I almost bought a Hemi Dodge Charger some months ago. I went for a Ford Excursion instead. The reason was a peculiar failure mode of the Hemi engine. They are a little bit prone to oil starvation at idle. IF you have the engine idle a lot, for a long time, that can cause excess wear. If you run the engine above idle a lot and shut it down quickly the engine lasts a long time. I have no idea if this was ever fixed in more recent versions of the Dodge Hemi, but chose not to take the chance. (The one I was looking at had been a city vehicle and then bought used and run many more miles all with an unknown idle time… but the city use involved hazard / work lights so likely was a lot at idle)
Now I find out that the Hemi engine is to be discontinued. But NOT for any wear or oil starvation issues. Nope. Still a spectacular performance engine loved by millions. Nope, what is killing it is the $Billions of dollars that Dodge / Chrysler (Stellantis) must pay to Tesla to buy “credits”.
See about the 9:30 point. Tesla makes a boat load of pure profit off of government enforced payments from the gasoline competition to buy Carbon Quatloos. The offset payments for their “excess consumption” of oil products and CO2 produced. Elon was just bright enough to figure out how to be on the other end of a government enforced punishment & transfer payment scheme…
This is also why your bigger cars and trucks are costing between $70,000 and $100,000 for more or less ordinary cars. Want a big engine? Pay Tesla for the privilege. Just hidden in the gas car company transfer payments for carbon credits and fuel consumption penalties.
So the Car Industry is no longer a Capitalist competitive industry, it is a Socialist Government Managed industry.
IF you want a car or truck with a big engine, I suggest finding a nice old car, and preserve it as a Classic. That’s what I’m doing with my fleet. $60,000 buys a LOT of maintenance and upgrades.
Musings from the Chiefio 
That whole green ” save the planet” thing is 99 % a scam and 1 % about the environment.
Some of us knew that 15 or 20 years ago…but the scam is getting bigger, uglier every year.
The choice as given us is between “save the planet” and “save the people” and the only answer allowed is “save the planet”. There is no both. There is very little overlap.
The wonder of it all is how few environmentalists realize they have been scammed and used.
Yep, the wife and I are both retired and in our late 70’s. We looked at buying a new car, but the price is out of reach. Next, we looked at nearly new, but used. Still ridiculous. So, I found a local mechanic who will allow me to buy the parts and he will install them at night or weekends. With 150k on the 2008 Tahoe, the suspension has now been completed… rides great. Just had new solenoids installed in the transmission, new headlights and a new fan motor for the AC. I’ve found an electrical guy for the things that don’t work electrically. He says GM is a nightmare. Anyway, so far, so good.
Elon wants to get to Mars period.
Cracked/rusted through-frame GM trucks are going for cheap up here, bought 2 in the last 3 weeks for $600 and $500, the latter has a 5-speed and both are 4WD.
The drivelines can go in almost any truck.
It is kinda interesting that all the governments of the western world Have put all this legislation in place thats beneficial to going to Mars.
Maybe we should ask ourselves, What would it take to put a colony there, Not terraform the planet, just have an ark, where life could survive for 20-50 years. Like in biosphere2 greenhouses/underground…. I’m sure if some people here thought about it about it, we could come up with some interesting things.
@Josh:
There are 2 major “issues” with a small Mars colony.
1) Getting there with “stuff”.
2) Maintaining that “stuff” without a whole planet of infrastructure.
You can delay #2 by shipping more stuff from Earth, making #1 more of a problem
Once you have “enough people” to be stable on Mars (figure at least 100), protecting them from radiation is Job #1. Quickest, easiest, and cheapest way to do this is to use the Musk “tunnel boring machine” to make long tunnels deep enough under the ground to be safe, and seal them with some kid of “goo” brought from Earth.
This now gives you your first taste of #2. How do you make more “goo” if you need it? How do you repair a worn or broken tunnel boring machine without parts from Earth? Electricity to run it all? See the Tesla solar panels and power walls… but say you want to just “weld on” some more material to the cutting teeth (a common thing in power diggers). OK, an electric welder (shipped from Earth) works for a while. As do some hard metal welding rods. BUT, should you want to make a new welder or repair that one… From where would you mine Copper? Iron? Cobalt? Chromium? How do you refine it? Where do you get borax for flux? Wood or plastic for a wire brush handle? Phosphors for your fluorescent bulbs? Or fabricate light emitting diodes for LED lights?
That’s the problem for a 50 year colony (and “perpetual” is even harder… as a LOT more different minerals are needed.. like, where to get plain old salt? )
Then there’s the food problem. You can grow a lot of stuff in an LED Lit Greenhouse. For a while… but you still need nitrogen fertilizer, phosphorus, potash, and a dozen or two trace minerals… Now much of that can come from a good composting operation, but not all of it. Nitrates break down and are lost. (Luckily they are the easiest to make… but need a fairly energy intensive and fairly big operation normally). To grow your colony will need added amounts of those things. Where do you get them on Mars?
Everything shipped to low earth orbit (LEO) costs about $10,000 / lb at present. Then you need to get it to Mars…. So things like contact lenses and drugs are almost certainly going to be shipped from Earth (since it takes thousands of folks to make and run factories to make all of those things that are needed). What happens when an aspirin for a headache costs $50,000 / pound? Or about $200 for a single dose?
So you can see that a Self Sufficient Colony is a hell of a lot harder to craft, and needs a much much larger number of people and factories / machine tools / crafts sent. The personnel & material needed for a first go at that is gigantic. Plus a whole lot of New Stuff needs to be invented. How do you make rubber goods without rubber and oil? (Hint: Jojoba Plants, oil seeds, algae). But you still need the chemical industry of at least some size.
So expect that for the first decade or two, a whole lot of absolutely essential goods will be shipped up from Earth until folks figure out how to do without, make small batches in lab scale facilities, or you grow that colony to a 100,000 folks with a fair number of them geologists, miners, and engineers.
My first guess would be a “Few $Billion” for the starter colony then about $1 Billion a year for a decade to keep it going while solutions were worked out. Breakthroughs in a lot lower “cost to orbit” and “cost to go to Mars orbit” would help a lot. Then likely 100 or so launches of the biggest ship we’ve seen flown (or Musk’s Starship) to get everything needed up and over. For about a 100 person minimal size post.
Maybe about $1 Billion per person landed on Mars and supported for a decade.
It would be dramatically cheaper to make an O’Neil Cylinder in Earth Orbit and get it up and running, along with asteroid mining to support it financially. Order of costs about the same as a Mega-Cruise Ship plus cost to get it to orbit. A LOT less if you can work out how to make metals and slag radiation shielding from orbital stuff.
The “good news” is that there’s a lot of Iron in space, along with a fair amount of Aluminum (mostly in silicate rocks). So you have some ready materials to start working with. Also it is already out of the gravity well of Earth, so not $10,000 lb. You just need the Delta-V to get it where you want it. Much cheaper.
So I suspect we’ll see LEO populated first (to some extent it already is with the space stations) and than a Lunar Base (easy to make a shelter with lunar soil / rock and lots of radiation shielding for cheap). Then a colony on Mars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Your wording: ” Elon was just bright enough to figure out how . . . ”
I’ve wondered about Elon. My thought is that he is both bright and lucky.
A fellow named Eric Peters has posted on the extra charge to the buyer of trucks and SUVs that companies have been paying to Tesla. Then Elon built the Tesla Charging Network for which the same companies have now signed up for. Buy another company’s EV and pay Elon to charge it.
I’ve no idea if he saw these things years ago, and planned on them, or whether he sussed out some and got lucky with the rest. The big “if” has been the governments that have continued and upped the subsidizes. Saving the planet has become a religion that genuflects to his bottom line.
