The road not taken on the technological progress trip i'm looking for examples of technological ideas that work but for whatever reason where not widely adopted or used or simply did the same thing differently, like how the soviet space program made rocket engines different (and better) than the US did. and how there space suits work just as well but are made to a wildly different set of standers
some examples are ... tesla's wireless power transmission magnetic wire data recording capacitance disk data recording gasoline vaporizer for early cars manifolds sound powered piezoelectric wireless cell phones high voltage solid state multi fuction hardware based computers multi barrel rotary firearms to achieve full auto (oops we DID came back to that and made them better and we now mount them on aircraft)
please help me add to my list of technological paths that we didn't take
or electric vehicles --- ya that's a tech that has had several starts over the years and has been in several instances actively killed off by people with monetary interest in a different tech
like in some of the first horseless carriages that lost out so gas powered, because a byproduct of lamp oil production was gasoline and it was easily shipped with the lamp oil
or later in the 40's when electric motors combined with diesel motors for power where better for uses that needed to still have power but stop the diesel motor like submarines or where they needed lots of power but not to have a heavy complex transmission like diesel electric trains or the maus tank
in the 50's when they outlawed and banned cars that can easy be converted into electric
or in the 60's 70s and 80's where they had the road and vehicles laws talord to only fit only the kinds of cars they were making and actively worked to destroy anyone making something different (look at delorean)
in the 90's when they just outlawed electric vehicle charging stations and then had the cars (recalled for "safety" concerns and then later for "non warranty" support going so far as to have repo experts take the cars from the owners in the night)
Dylan Johnson
Steam automobiles.
On the other hand, Tesla's wireless power transmission probably wouldn't have worked. And I knew someone with anime recorded on a capacitance disk.
I remember when magnetic bubble memory was predicted to sweep the field. No moving parts. But the price of hard disc drives kept dropping.
Carson Murphy
> firearms
Use of peizoelectric sparkers to provide the ignition spark for primitive firearms instead of flint. Made feasible by pinfire-style rifles using a larger more robust spark generator. > The sparker slams into the powder or paper cartridge then delivers the spark, the thicker gauge rod used to deliver the spark isnt nearly as vulnerable as the firing pins on the pinfire rifles
Caseless firearms in the 60s which operate similar to the Gyrojet except that instead of providing rocket thrust, the propellant is burned up at the same rate it normally would be in a firearm. Thrust vectored exhaust ports wouldnt be required because the projectile could have rifling bands on it (similar to artillery shells) to absorb the spin over a smaller surface area. The longer projectile, hollow in the rear would be frontheavy and inherently more stable. The rear part of the projectile housing protects the propellants from cookoff in the same way that conventional shells do. > russian 40mm grenades work a little like this already. > the only question is what to cover the rear exhaust port with, which would be a gaping hole compared to the gyrojet projectiles. > a pre-serrated metal seal designed to fold back under the pressure from the detonation could provide a proper solution. > lower quality ammunition could simply have a thick wax seal with the primer compound located under it. This ammunition, unlike standard bullets, would be viably dangerous to ignite in a fire or during an accident, since the ignition would still provide sizeable propulsion on the round like a rocket (even if the rear part of the projectile burst under the pressure).
Also Caseless firearms using binary propellant injection nozzles, separating the propellant and the projectiles in the loading process (the binary propellant canisters could be good for as many reloads as a soldier can carry ammunition for though). > just like an internal combustion engine, sans the need for oxygen
Juan Reed
And while we're on the topic of firearms, I feel it relevant to bring up Luger's famous toggle-lock action.
Also, another issue with caseless projectiles is that it produces much more residue within the rifle compared to conventional bullets, meaning that the gun requires considerably more maintenance to operate properly.
Dylan Harris
>capacitance disk data recording
RCA did that. It died out in the 80s. A 2 hours movie had 60mins per side, but degrade if you do anything with them. I assume that is one of the major reasons it was discontinued and is only an uber niche market now.
>sound powered piezoelectric wireless cell phones
Isn't that still a thing?
>wireless power
That is coming into being more and more now. You can get all manner of energy harvesting equipment from mouser and digikey. Most of it is for harvesting energy from things that always send out power for other functions than powering a device. Like being in a city and being bombarded with all the wi-fi hot spots.
