes, but, if you could schedule your travel at any time, it makes sense to use the toll road when traffic is lightest and the tolls are the lowest.
"At the very least, there will need to be some sort of negotiation between the car and the grid as to whether/when it can charge overnight."
There is still a vast amount of capacity going unused overnight that can be filled up. Going forward, if pricing can be sent down the lines to an EV, people can choose to have the car top up when rates are low (lots of supply vs demand) and only charge when rates are high if they must. That would go a long way to utilizing something like wind that isn't predictable.
"then surely it must be possible to store a few thousand tonnes of nice solid vitrified nuclear waste under the sea with no risk of it ever leaking out."
That's not an idea I'd like to see come to fruition. I'd rather that research was done to find way of burning up that waste so minimize long term storage issues. If secure storage is only needed for 100 years, we already know how to do that and have places where it can sit for that amount of time. One of the tantalizing possibilities of LFTR reactors is they might be able to process the current stock of waste that's just sitting around. That has to be verified, certainly, but at least there is a chance and it's something worth a government spending money on rather than giving everybody a free EV or paying large corporations that don't need the money to do something they would be doing anyway if it has profit potential.
"The whole point is to stop burning oil so we don't put anymore CO2 than necessary into the atmosphere."
I see it more as crude being a finite resource and we use it for so many other, more critical, products. Lots of medical products are made from plastic that's disposed of rather than something that can be autoclaved for reuse. It sounds wasteful until the cost of sterilization is calculated and then how there can be issues with it being done properly.
Epoxy is made from petroleum. Lightweight carbon fiber composites are made using epoxy. Drugs, fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and on and on. If oil can be replaced as much as possible for transportation, that leaves more available for other things before it's gone.
I don't think that oil will run out, but it will continue to get more and more expensive to the point where only the most valuable things people are willing to pay for will be produced from it past a certain point.
"Not even close - the majority of the energy used in an oil refinery is thermal energy - and guess what - it is an oil refinery so they get the thermal energy by burning oil."
A couple do use oil (low grade) in a cogen fashion, but most use vast amounts of leccy as the primarily energy input.
"PG&E are bastards. But thats because of the PUC. The state regulators makes sure there is no competition and that the state market is totally dysfuntional. "
It's hard to have competition with power distribution. The scale to install and maintain high tension lines is very large. A bunch of smaller companies won't have the number of customers it takes to do those parts of the network. I'm also happy to not see 3-4 sets of power lines run all over town so people can choose their supplier (yeah the whole thing in countries outside the US is just middlemen, not primary infrastructure companies). The PUC is a bunch of mindless jerks. California is run by more mindless jerks that wouldn't allow PG&E to cut back foliage far enough away from transmission lines to increase safety (so they instead just shut down the lines when there's high winds). The utility companies are allowed to be run like any other corporation that's only interested in "maximizing value for the shareholders (the corporate execs that get fat stock options)". Why should PG&E be spending money on the naming rights of a sports arena? Billboards? Print advertising? It's a monopoly. I'm fine with them being a monopoly, but in exchange, they need to be regulated differently that a company making breakfast cereal. The whole lot should be the first ones with their backs against the wall when the revolution comes.
The HSR project in California is fraud to the greatest extent possible. Voter approved a bond measure with very specific conditions. One of those conditions was a private industry component to share in the costs (and any profits). No company believed that the project would ever see more than massive losses. That should have killed it off, but the politicians re-wrote the fine print and went forward with it anyway. Lots of good chums have made tons of money on studies, land acquisitions and concrete sales. The taxpayers, on the other hand, aren't feeling very comfortable when sitting down. A private company, Brightline, is supposed to be starting a service on existing tracks to go from LA to SF. The trip will take ~11hours. The way it works is that it is an overnight all-sleeper service. Have a nice G&T in the cafe car, toddle off to bed, wake up to a coffee and bun the next morning at your destination. Spend the day and take the return service rather than spending 11 hours round trip driving or a bunch of time faffing about at airports.
"Meanwhile the ministers have no clue about anything except how to profit from the collapse of the country."
I don't know about that, but they have figured out that since they write the laws, there are in a great position to make a fortune with a bit of insider trading. "Oh, that wasn't me, it was my spouse".
"If its to lower cost, as data has become available it is showing that on average it is more expensive to run an EV then an ICE vehicle in the US."
You need to show your work as it's in direct opposition to my data and experience. All I'm seeing is "they say", with no indication of who "they" are.
You are also glossing over the total cost of petroleum in the US which has to include endless wars and overseas military presence to secure regimes in the Middle East so there aren't serious disruptions to the world supply (the US doesn't actually get as much oil from the Middle East as it used to). It's a global commodity so any disruption to major oil production sends huge ripples across markets.
To have a base level commodity that the US relies on in the hands of other countries puts the US at a big risk. Generating electricity is input agnostic. It could come from wind/solar, fossil fuels or a steam generator running on dried cow pats. Petrol and diesel are only cost effective when produced from quality crude oil. Light/Sweet being much preferred to heavy/sour and the tar sands of Canada being the scrapings from the bottom of the barrel. The political costs might be the most expensive and the hardest to calculate.
Yes, the US produces oil domestically. The problem is no new refineries have been built in decades and they are configured to use narrow spectrums of crude that isn't found as much in the US. Saying "crude oil" is like saying "cancer". It's a catch-all term rather than a specific thing. I see lately that Sleepy Joe has blocked any drilling in the Alaskan north where there are possibly very huge reserves.
"Some Gridserve charging stations have taken to installing their own diesel generators to power the fast chargers because the local grid can't cope. Net zero? Not a hope in hell.