Naked and Afraid should do an episode on Mars before we collectively make a decision.
That green energy cult and scam and those electric vehicles are killing more than just the Hemi engine,
” … Ford is cutting 1,000 jobs in the United States and Canada after accepting a subsidy from the Biden administration to produce more electric vehicles…”
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/ford-cuts-american-jobs-after-biden-admin-boosts-company-with-green-subsidies/
Tesla built its charging network with no subsidy. It would have been impossible to ramp up BEV sales without a widespread and reliable charging network. AFAIK, Tesla’s Supercharger network has not yet received any state, local or Federal subsidy.
Musk makes a fair proportion of his “luck” by relentless fast-cycle innovation, integration, automation and optimization across his companies. Thus Tesla Superchargers have 80% lower installation cost than competing charger networks. https://electrek.co/2022/04/15/tesla-cost-deploy-superchargers-revealed-one-fifth-competition/
Tesla claims their Superchargers are a profitable operation.
The Superchargers also feature 99.95% reliability according to their report on 2022 performance. This compares with hit-or-miss experience on other charging networks.
Electrify America was financed by VW as “penance” for cheating on diesel emissions.
@Nick:
IMHO, VW ought to have never copped to “cheating”. They just used the rules as given. I think they ought to have said “Hey, you made the rules, we just used them!” and stuck to it. The Government said “Pass this test” and they made the car smart enough to do that, but also have good mileage and performance when not tested…
Hey, it was the Government’s test… they could have made it just a normal drive around the track… (which is sort of what they went to from their original stupid test).
@Jim2:
I think it would be a way too short episode … and not very interesting watching naked bodies blow up like balloons and froth… (Mars being a soft vacuum…)
Musk saw an opportunity and took it. He did not have any stake in ICE.
Those companies based on ICE also see where the future is going. They have a big handicap, competing against themselves.
BUT, the market is rigged. By the govt rules and by the subsidies, and by the media.
Electric motors are great. On vacuum cleaners. drills and other power tools. even some chainsaws. some lawnmowers. toothbrushes. even city cars.
Too bad about the batteries, especially for the cars. not to mention the trucks. Forget about trains and planes. Everybody knows that.
What they don’t know is that they are being led down the garden path on EVs.
You will be allowed to buy an EV, if you can afford it. But electricity to charge it will be rationed. It has to be because there won’t be enough for everybody. Rationed and expensive. But the voters won’t realize it until it is too late.
@YMMV:
A big part of my utter lack of interest in E-Cars is just that Charging issue.
You can’t just hand someone some cash and fill up. Nope. You get an “account” and then your car and the company have a “bit of a talk” and it then decides to charge your car… So trivial to put in a bit of code that says “except when The Government says not to charge”…
We’ve already seen the start of this. Gov. Nuisance in California announcing a ban on new gas cars and everyone forced to buy e-Cars same time he announces “don’t charge your car due to electricity shortage”.
It would require a complete doubling of the entire electric grid to replace motor fuels. It just can’t happen. We can’t mine the metals and make the grid parts fast enough. But that’s OK, ’cause we can’t make the e-Cars fast enough either. Not enough copper and Lithium and cobalt and… no way to mine it a lot faster either.
So like England blowing up their coal plants before the windmills were working, or Germany ditching Nuclear before they had an alternative source of supply: Beatings will continue until morale improves and Economic Green Destruction will continue until it can’t… and then we will start to rebuild. Only question is: From what level? 1950 level? 1900? 1800’s? (Probably not ’cause we can’t breed enough horses fast enough…) So likely about 545 AD Level. You know, just after the great collapse of 536 AD… Or maybe, what with all the good copper already mined, from about the time of the Bronze Age Collapse when they ran out of copper…
Or the bean counters took their easy way out
The big problem will be charging those EVs. OK, there’s also a big problem mining enough stuff to make them, and the energy it needs to refine those materials, and that without oil you need to find a different material to make the road surface and to make the insulators you need for wires, but those will be Somebody Else’s Problem by the time you have that EV parked outside.
My bet is that that old dream of Free Energy may soon be realised. For most of my life I believed that both momentum and energy were absolutely conserved, but fairly recently (as a result of being informed of experimental evidence) I looked at the logic and realised that in theory they cannot be absolutely conserved – there are exceptions.
For momentum, the essential logic is from Newton, where the action (force times time) is equal and opposite to the reaction (also force times time). This symmetry (by Noether’s theorem) leads to the conservation of momentum – it isn’t an axiom, but a logical deduction (though it’s generally taken as axiomatic). However, if you dig deeper here, what actually happens in a collision between two objects is that one puts a stress into the electric field between them, that stress propagates at the speed of light between the objects, and then that stress produces a force on the second object. The action and reaction are actually two separate events with a spacetime interval between them. In fact each object sees a force from the field at that point, and reacts to that field here and now, and the other object that produced the field stress does not affect things – it could be at any distance or may not exist, and it’s only the field-stress that the object experiences that is important. If the field is of constant magnitude, then the time delay does not affect the symmetry and thus momentum will be conserved, but if the magnitude of that field is changing then the action and reaction will no longer be symmetrical and momentum will not be conserved. You can easily do this using a wave of electromagnetic field.
Meanwhile, that momentum is conserved is one of the essential symmetries that leads to conservation of energy. Break CoM and you can also break CoE, which is why the “reactionless” space drives are so important as experimental evidence of the possibility of making energy from *nothing*. Of course, this is also the reason why a lot of people consider them to be impossible – they’d rather believe that energy is always conserved than accept the possibility that it might not be.
Odd thing here is that the people experimenting with reactionless space drives insist that in their theory momentum is absolutely conserved. I’ve also failed to convince them to try the simple experiment of setting up a couple of drives (for balance) on the shaft of a generator. Once the linear speed of the drives exceed a certain speed, they will be producing kinetic energy at a greater rate than the power needed to run them. The maths works out a speed in metres/second of the inverse of the thrust in newtons/watt as the break-even speed. About 20m/s for the IVO drive.
That’s not, however, the only way we can break an essential symmetry involved in conservation of energy. A friend is working on an alternative solid-state idea that I think should logically work.
There’s also the possibility of converting ambient heat energy to usable power, using the equivalent of a solar cell but with a semiconductor with a band-gap of around 24meV as opposed to a “normal” solar cell of around 0.9eV. I’m working on that. This will be somewhat more-limited as to the amount of power it can produce, because of icing problems, so a few kW will be a reasonable capacity before the heat-exchange surface gets too big to be practical. Cost should be about equivalent to a solar cell of the same output, but you get output 24/7.
Thus, in a few years with a bit of luck (and some flexibility on belief), an electric vehicle will become practical because you either need much smaller batteries that self-charge or because no batteries will be needed other than maybe some starter-power to boot up the main power. They’ll also be a lot lighter that way, too.
It remains that the current design of battery-powered cars really doesn’t work for the majority of people. Too short a time between charges, and not enough chargers, and of course they cost way too much anyway. The risk of them going up in flames is unacceptably high, and the consequences when they do can be severe. It’s not a viable technology, really, even though some people would buy them for the ludicrous acceleration available. Then again, people also spend money on drag racers that need an engine rebuild after around 1000 revolutions of the engine, but have tremendous acceleration. There’s always some people who will push to the limit and beyond.
However, electric motors are pretty cheap to make relative to an ICE, and if you can sort out the electricity supply then an EV would be preferable.
The main problem in predicting the future is that it’s a projection based on what we know is possible right now, and can’t allow for new discoveries and inventions. Still, with the new inventions, you first need to realise that something is actually possible, and why, and then work out how to do it for real.
The EU is on the brink of creating a digital currency. Game over.
