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AngrybobH

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Posts posted by AngrybobH

  1. 2 hours ago, tater said:

    I need about a 15 hour warning

    Yeah, funny that I live in west Texas and I need an 8 hour lead time. I would love to be there when it goes (or goes off). Wife and kid aren't even remotely interested so, a solo drive for me.

    On that note, they did say they were not going to do road closures on the weekends, right? And that means a monday to friday only launch?

  2. I was thinking about this small versus wide lane road thing. I'd say I agree with the studies and all but, I have a counter example. One I should have thought about before. I currently live in west Texas. The roads here have wide lanes. When I first came to this place I remarked that one lane is as wide as two lanes (with only a tiny bit of exaggeration). I learned to drive in central Massachusetts. The lanes there are tiny in comparison with hills (real hills unlike west Texas hills) and curves.

    I once was driving in Boston with the flow of traffic. Traffic conditions were congested and the road was not straight. I was moving about 90MPH with about an inch between my right mirror and the left mirror of the car next to me and less than a car length in front or behind me. A narrow curvy road with buildings close to the curb did not slow down traffic.

    In west Texas, I routinely drive on a road with a posted speed of 45MPH. This road has 3 lanes in both directions and a turn lane, the buildings are set far back from the road. It is almost never congested. But, almost every time I drive on this road there are vehicles driving side by side at about 15MPH lower than the posted speed (which is common on all roads down here even the highways). Wide, straight lanes with buildings set back does not speed up traffic.

    Quick stat look up says Texas has 33 million people and about 4400 traffic deaths a year. Mass has 6.9 million people with 400 traffic deaths per year.

    This makes me wonder about the studies of roadways. I'd agree if/when someone says the US does it wrong but, there has to more to it than roads alone, as I have said before. The Texas vs. Mass example makes me think speed has nothing to do with it but straight wide roads makes people think they don't have to actively participate in driving 100% of the time.

    1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

    public transport

    Would be nice do have but it's pretty much a no go in the US.

  3. 16 hours ago, HvP said:

    when drivers believe it is safe to drive fast the roads actually become less safe.

     

    7 hours ago, DDE said:

    Ugh. Without outright lockdowns, in some places Corona has boosted road traffic as people avoid mass transit.

    I don't disagree with either. I do remember reading about the studies during the pandemic lockdowns. It's really interesting but, lockdown traffic and pre-lockdown traffic general behavior isn't exactly an apples to apples comparison. I do believe they are close enough to draw some conclusions and generally agree with the findings. My earlier comment was to point out that while better roads would help, better cars and drivers are needed. Possibly even less drivers by way of better mass transit and better designed roads/cities(for pedestrians). Only fixing one of them could leave results lacking.

  4. 4 hours ago, HvP said:

    It's our roads that are built wrong. Speed kills.

    I don't disagree with you at all. But I seem to remember a study that showed, statistically (yeah, I know), that speeders pay more attention and have less crashes but worse crashes when they do. So, speed kills is still true but I wouldn't put most of the problem on speed. I would put most of the problem (in no particular order) on poor driver preparation (not knowing where they are going), poor driving ability(they give licenses to nearly anyone), driver inattentiveness (cell phones that connect to your car!, radio, french fries, .....), Lack of perceived danger and responsibility (cars are safe but not 100%. Every time you turn the ignition on you should think "I could die or kill someone" because driving can be dangerous), large to oversized vehicles (harder to control, gives a sense to drivers of more right of way than is deserved), and roads, like was mentioned.  And sure, speed kills.

  5. 19 hours ago, AeroGav said:

    Is this an engineering problem that is already solved ? 

    Yes. In the automotive world (where I work) there many different solutions that work well and could potentially be adapted. Thinking variable camshaft timing actuator and solenoid setup, similar to what @RCgothic said.

    18 hours ago, Shpaget said:

    Power transfer is fairly trivial, sliding or rolling contacts should have no problem with this.

    Non-contact inductive power transfer could also work.

    But, I do wonder, why rotate a piece of the ship? You could just make all the stuff fixed and rotate the whole thing. I would think a little gravity would help with things like fuel tanks and water recycling.

  6. 11 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

    3Mg83h7.jpeg

    I'm surprised that wrench doesn't have a Cummins part number on it. Mixing units happens all the time with them. Recently I had to run a volume and pressure control solenoid test on a Cummins 5.0L that requires replacing a fuel rail banjo bolt with one that has an AN fitting on it. the banjo section was 14mm but the AN was 9/16 (which is just enough larger than 14mm and too small for 15mm). I haven't use a 9/16 wrench in probably more that 10 years.

  7. The knowledge required to go from standing naked in a field to wearing synthetic clothes and video chatting with someone on the other side of the planet inside a temperature controlled room is really what is required for ISRU. To say it's vast would be an understatement. This is a subject that fascinates me but I don't have the education required to add to it meaningfully. I do though have some random thoughts.

