Posts by Cragganmore 17 posts • joined 25 Dec 2017
Staying vaguely on-subject with trouncing future green energy dreams... is anyone else mildly perturbed by the knowledge that 30% of the UK's 'renewable' energy mix comes from burning "low carbon" wood-chip? Sounds very much like a cop-out to me. But don't worry, I'm sure someone in HMG has worked through all the life-cycle CO2 emissions (amongst other stuff) and figured out it all makes sense comparatively.
Work-around: just connect Garmin watch via USB to laptop, and navigate under activities folder to locate the latest "FIT" activity file and manually upload to Strava. Actually quicker than doing it via (the now kaput) Garmin Connect.
How many times will Strava's IT folk double-check their backup strategies this evening...
Apparently: "During the investigation, the German police successfully communicated with the alleged blackmailer multiple times via an email and succeeded in capturing his/her Motorola brand device's MAC address f8:e0:79:af:57:eb, which was allegedly connected to several public Wi-Fi networks in Berlin at different times"
really... how...
The fuzz did back-track on that statement (maybe under heavy leaning from Earl Grayling). Difficult to see how you could get to 93 witness statements from employees within the airport if it was all BS.
Equally - it's difficult to see how you could defend the entire approach/take-off air-space (not just the airport perimeter) in a reliable way in day/night/rain/fog etc. As many have said on here, it is reasonably easy for a determined technically competent person to make their own quad-copter with a 30 min battery life, with an autonomous GPS system that would take-off, route over an airfield approach, and then head back to a pre-determined location. No radio-traffic or comms involved - so nothing to detect or block/jam.
Assuming a radar-based detection system (mitigates rain/fog etc) could detect, then the challenge is applying kinetic energy to disable the device. Again assuming you don't care where it lands/crashes! Directed energy weapons might seem an obvious choice but not that clever with aircraft in the vicinity.
The Russians apparently are considering deploying their own counter-drones - presumably directed onto target by a separate detection/tracking system. But that would still mean significant disruption and diverted flights whilst drone-dog-fight takes place in the skies. And it wouldn't appear certain that it would take out another drone 100% of the time.
You mean the Galileo project that we're no longer part of because it's run by those beastly Europeans.
Back to the subject - according to Wiki (so it must be true etc) "part of Ordnance Survey has operated as Ordnance Survey Ltd since 2015"... it begs the question which part has been ring-fenced as its own legal entity and for what purpose? Maybe the team that has the worlds biggest collection of coloured pencils for all that shading work.
Also the Met Office was until recently MoD-'owned' but now an "Executive Agency" (such a lovely term) and a Trading Fund of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. Even our war-fighters need to know whether to bring an umbrella to the battlefield.
"... the near-certain fact that in just a few years the enemy will be able to track those with one of their mass-produced robotic drones and so their locations while out on patrol will cease to be "totally undetectable..."
The ocean's still a big place... a very big place. Unless you put a nuclear reactor on board an underwater drone it won't be on station long enough to have any chance of searching - let alone travelling fast enough to keep up with a nuclear powered submarine. And I don't buy the Russian propaganda around nuke-powered drones. (I'm not talking about nuclear warheads - which I know they've also talked about - and I hope to god they would trust the thing not to go wrong). Why else would they mention a mother-ship concept to launch a nuclear drone as it would have the endurance and speed to traverse from a Russian base. Plus, if you realistically wanted to put develop a reactor small enough and autonomous/reliable enough to stick on board an underwater drone it would probably cost something approaching the costs of building another small SSN. So what's the point?
Physics ultimately gets in the way of making oceans 'transparent' - things will get incrementally better in terms of detection, but conversely folk will find ways of making things quieter and find better ways of countering. Classic definition of an arms-race :)
Large scale energy storage needs more investment as a solution for bridging those days of zero wind or darkness. Plenty of good (and not so good) ideas:
- pressurised air stored within disused salt mines.
- free-fall weights in disused coal mines (short term power peaks)
- molten salt (as a very high thermal storage density)
- electrolysis to generate O2 and H2.
- reverse hydro (as in Llanberis, Wales)
I'm sure there are more crackpot (i.e. interesting/novel) ideas out there!
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