My Naked and Afraid remark was snark to point out the hostile enthronement. Like you say, there is no natural life support there. Not oxygen, no obvious water, and no food. I’m not so sure it would be practical to transport a boring machine to Mars. Also, it would take a large amount of energy to run. Terraforming might be an option but takes longer than Musk will live. And terraforming a planet that already lost most of its atmosphere will be an on-going proposition. It’s not even a nice place to visit, much less live there. I wouldn’t go if they made me.
Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA’s watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet.
Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency.
https://nypost.com/2023/06/27/nasa-locks-4-volunteers-into-3d-printed-virtual-mars-for-over-a-year/
@Jim2:
FWIW, I did a similar 105 day version some decades back (prep for SpaceLab not Mars, but they wanted to know how to select for folks who don’t get antsy in Social Isolation for long periods in a can…)
I know what those folks will be experiencing (at least the first 3 months…).
Oddly, the worst part is the first 2 weeks. At about the 15 day point, it just sort of “becomes the new normal” and after that it is just a long boring wait.
EMS – “boring” being the key word. It would drive me up a wall.
Musk started SpaceX in 2002.
After He found out how expensive rockets were, He was looking to see how feasible it was to build a greenhouse on Mars. He didn’t get involved in Tesla till 2004, And then he started the boring company Supposedly to alleviate traffic in la.
He figured out how to land/reuse rocket, took evs from 50mi range/top speed 500mi range/hauls ass. Pretty sure he’s trying to improve boring machines, developed cheaper comsats (need global coms on mars)….
@Josh:
BINGO! We have a winner! Everything Musk does if directed at Mars, one way or another. He figures out what is needed, then figures out a way to make a company that self funds the R&D to do it. Vehicles that don’t need oil. Reusable rockets for cheaper haulage. Making living space tunnels fast and cheaply. Communications between outposts without wires and cables. Communications with Earth in volume. Etc. etc.
So anyone want to guess how much Lithium he expects to find on Mars? ;-)
@em
;) maybe that’s his motivation, maybe something else…
What are your thoughts on water ice as a shielding material? Both radiation and micro meteorites
Musk intended to shoot people to Mars 2024. Looks like that’s not happening.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-spacex-mars-plan-timeline-2018-10?op=1#2024-blast-people-on-the-first-human-voyage-to-mars-8
@em
I’m kinda socially inept, was the bingo comment snarky? I chuckled ’cause I thought was….
I like what Musk has done with Twitter, and if he wants to go to Mars, more power to him. It’s just not for me.
That said, he might better spend his money on a hundred Mars robots to explore likely habitats, ice, and minerals. Robots are so much cheaper to maintain under Martian conditions. I’m sure he could find a way to do it cheap, relatively speaking.
@jim2
I’m guessing that he is planning on mostly autonomous “robots” humans need lot of shielding from radiation, thus the big push for self driving cars, waymo? I think, has been rolling them out in Phoenix az, lots of people are working on lots of things that I could see as being necessary on mars
He could set up the robot system like a video game “Minecraft on Mars.” Hire people to “play” it. Find ice, minerals, build stuff. Fun for all!
@jim2
Lol, that reminds me of a movie, benders game I think…
Lots of other people working on mars, been the subject of sci-fi over a hundred years….
Must be a lot of people thinking of chixalub…
Josh – Ender’s Game? Where he thought he was playing a simulated war, but was actually commanding a real one? Wiped out thousands of his own guys as a tactic?
@jim2
I think that was the gist of that movie…. idk, your comment made me think of it….
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
I can’t remember what all i heard but I think back in the early 60s we had the big gun on Barbados, 2 16in naval artillery barrels welded together. Might be project harp, not haarp.
Launched 100lb projectiles 50mi up?????
Em prolly knows all bout that
@Josh from sedona: I think you are remembering Gerald Bull and his experiments to shoot objects into space. He was eventually assassinated (probably by Mosad) for his collaboration with Sadam Hussein to design a one meter caliber cannon to fire from Iraq to Israel.
@Josh:
The “BINGO! We have a winner!” is a reference to all the times that is shouted out in old movies (or in real life) in Bingo Games – especially at fairs and church nights… Just another way of saying “You got it!”
FWIW, Musk has many many times said his #1 goal is to get humanity to be multi-planet precisely because a lot of risk of a big rock from space wiping us out on one planet.
Water, or water ice, are both about the same as either mechanical or radiation shielding. Kevlar is a LOT lighter and better for impactors. Realistically, you want to separate the two operations mentally. For impactors, a kind of composite armor works better. Less mass needed and if impacted, your shield does not evaporate or leak out… But that does not prevent using everything you have to advantage.
So, take the International Space Station: The outside has fabric armor ( I think it is kevlar) along with metal skin and similar. Yet the water storage makes a nice wall filling around the interior radiation safe room.
On a surface, such as Mars, water has the problem that if you get a leak, the top drains first… right where you need the most shielding from incoming cosmic rays et. al.
The easiest and cheapest material to use is just dirt. Either by piling it up, or drilling a tunnel through it deep enough under the surface. Most rocks are some kinds of silicates, so have Silicon & Oxygen atoms. Denser than water with just Oxygen (hydrogen doesn’t add much to shielding). Dirt also has some heavier metal ions in them too. Heavier elements tend to higher nuclear cross sections (better chance of stopping an incoming ray / particle) so that’s a good thing:
You can see that C and O are relatively small cross section. That’s why Carbon and Water are used in nuclear reactors as moderators, not shielding. They interact with neutrons to slow them down, but not stop them as well as Ca or Cu or Zn (or lead that’s really good… and dense).
BUT, you need to take that nuclear cross section and also adjust for the density of each material. IF you have a whole lot of water for free, that can be better than hauling up lead at $10,000 / lb to LEO.
Similarly, the Lunar Regolith and Martian Soil are already in place, so are free, and in addition to Silicon, have many other heavier atoms in them (Feldspars, for example, can have all sorts of metals from Ca & Mg to Al, and Fe. Even Barium of barium enema fame for stopping x-rays.)
So, were it up to me, I’d plan on using any water (and food and furniture and waste and luggage and fuel and…) that was stowed on a space ship as “convenient and free” added radiation shielding in transit in space since I’m hauling it anyway. But I’d also have added structural shielding sufficient to protect me in any case. Once on a surface, I’d rather use dirt… Free, abundant, easy to form. Preferably by just running a tunnel under about 20 feet of it and sealing the tunnel with cement & polymer.
For micro meteors I’d want a hard surface to cause them to shatter, then a tough surface to slow them down, then a “catcher” of polymer to stop them and anchor in place. So ceramic over cermet over metal backed by Kevlar. After that: Do you REALLY want to risk 5 months to Mars landing with all your drinking water leaked out and boiled off into space from a 0.1 mm puncture?
Look at bullet proof windshields. Layers of impact resistant glass, bonded with a thin polymer sheet, then a thick layer of polycarbonate, then more glass, oriented polymer film, glass. Back that up with a kevlar panel and put it over the metal skin of the pressure chamber. Call it 4 inches thick for a .308 scale bullet AND it doesn’t evaporate, leak out, or get drunk… FWIW, I’d not mind 2 layers of that with a couple of inch air cap between them to have the fragments spread out. Break up the penetrator on first impact with ceramic (you don’t need to see through it, so ceramic and cermet instead of glass is an available upgrade) then absorb the fragments and slow them down with the strain oriented polyester, then more ceramic and finally the polycarbonate layer to stop anything but the really big chunks. Then repeat the “break up the projectile” on the next ceramic / poly / ceramic section and catch the bits in kevlar (IF any make it through).
