DV8 2XL

If the generator runs at a fixed RPM you might look into a tuned exaust.

See: http://www.wisci.org/wiki/WiSci:Policy Yes tech topics are welcome

herpguy, just because your in grade six doesn't mean you can be a member of the more educated audience... I've known lost of people who went farther in school than that I wouldn't call well educated.

Goes back to what I was saying about closed or open systems. You have to use supercritical saturated steam (+400C) to get any power out of a light engine. If you make steam and vent the used steam to atmosphere 10l will take you nowhere, if you close the circuit with a condenser big enough to dump out heat fast enough so the loop doesn't vapor-lock you will have to add a lot of weight.

Remember it's not just the weight of the engine. The weight of the working fluid and the fuel have to be taken into account too.

Its not quite that simple. For one thing the amount of cooling must be controllable, and there is no telling if this would increase the weight or in fact provide a large enough area. You have to be able to dump a lot of heat out of a steam engine when it's running if you want to keep it compact and light.

Big issue with airborne steam power is that you have to run a closed cycle reusing the working fluid. That would mean that along with a source of heat to make steam, you also meed a way to dump heat to recondense the working fluid. This not only adds to the weight of the aircraft, but also a radiator which which means area with air moving over it that would add to the drag. Using an open cycle like a steam locomotive would require that the plane lift too much water for any useful amount of payload or range.

We've been there and done that too http://www.megazone.org/ANP/tech.shtml

Cap'n Refsmmat and I have been working on the policies for the new wiki but it would sure be helpful if we could get some input from a few more people.

No they are ignored by the scientific community because they are not reproducible, even if they were these tests have not been framed as tests of QC, thus they cannot be said to explain anything about this theory. Well if it the effect cannot be detected, or denied by by observation, then the issue is moot since then no useful predictions can be made. Ether way the theory dies

At this time no proof of QC exists, however unlike some, I am not willing to dismiss it outright. However I do recognise that there may be other mechanisms that are at work, like thermal randomness, to provide the necessary non-deterministic input to the system. Well that's the crux of the discussion we were having. No, it will 'boil down' to proof via some yet to be determined quantifiable, reproducible, experiment testing a falsifiable hypothesis.

So what's wrong with a good Canadian rye, you traitor?

About $60CDN a month, for all my electric power and heating, but we are on a plan that flat-rates your bill over 12 months, based on a years average consumption.

The call to dismantle suburbia has always amused me. Consider what would happen if cheap individual transportation were to vanish. Mass transit would become available, the average subdivision might not be laid out for the best bus routes but people would put up with poor ones. Can't get to the shopping mall? Corner stores will rise again. The obvious truth (to me) is that suburbia would be re-factored in a number of small ways to adapt to the new reality.

Slow motion to an outside observer, normal to himself. This is the idea of 'frames' in Relativity.

Ok, how about this then? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_aircraft

The Flying Kettle http://www.flyingkettle.com/ Not exactly I know but a start

With an antimeme, of course. And no I'm not being a smartalec, memes can be countered it happens all the time as a mater of course. Presumably, one could design one to selectively nullify another.

Australia is sitting on the world's largest known reserves of uranium, has no pretensions to become a nuclear weapons state, and has a relatively small population. In case you weren't aware, your Canadian cousins have developed a rather nice reactor technology called CANDU, which is great at making electricity, but poor at making weapons-grade plutonium. It uses natural uranium, so you don't need an enrichment plant, and God knows you have plenty of Outback to bury the waste in. Give AECL a call sometime, I'm sure they can set you up with a good deal, on a dozen or so at reasonable terms.

Well they may not be built in the U.S. or any other State that persists on maintaining the 'nuclear (weapons) option' because the current technology is just a fig-leaf to cover those programs. Then again it's likely that what you said in your last paragraph is probably the grim truth, but since we were speculating anyway...

So Kurt Gödel was full of dren?

OK. BEVs, I can clearly remember a spokesperson for the battery industry stating in the early 70's that: 'no new chemistry is on the horizon, or likely to be discovered beyond what the state-of-the-art is now." (I paraphrase) Then came Li-ion cells, zinc air cells, and others. Now this doesn't apply directly to what you have said, but the lesson is clear. Few electrical plants are run from petro-fuels and none need burn anything at all as there is a clean safe alternative in nuclear energy IF we can get our collective heads out of our butts and exploit some of the available designs that don't need enriched fuel and that produce a spent fuel stream that can be reprocessed by PYRO-A or PYRO-B and thus all but eliminate the flow of useless hot waste that current systems produce as well as being inherently proliferation resistant. Smaller, modular designs that could be type-approved, then centrally manufactured, shipped by rail to prepared sites and brought on line in a tenth the time it takes now. As it stands every time a new plant is undertaken in most of the world we have to re-invent the wheel by starting from scratch. As for safety, consider this: aviation and its technical predecessor seafaring are not inherently safe, these are regimes that are terribly intolerant to error and sloppiness. They were both tamed by the application of strict procedure and disciplined execution backed up by inculcating a culture of responsibility. Notwithstanding the fact that engineering wasn't allowed to stand still and this too contributed to safer more reliable systems. But what if...? goes the cry. Well what if? What if a hydro dam busts and floods a populated valley, what if a LNG ship blows up in harbour taking out half a city? All of the designs I'm referring to, fail down; that is the reactors shut themselves off if the drift out of norm. As for this algae scheme history is full of examples of cultures that have monocroped some plant and relied too much on it - guarantee me that some infection won't take this stuff down when we've got ten million acres of this stuff as the backbone of our transportation infrastructure - you can't.

Nevertheless some good science has been done; the Drake equation , for example and SETI (despite the null result so far). Within the confines of legitimate science we seem to be doing all we can with the tools available.

Not bad bascule, that just about sums it up.

Proposing the use of large-scale raceway ponds to cultivate microalgal on waste-water nutrients and then to anaerobically ferment the algal biomass to methane fuel is not new. However, major technical challenges have limited the practical application of this technology: the difficulties of maintaining selected algal species in large-scale production systems, the lower-than anticipated biomass productivity and methane yields, and the high costs of harvesting the algal biomass and of the overall process. I'm not sure from reading the first link that these issues have be solved for oil production from that feedstock as yet. Again I don't think that the long term transportation fuel issue will be solved by staying in the Carnot-cycle box. We need to look at more radical solutions.