Rocket Man

i just tried those figures in metric, it's about 20 000N which is about 6000 lb i think. 3000rpm is pretty fast. that's 50 times per second (you'll hear the thing buzz), you'll have a few issues with materials flex making it not transmit that force properly. i think 600rpm is more the bench mark. by all means, set the maximum to 3000rpm but just don't get lead footed on the first test what sort of motor are you thinking of using?

how is it inferior? the cable *must* originate from space. why not leave it there. you'll use just the same equipment to make the cable as to service it. you need to bring the end down slowly and accurately into the base station, you can't put any tension on it initially anyway. locking it down puts it under threat from wind shear and all manner of debris. the only complications arise in power source and more equipment to make use of mobile weights. edit: most carbon nano tubes are highly conductive, more so than silver. it doesn't take much to modify the cable to pass a current from the top end down. you can put a lot of solar collectors in space before structural constraints come into play.

then it's still the same equation, just add to that the force the machine applies without oscillations.

rendezvous between boats is common place. i did say dip the car in the water. consider the normal ground speed: nil. if the counter weights are mobile on the cable you can put the whole assembly into faster or slower orbitals just by moving mass by mechanical means. you can place the end of the cable anywhere on the equator with pinpoint accuracy. it doesn't wander around rockets are inefficient because they are reaction drives. they use lots of energy to accelerate against a few tonnes of fuel. E=MV^2 this accelerates payload against a rather large counterweight to get the required momentum the car will be in equilibrium with the water ie: floating. if it floats, you have a very convenient fudge factor in terms of tension. move the assenbly up, you have more aparrant weight. move it down, you have less due to bouyancy. if you add payload to the car, it moves down in the water, this does not have to be countered by the orbital sections. when you want to put some muscle in to it to get it moving up, you shift the masses along the cable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt 1mm of lead isn't a tremendous amount.

silicon heatsinking compound would probably be enough depending on the size of the car. how would you connect the motor mechanically? if you were really stuck for power switching, you could try relays. does this car have variable speed? if not, it's a simple matter of rigging two single pole relays the right way. then you can run as much power as the contacts can handle. if you want, i'll post a schematic.

you want the centripetal force. [math]Force = Mass . Radius \left( \frac {rpm \pi}{30} \right) ^2 [/math] i don't know how this works with imperial measurement.

get an AM radio, as cheap as you can buy with a rotary dial. (expensive ones have all sorts of filters etc) extend the antenna and coil it up. tune it to a silent spot and there is a close equivalent to the device you're describing i tried it with my radio, works fine as long as the source is close to the base of the antenna.

if the counter weight is at geostationary, it isn't supplying any upward force. what supports the weight of the cable? i agree with skepticlance and 78000Km, geostationary is about 24000Km. that's where the tension comes from. any part lower than geostationary is influenced primarily by gravity, any part higher is influenced primarily by centripital force. so you get a tension along the length of the cable. it doesn't need to be attached to the planet, becasue it already has tension there, you can't supply an upward force to it from the ground because it will flex. so why fix it to the ground at all? it's moving so slowly at ground level that you can accurately and reliably control it's vertical position from the counter weight at 78000Km. with those distances, pulling the cable 100Km higher is trivial. if the car comes down and floats near the end of the cable, a rendezvous with a boat would again be a trivial matter because the drag from the water nullifies relative velocities.

so the air is for cooling? you should have said. there's a number of ways you can make a cabinet to dissapate heat without letting liquids through. a well designed heat sink ought to do it, but if you're really concerned, you can purchase a coolant system. you can get peltier devices to bolt onto the CPU, they move 70W of heat (silently), a laptop shouldn't put out more than that. i've seen them for about $12 aus.

you want to jump? http://www.flybar.com/pages/home.html

that's not the only way it can work. a crane is fixed to the ground... unless it's a blimp in which case it's still called a crane because that's the purpose it serves. if it's not fixed to the ground, you need another method of supplying the upward force. interms of the elevator, this is called centripetal force. so all the elevator is, is a crane held up by centripetal force. it has a car which moves up and down a cable so it's called an elevator. an elevator in a building isn't attached to the ground, it's attached to a building. a blimp can act like an elevator, all you need is a winch on the blimp. if you move the whole assembly out of the atmosphere via orbital mechanics, you avoid the whole issue of docking stations. the car can be a floating docking station. the cable is held tight across it's orbital.

i'm not sure you're going to get a large air flow through something that won't let liquid pass. if you throw a cup of water at a bed sheet while it's hanging up you won't get much out the other side, but you want something that will react on the molecular level what application is this for? how much air needs to pass through it?