Reference, please. Using diesel would be very expensive. Likely so expensive there would need to be some overriding reason why that charging station had to be located there.
Some stations in the US use battery storage so that stations can be put in places where there isn't the service for very fast charging. The station will recharge that battery when demand is below usage and the battery isn't full. That can also level peak demand which power companies charge a premium for.
"Cold lithium cells have a much reduced capacity - not voltage, but amp- or watt-hours - due to increased resistance within the cell."
In real world testing, it's about a 15% reduction. It does get worse for EV's since in cold weather, battery power is used to heat the cabin/occupants. This is why so many EV's feature heated seats (more efficient) and the best EV's will have an efficient heat pump for HVAC. Unless you are doing long trips, the reduction in range isn't a big deal since there can be plenty of battery for all of the driving you might do on a normal day. Some EV's will pre-heat the battery pack if a charging stop is programmed in the SatNav so even when it's blowing snow outside, the battery can charge quickly and take on a full charge. The battery heats up with highway travel too. Bjorn Nyland reviews EV's on his YT channel and he lives in Norway. If you want to see what cold weather travel is like, look up his channel. One of his stress test routes is up the arctic circle and back to the Oslo area.
" electricity to recharge is more likely to be coal generated"
In the Pacific North West of the US, power is going to be hydro. You also skip over that where coal is being used to generate electricity, refineries turning crude oil into transportation fuel are coal powered. Your ICEV is coal powered if the fuel you use was refined someplace where the electricity is generated using coal. It's not a good argument.
"14p/kwh is a pipe dream. 30p is more usual."
There are places in the US as low as $.08/kWh. It's $.33/kWh where I live which sucks. It does make putting solar panels on a better deal. If power was $.08, solar would have a very poor ROI and battery storage a big waste of money.
"Are you suggesting you can get electricity for 2.76p/kWh? No chance of that."
It's a joke, son, you missed it. Anybody that's used a slide rule knows the pitfalls of that blasted dot and should be good at doing estimates to check their work.
EV's typically cost 25% that of petrol per mile, give or take. I've rarely seen anybody claiming that an EV is more money to operate post up real figures to back up their claims. It's very easy to check the price per kW and petrol costs for a stated location. Every time I check somebody, it's right in the region of 25% so I use that as a rule of thumb. I haven't run those calculations for the Orkney's or some very out of the way place. Petrol where I live is around $5/gal right now, but I know of a couple of stations that are $7-$8/gal (middle of no-competition). Electricity is close to $.33/kWh. My ICE car gets 30mpg with mixed driving. A Chevy Bolt is around 3.8miles/kWh. I leave the calculations as an exercise for the student.
"NEMA 14-50 outlet box at Home Depot. Install took me a couple hours. No 'sparky' or certificate needed."
The former owner of my house had an outlet for a welder in the garage. I used the holes in the studs to run bigger wire, installed a 50A breaker and the 14-50 outlet. I can plug a welder, EVSE or a friend's RV into that. I think it cost me ~$50 for all of the bits. The place where the cost climbs is if the run to the panel is long/difficult. It was a whole 2m for me so very cheap.
"which means they know your annual mileage."
They can take that and the gross weight of the car and calculate from there for the road tax as compared to a similar car that runs on petrol or diesel. It can even cost less since there is less accounting for an annual tax over taxes being assessed and collected each time fuel is added.
"So people will buy counterfeit Chinese or Indian chargers on Alibaba, which are programmed to lie to the car."
There's no point in lying to the car. You want the car to know how much power is available so it will charge as quickly as possible without blowing the circuit breaker or burning up the wiring/house.
"The UK already introduced a rule so that EV charges should be on a seperate meter, which then becomes an enabler for differential charging/taxing for 'fuel' vs normal domestic use."
That's just adding a bunch of complication. It would be easier to take a high average miles driven per year and add a fee at the annual registration to cover what a moderately efficient car would have in fuel taxes. Separate meters, mileage reporting and other schemes leave all sort of holes for people to cheat and many will. It also means there will need to be whole new agencies that go around auditing people to see if they are cheating which might cost more than it would bring in through fines.
"Requiring that such chargers be on a separate meter just risks dangerous DIY bodges to rewire them to the ordinary meter."
It used to be that a second meter would be fitted to make it easy to get the usage on a EV tariff. I think that's mostly been done away with and discounts are given for charging in the wee hours through a Time of Use tariff.
Or as Dr. Malcom would have said, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should".
When I was a teenager many moons ago a pair of Levis jeans would last years of hard wear and weren't too expensive. Now they are way too expensive, seem to last no time at all and are made in sweatshops located in third world countries instead of the US. They do have loads more tags sewn on the inside that need to be clipped out.
There might be niche applications for doctor monitored health reasons. Spacesuits, firefighter turn-outs and some other specialty wear could be good targets. It might even be that sensors could pick up on signs that a seizure is imminent and could warn the wearer or their care-giver. For day-to-day wear made to a price it will last a couple of time through the wash or need to be specially cleaned at a much greater cost.
I'm already looking at making more of my own clothes. It takes time and isn't less expensive, but I can make things fitted to me out of much higher quality materials so they'll last a long time. I've found a couple of good YT channels where the vlogger finds quality clothing at thrift stores and shows how to mend and alter them. The Aspiring Gent found a nice wool suit for $20 and tailored it to fit like something costing closer to $1,000 (I have a thousand dollar suit and it IS very nice, but I can't justify more of the same). Adding electronics seems like a good way to limit the lifetime of a garment and cause other issues. Trying to alter something with wires running through could be quite a chore.
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