[geeks] [rescue] Computerfests (was: first real server hardware) -OT

[Dan Duncan]

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> > Size isn't that big a factor anyway except where it relates to weight.
>
> Also, I thought they could put a motor in each wheel. 4wd, and fairly
> small.  It seems at least one hybrid show car was like that.

The prototypes I've seen put electric motors at the driven wheels.
It could be 2 or 4.

> > Manual transmissions are going the same way, alas.   :(
>
> Quite a few cars now have a manual only as a special order, or don't
> have it at all.
>
> For example, Honda sells them with 4-cyc engines, but not their six.
>
> Gah!

Tell me about it.  I wanted my latest car to be AWD (I've been
commuting 70 miles each way across a continental divide for the
last 2 winters) and while AWD has become a fairly common upgrade
on a number of cars, the manual tranny doesn't follow it.

Bastards.

> > Biodiesel is nice.  I still want to strangle every drooling cretin
> > who suggests hydrogen or ethanol as a currently viable fuel.  They're
> > essentially storage mediums at this point.
>
> What is wrong with ethanol besides lower mileage?

Ethanol is a scam.  It consumes more energy in fossil fuels
than it produces.  Once you've plowed the fields, pumped the water,
and distilled the alkyhol (all done with fossil fuels) you might
as well have just saved the expense and used gasoline.  The only
reason ethanol is produced as a fuel is because it's subsidized
by tax money.  Ethanol will always be produced as a tasty beverage
because you can't drink gasoline.  (more than once)

> Hydrogen bothers me, as does natural gas.

Free hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe.  The trouble
is, it's pretty damned scarce here on earth.  It's usually locked up
in some compound like water and the best way to free it is by
electrolysis.  The problem with that is that you have to put in the same
amount of energy to free it (plus overhead!) that you'll get back by
burning it.  This is great if you have a ready source of renewable energy
like solar or wind power that you'd like to store up for later, but most
of us get our electricity from fossil fuels, so it ends up being just
like the ethanol.

I want to smack the average moron who thinks electric cars are
zero emission vehicles.  My electricity comes from coal, which
produces all kinds of emissions including spewing more radioactive
material into the atmosphere than any nuclear power plant.  My
net emissions may be lower than a gasoline car, but if I owned
an electric car it would not be a zero emissions vehicle.

> > Right now, I'm leaning towards diesel because the only change needed
> > is to use the green handle instead of the black one when I fuel up,
> > and I think people will manage.
>
> Diesel doesn't really solve the problem though.
>
> You mean as a temporary solution?

As an interim step.  The beauty of using a SERIES hybrid design
instead of the parallel design offered by Honda and Toyota
(although Prius is a step towards series from parallel) is that
the engine/generator is merely a source of electricity.  Since it's
not directly coupled to the drivetrain it's just a module.  You can
easily replace it without any significant change to your design.  Want
to switch your design from gas to diesel?  Pop in a different
engine/generator.  Fuel cells become commercially viable?  Pop in a fuel
cell.  How about a higher performance model to carry heavy loads or go
faster?  Bigger engine.  How about a multi-fuel turbine to burn whatever
is on sale this week?  How about Mr. Fusion?  Hamsters?  Plutonium?

-DanD

-- 
#  Dan Duncan (kd4igw)  dand at pcisys.net  http://pcisys.net/~dand
# One man's theology is another man's belly laugh.  -Lazarus Long