    On 6/13/2022 at 10:26 AM, Hyperspace Industries said:

    ridiculous amount of energy needed to get aluminium

    If you think about the ways to get power(heat or electricity), it is possible to end up in a situation where you have an excess. Especially when you don't really need to worry so much about environmental damage (can't make the moon MORE dangerous for instance). I'm not dismissing the difficulty of heat and power management but, say on the moon for it being close, enough stuff can be sent to have plenty of power. That makes aluminum...I want to say trivial. But that leads to the thought of radioactive materials. If you have fission reactors on the moon, can you refuel them with locally sourced materials? (a quick search revealed an article from 2009 about the discovery of uranium on the moon, so maybe). If everything comes down to heat or electricity, wouldn't power be the most important? With enough power we can always use the preferred human method of brute force for anything we need.

    Also, if you have aluminum (non-oxidized) but you need iron (unsure of how you would end up in that situation) and all you have is iron oxides, thermite is a fun and exciting reaction that lets off some heat.

  8. 4 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

    But if increasing oxygen partial pressure doesn’t affect uptake at all then this is DOA. 

    Not necessarily. My tinkering with zinc-air was nearly 10 years ago(oh sh... it was more than that, I'm feeling old now). You would think that someone has an idea of a material that can be used. It doesn't even matter if that material is super expensive because that side of the battery is not consumed. It does seem most of the research was done when lithium batteries weren't what they are today but with the better environmental impact of zinc vs lithium(and cobalt) you would think someone is still working on those. I do know there is a company still trying for iron-air batteries. I think x-air batteries can be better than li-ion just got to wait for someone with funding to figure it out.

  9. Zinc-air batteries (and other x-air batteries like iron-air) can offer many solutions but like stated specific power is lacking. There was a bus company in California (can't remember the name) that was doing research into bus scale zinc-air batteries. They discovered the graphite side (oxygen gathering) limited the O2 into the battery and not the quantity of O2 in the air. They theorized that a different configuration of carbon was needed, like graphene. I'm not sure they solved that, but that was not the biggest problem. The best electrolyte they found was KOH (common in alkaline batteries) but as large scale zinc-air batteries discharged the potassium reacted with with the air(mostly the CO2) and the electrolyte was precipitating out of the solution (pretty sure they haven't solved that one yet).  The best part of most x-air batteries is the ease of recycling (also , if you want another rabbit hole to fall down, zinc-air can be made into a hybrid flow battery). Used zinc for instance just needs heated and it will reject the oxygen. You just got to solve the other problems and you could be a zillionaire.

    I once built a crappy zinc air battery mostly because the materials are cheap and I like to tinker.  Zinc from boat sacrificial anodes(or rub the copper off a penny), KOH from the chemical store (KCl for water softeners is also usable), and graphite from the art supply store, plus a cup and you could make your own too. Amps per cell is very low but ~1.2V (1.65v/cell is what it was supposed to have) isn't bad.

  10. 3 hours ago, Nuke said:

    they actually heat some parking lots to keep them clear of snow

    When I lived in a much colder part of the world my neighbor had a driveway like that. I was envious because all I had was a cheap shovel.

    Also, car engines try to use all the heat they make to push the pistons down not make things warm. They are not very efficient heaters.

  11. 4 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:

    Michelin's new product gains traction.

    I always took this project as the fusion reactor of tires. I wouldn't hold my breath about these being put on regular everyday cars anytime soon. I could be wrong, but note the article says there no word on price and since there is almost no margin on tires I would bet, if they get them to work, they will be expensive mostly because they can. Cost will keep the manufacturers and car owners away even if they end up better in every other way.

    As for the tire manufacturing process, I was under the assumption that the natural rubber (that is absolutely required) was the only problem resource. I can't imagine Canada having large quantities available.

     

  12. 6 hours ago, ARS said:

    1. The target's rear is as heavy as the front (no lighter or heavier side)

    2. The target's overall weight is much heavier than the front of police vehicle

    3. The target has a rear mounted engine (meaning the rear that's getting rammed is the heavier side while the front is the lighter side)

    1. 50/50 weight distribution is somewhat common in mid to high range cars. they handle much better than front heavy vehicles. Add in advanced traction/dynamic control and you have a car that could drive out of such a maneuver if the traffic/road conditions were right.

    2. The PIT maneuver is more about overloading the lateral traction of the rear axles' tires than overall weight. If a heavy vehicle had worn tires(or a poor choice of tires) on it a PIT could be even more effective.

    3. Rear and/or mid engine cars usually have a 50/50 distribution.  I once owned a Pontiac Fiero it was a 45/55 distribution. The second the rear tires lost traction it would flip directions. A PIT on that car would be super effective.

     

  13. 2 hours ago, HvP said:

    For me it looks like embedded tweets take either take several seconds to load in or fail to load entirely leaving just the unformatted placeholder text.

    Yep. Same here

    16 minutes ago, SOXBLOX said:

    It always loads in as text, and then changes to an embedded tweet for me. I'm using a Kindle with Silk...

    I have also always noticed this but lately it has been very slow. (Fast PC, fast internet, firefox) It has to be twitter but this is the only place I come across tweets embedded or otherwise.

     

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