• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle






  • Ah. I see. They are emitting a green light, so I know they’re braking, and it’s OK to cross.

    But, it turns out that they’re planning on turning into a driveway past the intersection, and not into the intersection I am crossing.

    That’s OK. I can check “impersonate a hood ornament” off my bucket list.


    We already have this problem with turn signals: there are circumstances where it would be confusing and dangerous to use them in the manner prescribed by law, and to avoid dangerous ambiguity, they should actually be used much later than the law specifies.



  • “The math is somewhat different” does not give adequate consideration to the importance.

    That 777 I mentioned? The fuel weight on a maximum range flight is more than twice its remaining payload capacity. Fuel weight is the primary consideration you need to be looking at. The efficiency gains from charging batteries (relative to electrically-produced fuel) cannot justify the losses from their constant weight.

    Some estimates say that between electrolysis, transportation and fuel cell conversion it’s almost twice as bad in terms of energy efficiency, so you ultimately need double the energy for the same thing.

    Only twice? Then its not even a contest. I was assuming fuel production was 1/10th as efficient conversion as battery charging.


  • The typical issue with fuel cells is not energy density, it is the fact that you need to waste a lot of energy to regenerate and transport the fuel.

    I’ve never understood that thinking. Yes, it takes energy to produce fuel. So what? We started with a form of energy that couldn’t be stored and transported, and converted it to a form that could be. That’s the entire point.

    So, overall, you’ll need to spend much more energy (= both recurring and upfront costs) compared to running battery-powered transportation if you want to make it a close cycle similar to batteries.

    That’s not actually true.

    A 777 can carry up to 320,000 pounds of fuel, which gives it a 9000 mile range. It will land about 300,000 pounds lighter than it took off.

    Build an electric version of the 777. Put enough batteries on board to make a 9000 mile flight, and it will weigh the same amount on landing as it did on takeoff. It carries the whole load for the whole flight.

    Put that original 777 on the 2600 mile flight from LA to New York, and it doesn’t need a full fuel load. You can drop 200,000 pounds of fuel, and add 200,000 pounds of payload.

    The e777 will still have the same weight of batteries needed for that 9000 mile flight.

    Swap out the batteries with fuel cells, and you can take on an optimal, sub-maximal fuel load for your shorter flights, radically improving total efficiency over batteries.


  • Sufficient storage capacity to meet overnight needs is going to be a challenge; storage to meet seasonal production variation is impossible. To make solar feasible, we need to build out sufficient generation capacity to meet our needs in winter. Winter, with, perhaps, 9-hours of mostly overcast skies and low angles over the horizon.

    Imagine the output of that same system in summer: 15 hours of high-angle daylight and mostly clear skies. The summer output of that facility will be at least 400% its winter productions.

    The solar economy needs absurdly massive electrical loads in summer that can be readily shed over winter. We may see fleets of factory ships, loaded with electrolysis equipment, plugging into grids on whichever side of the equator is currently experiencing summer.



  • It’ll take you public IP and translate those packets to use your internal one.

    That is NAT, yes. But that is only one small function that a router can perform, and not all routers have NAT enabled. You only need NAT if your ISP only allows you to use a single IP address.

    If your computer has an address that starts with 169, 168, or 10 there is a NAT somewhere in your network.

    That’s not actually true. I can create such a network without connecting it to the internet, no NAT. I can create a second network, again, no NAT. I can then use a gateway router that allows any node on the first network to reach any node on the second. That router is still not doing any NAT. It’s just passing traffic between two networks.