There’s probably better materials that I’m not aware of. You would also want the thickness you need proven in testing. Properly placed air gaps can spread out the debris from an impactor in the top layer to do less damage over a larger area on the other side of the air gap. There is something of a Black Art to designing such ballistic panels and testing is important to inform that art. (Some home made bullet stopping ballistic panels are made of odd stuff… like garden fabric / epoxy or fiberglass / epoxy). IIRC, the ISS has a thin foil layer on the outside then a few inches of gap to the next layer… most micro-stuff traveling at a zillion mph vaporize when they hit the foil…
So that’s my take on it. Purpose built shield on the surface with engineered materials. Radiation shielding by water as opportunistic. Safe Room with engineered radiation shields for solar storm bursts. Dirt as best shielding with a LOT of depth on planetary and lunar surfaces.
Hummm, so what is the best food to eat to make waste barriers?
Just sayin, :-)
I guess the eco-not-sees on Mars will campaign against oxygen production given the fact Mars’ atmosphere is already mostly CO2.
@Ossqss: “what is the best food to eat to make waste barriers?”
Sandwiches, obviously.
Made with real sand.
@Ossqss & TTN:
But certainly not beans… as gas is way too low a mass density…
@true Nolan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_HARP
@em
The bingo we have a winner doesn’t confuse me, I thought there is a subtext of thanks captain obvious 😉
@em
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
I was thinking about shielding for a truly massive colony ship, like a Borg cube (star trek) maybe even make it out of shipping containers… launched into Leo with an electro-magnetic railgun…
@Josh:
I’m usually fairly obvious. IF I’m being snarky, I’ll almost always tag it with “/snark;”. Just not a big guy for subtle snarking… or really much of subtle anything…. (speaking of socially inept… if someone asks me what I think of some ‘controversial topic’ I tend to just tell them… Seems that isn’t well received in some circles… So my usual thought is “Well, if you didn’t want to know, why did you ask?”.
BTW, I only knew about Bull form the Baghdad Cannon and his death at the hands of Israel for making a weapon for Saddam. Didn’t know the back story that lead up to that moment. Thanks for that… So had Canada not pulled their funding, Bull would not have needed to turn to Iraq for funding for his R&D / Development, and we might have rocket guns to orbit for modest payloads now. And of course, Bull would have been alive to develop it. For lack of a nail the shoe was lost…
FWIW there have been a fair number of interesting and potentially much cheaper cost to orbit technologies that have been scuttled once they started to look promising. Enough to make a guy think maybe the TLAs don’t want it…
My windows are insulated with Argon gas. I wonder what food could produce that?
IIRC, Argon gets its name from the Greek word for ‘lazy’, so maybe that is not a good choice, and it can suffocate you too I suppose. Inert but deadly :-)
@Ossqss: Argon? Yes, that is a Nobel Gas. You can make it with any sort of food, but it has to be digested by Royalty.
Per Pykrete:
Needs both wood dust and water; both in short supply in space, both low density / low nuclear cross section. Both heavy to lift into space, so expensive. Oh, and it needs active cooling to remain a solid long term. Now if you can grow wood in space stations and find water on asteroids, you can make a decent impact shield. With enough volume it could provide enough radiation shielding, but the cost of “Delta-V” to change directions will make your ship expensive to maneuver.
It has an advantage of cheapness to make on the planet surface, so good for things like cheap giant ships that can take a punch and not sink in the Arctic.
Not so good in the tropics, or for a very long duration hull that must be lifted into space.
Very good impact resistance and very easy to repair (smear slush of sawdust in almost frozen water in place and freeze it.).
Might not be good on the “sunny side” of a space ship where sunlight can warm things to a few Hundred Degrees…
The parameters I think are missing in your pykrete idea are attention to nuclear absorption / scattering cross section, effectiveness to weight ratio (a critical thing in space travel), weight to orbit, and duration in the harshness of space. For all of those, “rubble” or “dirt” from asteroids will be more effective and cheaper (no launch costs out of our gravity well…, higher nuclear cross section … and dirt in space is already devoid of volatiles and has long term stability in space.)
Me? I’d take “asteroid rubble / dirt” and melt it in a solar furnace to make ceramic panels, then put the engineered (cheap, and easy) panels on the outside of the ship or sensitive areas. Make a few spares to stow on board too, so if a panel gets smoked by a clinker in space, a new one can be swapped in easily. Then put a Kevlar pad a few inches behind the panels so any bits blasted off don’t ding the metal pressure vessel. For completion, a metal foil fore-shield a few inches toward the outside of the panel will smoke micro-meteors preventing slow erosion. (Turns out a speck traveling at 100,000 mph will erode most any hard surface over time, but if it hits a bit of aluminum foil releases so much energy it vaporizes and doesn’t impact nor erode the surface behind the foil. Neat trick, eh?)
For a ship that maneuvers a lot, you would likely want to chemically enhance the rubble by removing low nuclear cross section atoms that add weight but do not improve radiation blocking. Like H and O. Concentrate the metal ions and things with big nuclear cross section (after all, the energy lost to moving heavier weight around, when the ship accelerates, will cover a lot of energy to refine the rubble to lower weight with the same effective blocking).
Pykrete could be very useful as an emergency patch material. Have a bag of wood dust in emergency kit. “Just add water and cool” and you get a nice hard patch material. Don’t know about adhesion… maybe use a stick on sheet over it to hold the patch in place… I think I’d rather have some lead dust in epoxy, or leaded glass fibers and epoxy though… Hmmm…. lead glass in Fiberglass… Has some legs, I think.
@em
Holy crap!
When I talk to normies they have a blank look on their face most of the time, you on the other hand, are like…. I’ve been thinking about that for 45 years…. and so on etc etc
That I actually got you some new info?
I’m writing this down… 😉
Thoughts on the railgun for shipping containers????
@em
BTW, there are people doing 3-d printed polymer concrete structure for mars, look like beehives.
Iirc you were looking into polymer concrete a few years back….
@Josh:
Yes, still interested in geopolymers. been busy moving though, so had to let it sit.
Railguns for shipping? Depends on where…
In zero G space, you can accelerate them slow and and they will get to their destination at a slow but OK speed. In a gravity well to space? Only stuff that takes high G’s can be shipped. (Eggs to orbit will take about 10,000 Gs and arrive as soup… but rock rubble from the asteroid belt down to lunar orbit? Fairly low Gs needed and rocks don’t mind anyway.)
IIRC, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress had railguns for shipping, then turned into weapons in an Earth / Moon “disagreement”… Lunar Colonists dropping big rocks on Earth had them arriving with a LOT of Delta-V from the gravity well…
railgun from earth, to launch inert payloads to leo…like shipping containers full of parts for boring machines and such.
i was thinking maybe use a boring machine and go down like 2 miles…. maybe not strait, but whatever angle you needed to get the right trajectory, leave the machine in the bottom of hole most likely. build rail gun in the shaft, 2 miles should be plenty of velocity, shoot 40ft shipping containers into leo…. prolly need a conical heat shield for exit, and a dedicated power plant to charge capaciters….
Josh:
Just “do the math”. What G’s can your cargo take? People are about 3, up to 6 for fighter pilots. About 100 for things like meat and potatoes if supported and not too deep. (i.e. shallow loads on metal shelves so you don’t get 12 feet of it crushing those on the bottom). Things like iron bolts and metal chunks? Thousands of Gs depending on the material, thickness vs length, how supported.
Now you need about 15,000 MPH to 17,000 MPH at the muzzle (maybe more, you need to know the drag and such and how much V you lose to get to orbit… so about 14,700?? IIRC at 60 miles up.) You will be doing about Mach 23 at the muzzle, so you WILL need a heat shielded and highly aerodynamic shell / body.