Here's my list, though some are making headway now,
•Biogas methane digester power plants using city/home sewer as fuel. •Nuclear powered rockets (pic) •Holographic data storage. We have this, but do you think it will ever be as prolific as HDDs? •Spinning space station modules for creating artificial gravity. NASA had one proposed, but decided not to build it (Nautilus-X). •Manned space exploration. Well, it seems like there's a lot of talk about going to the moon again and to Mars, only no one is there yet. In fact, most of NASA shit seems to be grant chasing to line pockets more than anything else. It'll be 50 years soonish since the last manned moon mission. ISS ain't shit right now. They are making science, but the research is gathering dust. Too bad Challenger blew up. •Neck cradles for phones. Seriously, fuck these little bars of soap people call a smartphone. •Polaroids.
Gabriel Powell
$245k? Gotta check my sofa. Must have that in loose change somewhere around here.
Evan Foster
For some reason I read midget planetarium I guess it makes some sense
Magnetic Amplifiers. Used in the early days of computing and can do the same thing as valves, and apparently can be used to do mathematical operations, but eventually died out in favour of transistors. They still interest me though.
Onaholes are better than real women, yet people insist on traditional sex. It boggles the mind.
Austin Kelly
There's other ways of doing digital logic than vacuum tubes and transistors. Neon logic and Magnetic logic for example. Magnetic logic isn't just memory like core memory and hard drives; you can do the AND, OR, etc operations at the heart of a CPU with magnetic fields.
I've also really got a soft spot for "light pens". It was a computer input device that died when mice came out.
Also vinyl records used for video. There was about 50 years of people trying to get it to work but it never became a consumer product. It was used to put images on the Voyager Golden Disks.
Project Orion type spacecraft that use nuclear explosions for propulsion.
Have you considered that since electric motors are less efficient the bigger they are and that with modern technology we can make more powerful systems using multiple motors controlled by a computer in the car. Along with the huge change in battery efficiency/capacity could be a part of this? Of course they stopped trying to make them, they werent capable of it. And yes of course there was also people trying to keep petrol engines going, rich people dont want to lose money. Pic related >stop complaining goyim
Eli Scott
oy vey
Carson Foster
That's an orrery.
Camden Long
That isn't true. In fact, they are more efficient at bigger sizes.
From a circuit perspective, this is because "no-load" losses are small relative to power transferred.
Or, also from circuit perspective, you can use higher voltages and lower currents.
I am not certain on the mechanical advantages, but generators definitely benefit from scale.
We could apply permaculture principle to green the deserts and make the world a veritable paradise.
Lucas Jackson
>The road not taken on the technological progress trip Hero's Engine Would have started the industrial revolution 2000 years earlier if it had been appreciated for what it was rather than a toy. And Egypt would then have been the epicentre of technology.
That is far from where we ended up.
Hunter Miller
>Hero's Engine It was really weak, and besides, technological progress is mostly a function of societal structure. If you read Acemoglu & Robinson, they quote countless cases where technological improvement was stopped by the ruling class.
Technology requires that it is allowed to be adopted. THat is typically not the case, because it threathens the rulers. The west rules, because Europeans, First the Spanish and then the British, the rest following, developed a society that could have technological development and capital creation without kings getting into way.
Austin Miller
>It was really weak, True. It also spun real fast, most likely. And it should have been a pointer to explore more.
>and besides, technological progress is mostly a function of societal structure That is a two way process. For instance the invention of the stirrup changes both warfare and societies.
Also early on science and philosophy were greatly overlapping and in ancient Greece were close to the core of power.
>If you read Acemoglu & Robinson, Not familiar with that one. >they quote countless cases where technological improvement was stopped by the ruling class. I can believe that.
Justin Richardson
>Not familiar with that one. Why Nations Fail, blog and a book. MIT and Harvard faculty. Plenty of examples of rulers preventing tech development.
Luis Taylor
>high voltage solid state multi fuction hardware based computers more info on this?
Joshua Scott
Stupid and gay. Go colonize Sahara instead.
