Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Maths

"Nothing will change until directors limited liability is removed"

Directors don't HAVE limited liability. Shareholders do as a shield if the company goes under but directors are responsible for their decisions

Unfortunately thanks to decades of fat brown envelopes, that doesn't get enforced

Re: Maths

"the idiot company concerned has retained old data"

Which means they've broken the rules of GDPR. This could get "interesting" and not in a good way for TT

Re: And online is not better

> Paper (evidence) is better (for us!) in every way.

Many years ago my flatmate dealt with letters from Inland revenue by phoning them up, etc.

He ended up being heavily penalised as there were NO records of his interactions. Lesson being: "keep it all in writing"

Re: Or...

In Surrey, it was the Cock Lane Crusader

Re: Mobsters did very well out of Prohibition

More to the point in such a case, what advertiser in their right mind would authorise their product being pitched alongside such material?

Advertisers wanting to assert their rights about NOT having adverts showing next to stuff THEY regarded as objectionable is at the crux of Musk's legal posturing towards the people who pay him (those advertisers)

Re: Everything burns!

Project HARP was based in Barbados. The 16 inch gun (and several others) is still there today and can be visited when there isn't live firing taking place in the area

There are a few videos on Youtube and other sites about it

Re: Suborbital

"The amount of delta-v required to convert flight 6 to orbital flight was very small"

Technical nitpick: The trajectory _IS_ orbital. It's just that perigee is well inside the atmosphere, with obvious results for continued flight, if things stop working

All that's needed is a circularisation burn to remedy that issue...

Re: It was

They did offer to carry a "real" payload, but there were no takers and if you have to carry a "mass simulator" why not make it iconic instead of just a lump of steel?

Re: all airports will need to rethink their design

Virtually all UK airports have the same problem of poor connectivity and/or being hemmed in. Just like railway lines, you can build one in the middle of nowhere and people will immediately build housing near it, then complain about the noise, etc (look at the history of UK's old lines)

It's hardly unique to the UK. The Dutch spent a lot of time and effort making Schipol easily accessible from anywhere in the Randstad as well as protecting the overruns and yet someone still managed to drop a 747 on a block of flats

Re: re: end of Gatport Airwick runway

Gisborne airport (NZ) is fun too - railway crossing the runway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcnIiYxuzEM

EMAS relies on landing gear digging in and through the surface and the aircraft being below 80 knots - the design criteria are an intact and largely undamaged set of gear

Belly landings risk skimming over EMAS as the contact pressure is unlikely to be high enough to break the frangible surface and belly skids tend to be LOOOOOOOONG - meaning the speed will likely be higher than the designs maximum for EMAS anyway

Small dragon teeth for rasping the bottom of the aircraft might seem like a reasonable idea but they'd likely rip open fuel tanks and make any fireballs worse rather than actually slowing things down

This kind of sitiation is difficult to deal with and very few airports are designed to cope with a long end-of-runway excursion. Heathrow has the M25 at one end and housing at the other, whilst Gatwick has a motorway and a railway station

It's early days, but my money is on the pilots suffering situational overload, failing to lower the gear (which explains the long landing) and then perhaps trying a go-around instead of just deploying spoilers, etc. The aircraft had a nose-high attitude during the entire skid, which is not what you want if trying to slow down quickly

Re: Not just Foxconn

China stopped subsidising EV manufacture in 2018 and axed purchase tax credits in 2022

Re: computers on wheels

There's a burgeoning cottage industry in jailbreaking those features, for obvious reasons

Re: computers on wheels

"Modern vehicles are closed boxes - RTB for pretty much anything"

This is the crux of a lot of problems. Vendor lock-in writ large and loud, with active attacks on those trying to decode proprietary systems

Re: Not just Foxconn

"At least half the current automakers will no longer exist 10 years from now"

That includes China too. There are currently dozens of new makers and that's not sustainable in the long term

The problem for "traditional" car makers is that they've painted themselves into a corner. The huge crop of wannabe EV makers is proof that the entire market has changed in a similar way to what buggy whip makers saw back at the end of the 19th century

"Market barriers" will only make their problems worse, not better. The Chicken Tax nearly destroyed the USA domestic car industry and pushed drivers into trucks/SUVs because it was more profitable for makers to sell those

The bloat on things like F150s is a direct result of emissions, milage and safety standards being tightened up on smaller trucks. Makers are continuing to chase short term profit and the long-term is someone else's problem

Re: Not just Foxconn

Japan has entirely missed the boat on EVs for various reasons including:

1: Not wanting to be beholden to China on rare earths/batteries

2: Wildly unsuitable home charging connections (110V makes for VERY slow charging and unlike USA domestic power there's no 220V option)

#2 has made for a virtually nonexistent home market for EVs. Things are changing recently but there's still a lot of consumer resistance

Re: Famous prediction

"That's until LFTR or similar reactors are built that will use it to produce electricity."

Which is sooner than most people think. The Chinese rebuild of Oak Ridge's MSRE (TMSR-LF1) has been running a test load of thorium for a while and the results are encouraging (no external processing/conversion needed, at cost of a couple of points on efficiency but the cost savings more than make up that difference. Ditto core power density vs longevity. As with jet engines you can run at TOGO power for a short period or 75% maximum essentially forever

Re: Famous prediction

Genuine. China stopped subsidising EV manufacture in 2018 and killed all the tax breaks on buying them in 2022

Re: chargers that won't connect with the app,

In most charging networks, using a credit/debit card or unified card (Looking at YOU, Octopus), attracts a 75-100% pricing premium over using the specific app

There's a lot of gouging going on

Re: Charging infra (in the US at least) is dying

Teslas may have Ludicrous Mode, but the build quality is at best "meh" and sub-par by non-american standards, despite the innovations in battery and systems manglement

The UI is awful too. There's such a thing as TOO minimalist

Buyers are staying away in droves, but not staying away from other brands.

Re: Charging infra (in the US at least) is dying

"companies that make cars have not been in the petrol dispensing business"

They were once (actually, the other way around). Boeing owned an airline too (United)

Such vertical integration was regarded as anticompetitive for obvious reasons and broken up

Charging infrastructure approach falls over badly in the USA for various reasons, but the European approach of hefty fines for non-working dispensers is a strong motivator to fix them quickly

Re: BYD in the US

"They are a BYD supplied skate with the chassis built in England. It's weird to see them driven off the transporter before they are built out."

That's something I'd like to see a video of, just because....

Re: For years I've wanted this

Except that ICE cars have to be sized for peak power output requirements and the engines are horribly inefficient outside of those conditions

A series hybrid has the motor-generator sized for AVERAGE load and runs at one speed/peak efficiency - which improves fuel economy AND reduces the pollution control gubbins requirements dramatically. Most of the complexity of ICE drivetrains is because of the near-infinite range of engine speed/load combinations which can occur and the need to ensure both efficiency plus low emissions under those conditions

"Stuff is exported at cost"

Which is perfectly fine per WTO rules. It's exporting BELOW costs which is classified as dumping

Re: what do the rest do when EV's are being forced on us all

Once upon a time the USA had the best and most extensive public transport networks in the world - right up until the start of the 1950s

The automobile industry had a direct role in killing that off and like so many other things in the USA, there are "racial" factors which aggravated the mess

Re: :)

When it's that cold, ICEs won't start (or if they do start won't run long) without those block heaters to warm the oil up from "gel"

One of the more interesting observations about EVs in seriously cold environments is that despite reduced ranges, users still like them because of features such as preheating and they don't need to be run for 30 minutes just to warm up enough to be able to drive them (as one user put it: "Unlike my diesel cars, you can just get in and drive")