The major problem there is that most heat shielding is some kind of ceramic and doesn’t like vibration, shock, and abrasion all that well. So a supporting sabot will likely be needed. Given that it’s not trying to burn off speed (like a space capsule or shuttle returning from space) you can likely just absorb some amount of the heat of getting up 60 miles altitude as fast as possible. (60 miles / 16000 MPH = 0.00375 hours to orbit altitude. Multiply by 360 (minutes x seconds / hour) = 1.35 seconds. You could likely just use a stainless steel or titanium shell and let it get hot, as in about a quarter second you will be out of the deepest and highest pressure air.
Don’t forget to allow for the work done to lift your payload 60 miles against 1 G of gravity…
But that puts you straight up, not at orbital speed tangential to the planet, so figure about a 45 degree launch angle and multiply the times by 1.5 or so. You will need a “circularizing burn” once out of the air and in space so the ellipse of the orbit does not return to ground… Allow some extra mass for fuel and a rocket engine and a computer to do the burn…
So, OK, given that speed, take the Gs acceptable to get to that speed and find the length of tube at those Gs to get that speed. That’s the length of your rail gun. Take the mass you want to launch (cargo AND pod AND protective shell AND sabot AND any launch supporting surface to prevent pod deformation) and find the kW-hr needed to get that accelerated to that speed.
Those are your rough estimate numbers, now add about 10% to 20% for expected losses or inefficiencies, and proceed to engineering, testing, and corrections.
The rest is just engineering and testing. (Hope your calculus is good…)
BTW, mines (deep holes) rapidly get hotter with depth and anything over a few hundred feet tend to fill with water even in dry areas. IIRC, most folks proposing rail gun launchers use a rail parallel with the ground and toward the end start to tilt it upward.
Remember that mostly you don’t need to go “up”, you need to go 15,000 MPH parallel with the earth surface… and also 60 miles up… but the vast majority of the energy goes into the speed, not the altitude.
Oh, and another BTW, I think the fastest rail guns we have today are about 1/2 that orbital speed… so you might need to have a big scram jet or rocket motor on the pod to get the rest of the needed speed….
How deep a hole would you need to dig on Mars so that the air pressure at the bottom would be 2.5 pounds per square inch? If you had a base that deep, you could fill it with pure oxygen and breathe fine without a heavy pressure vessel enclosing the base. Be REALLY careful with any fires though…
Yeah, you really don’t want to be using 100% oxygen. Fire is a mother. A mix works fine: a percent or so carbon dioxide, about 20 % oxygen, a bit of water, and the rest nitrogen or one of the lighter noble gases.
If the ambient pressure is low, you can up the oxygen some and/or up the pressure.
@em
“do the math” & ” hope your calculus is good” are issues for me, something i hope to rectify in the future….
i had figure that the shaft would need a casing and to be at an angle, 45 sounds about right, but maybe it needs to be way shallower. the deepest mine is in south africa i think and over 13000ft deep.
as per the payloads i was talking about picks and shovels and fertilizer, nuts and bolts, etc. stuff that handle the Gs and the vacum of space. i was aware that escape velocity is around 17,000 mph, i hadn’t check up on rail guns lately, but was thinking :longer barrel= greater velocity. IDK hey i’m a dropout, there’s a ton of stuff you know that i don’t . i know there would be a lot of kinks to work out, but could it be a cheaper way to orbit for certain payloads???? is it even at all feasible????
@em
“We’ve already seen the start of this. Gov. Nuisance in California announcing a ban on new gas cars and everyone forced to buy e-Cars same time he announces “don’t charge your car due to electricity shortage”.”
so where does that leave you???? move to florida, or get a big solar system with batteries…..
it is artificial demand, without demand you can’t fund innovations (r&d) you have to move product to improve it, unless you have super deep pockects. youve touched on this a tonnes of times with energy/resoure shortage crap, the low hanging fruit gets picked, you build ladders….
the question i keep asking is why?
and i bet you can guess the answer i keep coming back to….
@josh:
The expectation is that it will be cheaper to orbit (thus NASA working on it).
Even if you just go parallel with the surface and turn up later, all that Delta-V (change of velocity) comes via the electricity in the rail gun. That is energy where you did NOT have to lift it off the launch pad or accelerate that mass of fuel to velocity. That is a HUGE win. Look at a major rocket launch. Running the engines at MAX power for minutes as it Oh So Slowly lifts of the pad and gets up to, maybe 1000 feet and going a few dozens of miles an hour. That is a giant amount of fuel burn for the first little bit of going somewhere.
Compare even a Mach 1 launch from a Rail Gun (well inside ballistic velocities already demonstrated). Then turn upward to climb out of the atmosphere where change of direction is very low cost compared to acceleration from 0 to Mach 1. Then think about the fact Mach 8 or so is theoretically possible…
The atmosphere to orbit is about 60 miles thick. At a 45 degree angle, that’s about an 84 mile run (and a lot of that will be in very thin air…). Even at a 30 degree angle, you are talking maybe 120 miles. (and again, most of that is in thin air). So at 1200 miles an hour (about Mach 2) that will take 6 minutes (only 3 of it in 1/2 dense air or more and only about 2 of it in really high density air…).
So you can get rid of that long slow high burn rate “get off the pad and up a little bit with some speed” phase of the launch, and get into the “above 40,000 feet and going a Mach or Two” highly efficient range for a RAM or SCRAM jet… to take you to Rocket Land at the place where air is too thin for jets (about 100,000 feet+)… and you can then just work on taking your mass from Mach 10 to Mach 25 or so, but minus the need to get that mass off the pad and up with way more fuel burned…
It ought to be a win. But “some engineering required” ;-)
Remember that high speed fighter jets (about Mach 2) can turn upward and go to “Zoom Height” at about 50 to 60 miles (but at nearing zero speed and out of control). This maneuver is used to launch missiles at satellites they want to destroy. So the stuff needed to transition from supersonic parallel to the Earth surface to “straight up” has all been worked out. Just for things starting at about 40,000 feet and Mach 2 under jet power.
@2nd comment:
What I did was move to Florida with enough land for subsistence / emergency food cropping. I’ll not be buying ANY new car ever in the rest of my life. Money will only go into maintenance of my existing fleet. (2 are Diesels and I can make my own Diesel Fuel if needed… plus Jet-A will be available longer than I will be alive, so worst case is I hit the local airport for a drum of Jet-A… that works really well in Diesel cars).
“Why” is pretty simple: Control.. Buying gas with cash and driving where you want is not controlled. Charging your e-Car that can only be done via “online accounts” gives full information of where you are and what you are doing. We’ve already seen lots of desire to limit what you can do to “approved” things, so a ration of “you have 50 miles of commuting charge to get to work, nothing more” is a lot easier with an e-Car and “account” (and a 300 mile max range one way…)
Just look at what the WEF has said. They want to herd people into monolithic buildings where everything is no more than 15 minutes away and “you will own nothing”. Welcome to being a cow. To be milked then “harvested”…
@#3:
Maybe I need to visit Croatia ;-)
Maglev rail gun type thingy …
https://startram.com/
Rail guns? Sure! And then there’s Spin Launch.
https://www.spinlaunch.com/
What’s the highest gee force a human can stand? What if the human is floating in a liquid to give him neutral buoyancy? The limiting factor becomes the density difference between his flesh and the air in his lungs. So suppose you have the guy breathing an oxygenated fluorocarbon?
The liquid is dense though compared to air, so use a pump to fill and empty the lungs. Or maybe bypass the fluorocarbons, just fill up the lungs with saline, no breathing, and use an external oxygenator spliced into a major artery to take care of your oxygen needs. At that point you run into a limiting factor being the density difference between human flesh and that of human bone. I did some back of the envelope calcs thirty years ago and estimated something on the order of 100 gees — if you are willing to go just a bit cyborg.