Lucas Allen
>peizoelectric sparkers I wonder if piezos have any use in electric firing. Back up or compatibility for electronic firing technologies. > the propellant is burned up at the same rate it normally would be in a firearm If it is you need to make the case a lot thicker to withstand the pressure. Cases explode without the chamber to support them. Gyrojets are lower pressure and accelerate. > rifling band Driving bands, what you're describing, require a minimum velocity to work just like rifling. You're basically swaging the band with the rifling. Problem is gyrojets accelerate slowly but consistently. You could put your finger in the barrel of a gyrojet before it accelerated and have it push against your finger until it burned out and you'd be fine. You can make it go faster or burn quicker before it hits the rifling but then you've essentially recreated the gun. >Nozzles You haven't really made anything better than a caseless gun. If anything its harder to seal because the bullet itself has to seal the propellant inside the chamber while somehow being semiautomatic. And the seal has to be better because propellant is a fluid. >Also, another issue with caseless projectiles is that it produces much more residue within the rifle compared to conventional bullets, meaning that the gun requires considerably more maintenance to operate properly. Not really the case with most caseless designs, due to the chamber having to be separate. Keeps most of the fouling in barrel and away from the action itself. Fouling in the barrel isn't likely to cause malfunctions in anything but the most extreme cases. HITP like the G11 also burns very cleanly. Not perfect ofc but it fouled less than even the brass cased 5.56 they were comparing to as a standard. I assume it was M193 but don't know for sure. Other propellants might not burn as cleanly, but the G11 is pretty much the only relevant caseless project until LSAT's caseless info is released.
Joseph Young
>Would have started the industrial revolution 2000 years earlier We didn't have the infrastructure or metallurgy to use it. A better candidate for an "Early Industrial Revolution" was Barbegal and the other Roman Watermills. Water powered complexes that produced enough flour to feed on the order of 10,000 people. Carthage and the Qin both had the idea for interchangable parts by then, Rome had the man power for geoengineering and the population and reach to support real centralized industry. You could reroute streams and rivers. With that you could run foundries, trip hammers, sawmills, lathe. Produce metal, cloth, parts, ships, etc.
Colton Wood
dude if everyone would do this we would die out you know? I dont want to be part of wiping out humans by having a hyperrealistic fap, and neither should you.
David Stewart
btw Ternary Computers! (only real example: SETUN in RUS)
I win this thread by a long shot
Brody Miller
>We didn't have the infrastructure or metallurgy to use it. Really? They evidently had the metallurgy to make that device work. Iron age was already going, bronze technology was well known. Egypt also had discovered coal and thick oil. They had everything needed to get going. That doe snot mean it could be perfected in a year but then again nor were the steam engines of the 1750's.
Jace Turner
Data-flow architecture. Almost all computers run via von neumann architecture, evem thouhg data-flow architecture has been shown to work fine as a physical computer architecture.
Justin Gonzalez
>They evidently had the metallurgy to make that device work It was really low pressure. It spins because its light and on an axle, try to put any load on it and it won't move. >Iron age was already going, Remember it not just having access to iron. It has to be both consistent and strong to withstand the pressure. To much carbon and it's too brittle, too little and its too weak and will give. Impurities or voids or inconsistencies make weak spots, weak spots means explosions. And don't misunderstand, a boiler explosion was no minor thing. Sort of thing that destroyed buildings, peeled locomotives apart like bananas and sunk cruise ships. Early boilers routinely exploded and that was with much more advanced metallurgy and engineering capabilities. Entire specialist ironworks existed in the 1800's to provide the high grade and QC'd wrought iron for boilers and steam engines. Bloomeries also weren't big enough to produce wrought iron in such quantities until much later anyway - iirc around 1000AD we're still talking the a couple of pounds per batch, and being worked with hammers and muscle power meaning just the material cost for a boiler is enormous. >inb4 Newcomen engine Yes you can use copper and lead reinforced with bricks for a very low pressure engine like the Atmospheric Engine, but again you need good QC and a consistent curved surface for strength. It's probably doable with time and patience in Hero's era but due to its terrible efficiency it's economically infeasible in the time period due to the lack of large scale coal mining driving the cost of fuel down. As it was, the Newcomen engine was often a worse choice than draught horses depending on location. In Hero's day it'd be no contest. There's a reason the Industrial Revolution didn't truly start until the Watt Engine
Jonathan Green
OK so they started in the 1750's and had QC going in the 1800's. That is about 100 years.
As I wrote I never thought they would achieve overnight success. Development really gets going when you put the right people together. The US was caught out by Sputnik in 1957 and 12 years later they reached the moon. Also with lesser budgets you can achieve success. It will still not be an overnight success.
Ayden Wright
It has to be useful in the meantime to be developed. As inefficient as it was, the Newcomen engine was had a role in coal mines pumping water. Coal is plentiful and cheap in a colliery. Nobody is going to be pouring funds into developing a steam engine when the only one you can build is outdone by a draught horse or windmill for much less money due to the expense of coal. Basically: Low Pressure Engine = not exceedingly useful, only viable when fuel cheap High Pressure Engine = requires QC and wrought iron production that far exceeds what even Rome could produce