IR can't produce any immediately useful magnetic effects. it's part of the electromagnetic spectrum but the oscillations in the coil would be so fast that NO electronics could ever hope to keep up. (IIRC visible is in the terahertz range while pentium has clocked a supercooled transistor at only 500GHz) that device really only picks up on electromagnetic radiation in the acoustic range (20 - 20000Hz)

where do they grow, what purpose does a tap root serve? in england for example, you don't find tap roots. most root bases are wide and shallow. most aussie trees drop tap roots. what environmental differences are there?

the only problem i see is the restriction of motion and the constant applied forward force on the arm. it would be terribly difficult to run with. a basic exoskeleton shouldn't restrict motion and shouldn't rely on the user to apply large forces. if this thing were made using a farily simple array of pneumatic cylinders and conductive foam to detect changes in pressure, it could apply a force to reposition itself centrally over the users arm compensating for anything it has to push through. it wouldn't be any advantage in wall hopping because you still lift your own weight but you could carry vastly heftier loads over terrain you'd normally run bare.

if you plot a geosynchronous orbit on a map of the world, you either have a dot on the equator or the satellite oscillates north-south. they'll probably make the elevator car bouyant in water, drop it in the sea still on the end of the cable and rendezvous with a boat of some sort. that would be much cheaper and probably more reliable

iirc, a turbine has it's highest fuel intake at it's highest loading, i guess it's all down to how it's started. as for hot exhaust, BMW is prototyping a steam engine to run off the exhaust heat of a standard IC to give it that little extra torque. i still wouldn't want to have to tweak a turbine on the side of the road.

well i'd certainly want to stop it if it was modulated like some of the commercial stations these days.

most high speed trains are electric, infact, most trains anywhere are electric. on a decent sized loco, you can have a more efficient means of burning fuel becuase you can take advantage of the power to weight ratio of a turbine, the only reason they don't put them in cars is because the're notoriously difficult to maintain and are hard to scale down. most cargo trains run a diesel turbine and a generator.

lithium ion is one of the most potent battery types, one of the lightest too, electric motors are normally the most efficient, and lightest... do i see a trend? an IC engine needs a housing made from fairly sturdy stuff, that adds weight. an induction engine just needs something to hold the bearings and coils in place that cuts way back on the materials needed, also, you dont need such grunty cooling mechanisims which are also heavy. a 3phase induction motor, by principle, can aplply an even torque from zero to the frequency the coils are operated at. so you don't need much of a transmission. if you take into account everything that becomes redundant in a switch from IC to electric, the electric is not just lighter but ridiculously so. the only advantage of an IC engine is the energy density of the fuel which has been accounted for only recently

10m waves? try 30 million per second. a decent faraday cage would do the trick

virgin galactic barely kisses the edge of space, it takes 30 times more energy to make an orbital instertion. a sea platform would probably be the way to go, but think of the forces on a decent wind on 100km of cable. i'd expect they'd make it entirely orbital, fix a platform/elevator car on the end and hold the whole thing 100km above geostationary when it's not needed on the ground. with the amount of counter weight balancing going on you wouldn't need any form of propellants to shift the orbital.

i'm not sure anyone here wouldn't have some sort of interest in the subject (however apathetic we are) as far as i can tell, the main problems are the tensile strength of the cable as the distance from a stable orbit increases, and sourcing the counter weight to tack on the end. you've also got heaps of problems with atmospheric effects, a light wind would rack up tremendous forces

is this a wave or a seismic event? there's a difference. a 10m wave could be stopped by a block of flats while a 10m seismic event would hit the flats, flood the flats, fill the flats with 10m of water, then pause think about receeding while leaving most of the sea floor on top of the wreckage that was the block of flats. i don't know why you'd want to stop the wave, some people devote their lives to getting infront of such things.

bismuth repels a magnetic feild. see if you can get hold of some pyrolytic graphite, the effect is more pronounced. in the gauss gun, the ball bearings are in a higher energy state intitially than they are at the end. this position energy is released and sent down the track via a series of elastic collisions each adding energy to the next collision to send the last one off at high speed. it works much the same as newtons cradle it just has energy to release. any ball bearing that is in contact with a magnet initially can be fixed in place but the device relies on the transfer of one ball bearing to the next magnet to both release and transfer kinetic energy.