As for fuel usage at rocket launch, I ran across what I thought was a great idea using off the shelf (relatively cheap) hardware. Instead of using strap on boosters, the idea was to use strap on jet engines. Say a ring of six jets with just enough fuel (no oxidizer!) to assist to get the rocket up to perhaps 60,000 feet or so. At that point the jets fall off and parachute back. The jets run at max throttle, no harm done for the few minutes they will be firing. Besides, they are CHEAP when compared to rockets, are mass produced, VERY reliable, and can be bought and replaced off the shelf. The weight savings (did I say “no oxidizer”?) and cost savings are substantial. Maybe the jet assist could be adapted to an updated OTRAG design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTRAG_(rocket)
The idea has been explored in sci-fi (of course…) with Alastair Reynolds in the trilogy starting with “Blue Remembered Earth” putting a rail-gun in an evacuated tunnel in Africa with the uptick at the end using Kilimanjaro to get some extra height before emerging into atmosphere. Then high-power lasers ablating the base of the capsule to provide the extra thrust to get to orbit. Looks like it might be workable.
The stories are set in what is effectively a post-apocalyptic world where the West has collapsed leaving the Africans as the remaining civilisation able to run high-tech and get to space, which certainly looks to be a possibility at the moment.
Spinlaunch also looks to be viable, though there’s somewhat of a risk of “letting go” the vehicle at slightly the wrong point in a revolution and missing the right exit-point. Could make a mess of the launcher and capsule, and take a while to rebuild everything. Currently they’re testing a smaller-scale version, which will result in higher g-forces during the spin-up to achieve adequate linear velocity. Fine for things that can take those g-forces, and there should be little vibration problems that at the moment shake up satellites during launch.
However, I think the future will be the non-reactive drives. At the moment the thrust available is around the 50mN range (would lift around 5g or 1/6 oz, or a teaspoon of water), but once it’s accepted as something real and more people start working on the idea it should rapidly improve. The big impediment to development here is that current theory considers it to be totally impossible, and this is because since Newton we have considered the action/reaction symmetry as being a single entity. In fact, the action and reaction are two events that are separated by a spacetime interval, and each is a local interaction between the local field and the object. The normal symmetry is a result of using a constant-strength field.
The problem with rockets and specific impulse is that though you get more thrust by ejecting mass faster, the efficiency (thrust per watt) goes down as the inverse square of the ejected velocity too, so for the same amount of reaction-mass ejected at twice the velocity you’ll need 4 times the energy, or if you want 3 times the thrust you need 9 times as much energy. Reaction mass needs to be carried on the rocket, so you have a limited supply, and once it’s gone you cannot get any more delta-V no matter how much energy you have available. The Bussard ram-jet was invented to get around that problem for interstellar transport (space does have some free atoms per cubic metre), but we really don’t currently have a way of making one.
Sci-fi (at least the ones I’ve read) hasn’t explored this sort of violation of the laws of physics we grew up with and consider to be basically totally true and inviolable. Of course, there have been stories using antigravity as a concept, since that is a bit easier to accept, though I suspect that it will prove impossible to actually reverse that attraction to a repulsion, though there may be a way to reduce or nullify that attraction (see Alzofon). Even if you reduce the weight of a spacecraft to zero, you still need to have something producing a thrust to get it to go somewhere. Thus without a “reactionless” drive you’re still limited by the amount of reaction-mass you can carry.
Note that a photon-rocket doesn’t need to carry reaction-mass, but the efficiency (thrust per watt) is exceedingly low. Theoretically-possible, but practically out of reach.
Not sure how talking about a Hemi engine getting canned led to a discussion on space drives, but there it is. We’re fairly close to tests in space of the various designs of reactionless drives, which should lead to commercial use of them and the acceptance that they actually work. After that, expect competition to improve the performance.
One unique item about Startram is the MHD pumps.
Magneto Hydrodynamic (MHD) Pumps
MHD applications such as pumps, generators and thrusters have been used for decades. The Startram system uses a “MHD Window” which allows one end of the launch tube to be open the atmosphere, thus permitting launch of the vehicle. Normally, atmospheric gases would immediately fill up the tube and the launch vehicle would be subject to extreme heating and stresses associated with traveling 8km/sec in air. However, the MHD window allows ionized gasses to be continually expelled from the tube, thus maintaining a near-vacuum in the zat all times.
Thought this was an interesting tid bit
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roslynlayton/2022/06/01/up-700-chinas-consumption-of-us-coal-drives-shortages-not–railroads/
@Josh:
I removed the tracking tag from the end of the link to Forbes. The “?sh=1d5aad961168” that was at the end. They don’t need to know who first searched for the article and has posted the link, or how much it got used ;-)
Yes, interesting story. But we already know that the Biden White House and the Democrat Senate are “For Sale To The Highest Bidder” and that China has a LOT of $US they want to dump fairly quickly. No big surprise they would go on a spending spree for US Physical Goods…
But blaming the Rail Roads? Sheesh! They are doing great.
@jim2: “The Startram system uses a “MHD Window” which allows one end of the launch tube to be open the atmosphere, thus permitting launch of the vehicle.”
Most people here probably remember Tesla’s particle beam weapon he proposed back IIRC about 1930ish. He planned on using tiny dust sized particles of tungsten accelerated with million volt DC static fields. His problem was how to accelerate them in a vacuum but still get them out of the weapon without a solid window to hold in the vacuum. His solution was similar to, but lower tech, than the Startram approach, a low tech method only possible because the “window” was much smaller (pencil sized). Essentially, he had a venturi as the exit of the vacuum portion with high pressure air being blasted outward. Even with a vacuum on one side of the venturi tube, if the air is blasted fast enough, ALL the air passes outward and none is sucked back into the vacuum.
@Simon Derricutt: ” a post-apocalyptic world where the West has collapsed leaving the Africans as the remaining civilisation ”
Heinlein used a similar premise in “Farnham’s Freehold”, as a way of criticizing racism. Of course with people being like they are, many critics claimed that Heinlein was endorsing racism instead of criticizing it. Sigh…
“since Newton we have considered the action/reaction symmetry as being a single entity. In fact, the action and reaction are two events that are separated by a spacetime interval, and each is a local interaction between the local field and the object.”
Oleg Jefminko pointed out something similar in electromagnetics, that current models of induction require instantaneous action — which doesn’t leave much room for cause and effect. I do not think I am up to understanding his book, but here is a link. (OK, E.M., let me see if I can do this right. I put a “link:” before it?)
Link: https://www.amazon.com/Causality-Electromagnetic-Induction-Gravitation-Gravitational/dp/0917406230
“We’re fairly close to tests in space of the various designs of reactionless drives,”
Was sorry to see that Mike McCulloch’s satellite test was canceled. Is it just me, or is there way too much politics involved? I suspect that someone does not want us getting off this planet.
Maybe you could pressure up a salt dome with air and use the air to your advantage. It could have several air entry points along the launch tube running all at once. The ones above the payload would be pulling a vacuum on the payload. The ones behind it would be pushing it along. Just adjust the flow rates to provide a gentle launch over the length of the tube.
This is the sort of connection contemplated.
https://www.detectorprospector.com/magazine/steves-guides/steves-guide-gold-suction-dredges/
@jim2: Nice design for a gold dredge!
