[geeks] Carbon nanotube buckytape

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Mon, 22 Aug 2005 @ 02:56 +0000, wa2egp at att.net said:

> A better example is you car will get better gas milage if you only fill the
> tank halfway and run it until (almost) empty than if you filled the tank and
> ran it until if was half empty.  I remember an old saying in the early days of
> the space program: "A pound of payload costs a ton of fuel."

Actually, no, because the car example is not the same.  The car is more
like a screw driven system in that it moves through a medium, instead of
ejecting a medium to move.

Granted, it rolls over the "medium", but the point is the difference
being illustrated is that it is more efficient if you don't store a
medium on board, but rather use one external to you.

-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak
is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime
literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express
it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one
word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings
rubbed out and forgotten.]