Thinking in general about accelerating something through a long vacuum, the principle has been adapted to fire arms, mostly air rifles. Consider a bullet being fired from a rifle. The tremendous pressure behind the bullet pushes it out the barrel, but as it is doing so, the bullet is compressing the air in front of it. After all, the air can only get out of the barrel so quickly due to its own inertia. Part of the BANG! a gun makes is from the compressed air (not merely the combustion products) leaving the barrel. Suppose you could make a vacuum in the barrel before firing. How much faster would the bullet (or pellet) travel? Put an O-ring on the muzzle, and have a small hinged flap to cover it. Somewhere in there have a hose which connects to a hand squeezed air pump for evacuating the barrel. Even if you can’t remove all the air, pulling out 90% is a big improvement. When you fire, the bullet is pushing a much smaller block of compressed air in front of it. The compressed air front pushes open the flap just ahead of the bullet. Result? Hundreds of feet per second faster bullet speed.
TTN – the IVO test was postponed because they were warned by a supplier that there had been failures in the batch of the bus they were using, and it could habe excessive power draw. They thus took the satellite out of the launch. Better to not risk a failure, and it turned out that they had a bad bus and it would have screwed the test. I asked them. No problems with the drive itself.
The book by Jefminko looks interesting. Bookmarked for when I can get it. Looks like another bit of the answer. I’m not sure any of the answers are right, but if it’s near-enough then it can lead to new things becoming possible. Thus I really look at this theoretical stuff as “what can I do if that’s right?” and “can that be engineered?”.
Per The Book:
I vaguely remember from some time several decades ago (about 1980?) a theoretical discussion of being able to do a LOT more with electricity and magnetism due to the simple fact that Maxwell’s Equations were only being used in reduced and simplified form for all the stuff we presently do (i.e. all the various electronics “laws” and “rules”) but that there were really more than the 4 typically used, and they were a bit more complex having not been “simplified”. IIRC, it was said there were really 6.
I looked at them, decided I didn’t want my head to hurt that much and I’d come back later… which didn’t happen… I wonder if it is time?
Britannica says there are “4 Equations”:
https://www.britannica.com/science/Maxwells-equations
Feynman starts at 4, but then does a lot of stuff with them that I’ve not yet gone through. Is that expanding them back to what they started as, a larger set, or is that just showing how they work? Don’t know (yet?) but isn’t just “here’s 4 use them”…
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_18.html
Bolding by me:
So a big “Dig Here!” to slog through all that… or a bit of a hunt to find what Maxwell first said and how many equations… IIRC (a big question…) it was just that “time variance” and “fixed charges” simplification that was narrowing the scope from reality.
A taster (note that the formulas get garbled so are left out):
He then goes on to look at how changing / moving magnetic fields do odd electrical things and in general seems to be exploring that “now let things move” case. (Try, just try to summarize a few pages of Feynman into a sentence…)
Then there’s this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Maxwell%27s_equations
So was something lost in the work Heavyside did in “cleaning up” Maxwell’s Equations? I suspect “maybe so”, but I’m pretty sure it would take someone as well studied and steeped in physics and with similar skill to find it… if it is there at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Treatise_on_Electricity_and_Magnetism
So was something lost in that “changing its form of presentation”? Eh? Donno… but if it was and nobody is looking… the question of “what was missed” might be in plain sight…
EM – Richard Banduric looked again at the original Maxwell equations, since a v/c factor existed in them that was later ignored because it was so near to zero as to make no practical difference – or at least that was what was thought. See https://electricspacecraft.org/index.html# for details.
For the rest of what you wrote above, some important stuff but I’ll address it later since this year the Tour De France is passing by pretty shortly. I’ll be out to watch.
@Simon:
Oh, and note that everything in my comment above is “pre-quantum” … so it all needs some “additions and adjustments” at the moment you realize it is only the macro view and has not incorporated the reality of QM.
So there’s that…
( I think I need more coffee… maybe a gallon or two… ;-)
But even in my “only a pint” caffeination level, I can see that 4 non-quantum equations extracted from 20 “with differences of opinion” leaves some room for our present ideas about what is, and is not, possible to have some holes in it…
I just can’t get further than that just now…
Reading Simon’s link to “Electricspacecraft” I can see that I’m “late to the party” of thinking something missing in the Heavyside derivations of Maxwell… by about a century… There was a lot of bickering going on about just how to use Maxwell’s work back then.
So, OK, better late than never… and unfortunately, since one side “won” then, it has not been popular to think maybe the wrong side won…
So my major “issues” are that “displacement” currents are new to me, and “quaternions” are math I have not done (and do not know), nor am I proficient at vector calculus nor vector math really, any more. (At one time I could do vector math fairly quickly and both partial derivatives and integrals were “easy”, but it has been 40 or 50 years of unused time…). So the thing being described is a new idea and a bit odd and the tools used to describe it a bit opaque. Gonna take some time…
But it does look like some folks equipped for the job are looking at it.
EM – The initial experimental anomaly was the “electric wall” produced in a 3M plastic sheet plant. See http://amasci.com/weird/unusual/e-wall.html . Richard got interested in that and tried to figure it out, and in 2015 I came across him as he was trying to raise funds for a drone lift system that he thought could get to space. As you’ve read in the website, he found that v/c term in the original Maxwell equations, and though it was quite a small correction he found it could be multiplied by using rough and smooth surfaces that were oppositely-charged and moving relative to each other. Important thing was that the two surfaces needed to be isolated from each other, so the charging needed to be ionic rather than using wires. He figured that using a standard charging system (where you have a common ground wire between the +ve and -ve) put the electrons in the same frame of reference which killed the effect. Though this assertion never sat easy with me, since reference frames are a mind-construct, there is a quantum-related effect of energy-levels of electrons needing to be all different in a connected system (Pauli exclusion principle) so there may be something in that. There is a secondary logical problem here in that there is no such thing as an insulator – there are conductors and semiconductors, and electrons will leak through anything we regard as an insulator. The rate gets lower the better the insulator, but will not get to zero. Practically, though, the two contra-rotating disks needed to be isolated from each other to work and produce a net thrust. Back then he was getting about 100mN of thrust, with the power being used in spinning the disks and in the ionic charge generation (around 10-20W total power use). This was also tested in vacuum. Needed a test in space, given that in a vacuum chamber you can’t really discount a reaction against the walls of the chamber.
The disks themselves were a bit hard to make, using nanoparticles of Silver to get a large surface area for charge to be accumulated.
He’s currently doing things for the military, and thus I don’t know how far he’s developed his ideas and inventions.
Displacement currents in a dielectric are, AFAIK, just the movements of the charged particles within it. Looks like a real current and acts like one, because it is a real displacement of charge. The energy is stored in the internal fields being stressed.
As I understand quaternions, it’s (simply!) complex maths using i, j, and k which are each roots of -1, and the rules used simulate a 4-dimensional system that keeps each dimension equivalent to a physical dimension. There are also octonions, which allow us to simulate an 8-dimensional system, and these were used by Fred Alzofon to produce a Universal Field Theory where various approximations applied produced Maxwell’s equations along with all the other basics of physics. Quite a long way above my level of competence, and Fred didn’t use two words when one would be enough to people who already knew what he was talking about, so you really need to be someone who’s spent a decade or two on that level of maths before it would make proper sense. I think that Fred used the basic idea of no boundary that quantum mechanics used, and that if we added in Mike McCulloch’s horizon idea to it then it might fit experimental evidence better.
Question here is what those extra dimensions in the maths actually correspond to, as I suspect there are only 3 physical dimensions in reality. Thus I’d posit that each field we’re dealing with adds another 3 dimensions (or maybe less than that) to the 3 physical dimensions we actually have, and the maths will also treat time as if it were a physical dimension, so we need 8 dimensions in the maths to deal with 3 physical dimensions and time, with a single field which also has 3 physical dimensions and time. Another question is whether those 8 dimensions in the maths are enough, if there’s a second or third type of field we haven’t taken account of.
Bottom line though is that more things are possible than current mainstream theory would predict. A while back (also in 2015) Bob Norman told me what he saw a friend of his demonstrate, which could reasonably be described as a UFO drive. Because of the NDA, he couldn’t tell me how it worked, but I’m certain he wasn’t fooled and didn’t lie. He got no further information about progress from around 2016, so I presume the inventor and his friend crashed their craft and died (or maybe they tried going too high and the air-containment failed), leaving no explanations that have been found. I’m thus sure that producing a large amount of reactionless thrust using a small amount of power is actually possible, and that also makes me take the other reports of successes more seriously rather than dismissing them as impossible. Still needs to have the evidence, and to be measured correctly, but since the function is possible we just need to find the best way of doing it.
One problem I have with the theory side is that it’s very hard to eliminate recursion in the explanations. For example, Mike McCulloch’s QI uses waves (Unruh waves) as the reason for inertia, but if you don’t have an analogue of inertia and an analogue of a restoring force (springiness) in the underlying “stuff” then you can’t support a wave. Thus we’re explaining inertia by saying that inertia already exists as a basic property of space. Though the theory works very well in giving the right answers and in producing numbers that match the experimental anomalies, and we can use the formulae to make things that practically work and allow us to manipulate inertia and momentum in ways that used to be thought impossible, it moves the explanation of inertia itself to a more-fundamental property of space that itself remains unexplainable. Same thing applies to String Theory, in that in order to vibrate those strings need to be springy and to have inertia. Somehow, once people have an explanation they like, they ignore the recursion problems and that they still have a bit more to explain. Any wave-based theory puts inertia and springiness in at the fundamental level (and hidden from view as an assumption), and thus will allow you to explain fields and inertia at the higher level.
@Simon Derricutt: You have a MUCH more in depth familiarity with electrogravitics and associated subjects, but are you familiar with William Hooper? Multiple links here:
http://www.rexresearch.com/hooper/hooper1.htm
Interesting that Hooper was using non-inductive coils for his work, but instead of pancake coils, his were cylindrical with the wires running up and down. IIRC Hooper was involved also in a project with the Canadian government investigating UFOs.
TTN – I think there’s some confusion because of how people use words here. The word “antigravity” is often used to describe some “unexpected” force or tendency to accelerate that would be better described as being a force that has no connection with gravity.
For the various types of special ways of winding coils that are supposed to have some unexpected (in standard theory) properties, for the most part I think they are fooling themselves. With bifilar winding, where the current in each wire is going in opposite directions and so the net current (and net magnetic field produced) is reckoned as zero, in truth the wires have a specific size and thickness of insulator around them, so the current paths in each direction cannot be coincident – you get a net magnetic field produced that depends on how far the measured point is from each conductor. The standard way of simulation uses FEMM, which produces a vector sum of the magnetic field produced by each elementary current flow and direction at each point in the space of the simulation, so if you want to you could easily simulate the results of a bifilar coil. Such simulations are very good at predicting what you’ll measure with a magnetic probe, too. As usual, the smaller the dimensions you use for each current element, and the more calculations the FEMM thus has to do to produce the vector sum of the finite elements of magnetic field generated, the more accurate it gets (at a cost of taking longer to calculate).
Thus a bifilar coil has a high magnetic field produced very close to it (where the distance from the coil is comparable to the distance between the conductors of the coil) and the net field drops off very quickly with distance as those differences in distance from the conductors becomes a small fraction of the net distance. Bit like looking at a checquered flag. When you’re close you see the black and white squares, but from a distance it looks just grey.
As far as I can see, the only way you’re going to get something that differs from the simulation is where you’re using high frequencies and thus the delay-time between the source current changing and the magnetic field changing at the point you’re considering becomes significant. High frequencies here is somewhere in the GHz region. If you’re only dealing with MHz frequencies, likely the effects (if any) will be pretty small. The inductance of multi-turn coils is such that they will generally have a pretty high impedance in the GHz region, thus a small current flow and a small magnetic field possible, so any effects from the light-speed delay will also be small and almost-insignificant. With single-turn coils, you can get the impedance down, but it still depends on area so you also need a small area, and then you need a large current to get a big-enough magnetic field. To get a large current with a low power use, you need to have a high-Q resonance so the logical way to proceed would be to use a resonant system with as high a Q as you can get, and also to consider the distances between things so as to get the phasing right.
Thus it’s likely that “electrogravitics” is mis-named anyway. Are they getting these “unexpected” forces from an electromagnetic interaction where, because they believe CoM is always true, they think it’s a gravity effect whereas it’s just a force produced from the delay between the emission of a magnetic field and its reception? The fact that the propagation of a magnetic field is limited to the speed of light introduces a slight asymmetry between action and reaction that becomes larger with increased frequency and larger distances relative to the wavelength (thus a larger phase difference up to +-90° or 180° total).
For Hooper, the idea of several types of electric field seems odd to me. If different types existed, then we’d be able to measure a difference between them. An anomaly should have been seen between such moving fields and stationary ones, and apart from the relativistic differences (which are expected and not anomalous) I’m not seeing it. Of course, I think that the electric field and magnetic field are actually the same thing, with the magnetic field being what happens when seeing an electric field at a non-zero relative velocity. That also implies that the curl of a magnetic field must be there in the electric field, but not visible when you are relatively stationary to the electric field generator. Bit like a circular polarisation on a resonant wave – you only see it circulating if you’re moving relative to the source, but without relative movement you’ll see it as a a fixed angular polarisation. Visualise that as a twisted paper tape between the source and your measuring-point, so if you’re moving relative to that tape you see the rotational angle of the tape changing, but if you’re not moving it stays at the same angle.
Still, looks to me that people using “non-inductive” coils aren’t looking deeply-enough at their definitions, since they are actually inductive at short-enough distances. There’s also a problem here with looking at net measurements over an averaging interval, and maybe not considering that there’s a propagation speed to consider giving delays from different distances. There’s a further problem with the near-field/far field differences, and the propagation speed of the initial near-field wave (almost-certainly longitudinal) as opposed to far-field (over around 10 wavelengths) where the EM wave is transverse. Experiments seem to me to suggest that the propagation speed is faster than light within the first 1/4 wavelength then dropping to c by around that point when transverse waves start to appear (but maybe also problems with seeing other than a transverse wave) and being almost-all transverse after around 10 wavelengths. Things are a little odd in that near-field region. I’m not sure as to whether we can extend that region and transmit a longitudinal wave for longer distances, or what velocity it would travel. Does seem we can do that with wires and get a higher transmission velocity than c (up to 8c in experiments), using unterminated coax, but may not be able to do that in free space. Near-field has dragons….
This near-field problem may be a reason why the simple system of two resonant loops 1/4 wave apart and driven with1/4 wave phase difference doesn’t produce a net thrust (I’ve tried that). Apart from that, we don’t get much of a boost from the pretty low Q of such loops, so looks to me that we’d need to use resonant cavities and antennae to get into the far-field region with larger fields from the resonance too.
If it’s not obvious by now, seems that the more I find out the more I find I don’t know enough yet, and that what I thought was true isn’t. Still, using the wrong theory can result in a correct prediction (or near-enough) as to experimental results. If it works, then it will continue to work and we can use that even if the explanation may be wrong.
RE: The “Wall” I wonder if anyone went into the chamber bare footed. It certainly appears the person was getting a charge the same as the interior of the sheet. Barefooted or sock footed, it might be that the charge would bleed off to ground. Speculating, of course.
Apparently, there are multiple bi-filar coil configurations, with different properties.
Bifilar coil configurations
parallel-wound, series connected
parallel-wound, parallel connected
counter-wound (series)
counter-wound (parallel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifilar_coil