Insane engineering thread

We'd need a pretty sturdy base.
All in favor of dropping a 90mi x 90mi x [distance to sea floor] lead cube in the ocean and then building a pyramid to space on it

Botswana is pretty barren (while not being nearly as hostile as the Sahara), but getting to space isn't the challenge for spacecraft.

The challenge is reaching orbital speed or escape velocity.
If height was the only thing that mattered, they'd just use balloons then launch from up high.

>this is a sturdy thing
>thus all sturdy things must look like this

Not having enough weight is a very big problem for offworld mining and construction vehicles. Undertrays like this would actually solve this problem. But for the time being robots like pic related which take advantage of regolith they have already mined to mine more are the solution. When we start putting down big things we'll need undertrays.

I want to build a space elevator, which isn't too unrealistic, at least once we can mass manufacture better material in a few decades

Barges with fuckhueg kite sail things that sail into hurricanes to collect wind energy. Wind energy generating potential varies with velocity^3, so by being portable generating stations they can extract tons of energy from travelling storms. The wind pushes on the football field sized kites, which pulls the barge through the water and drives an underwater impeller for collecting energy. Energy is stored in the form of liquified air tanks inside the barge.

This but large enough to stop the hurricane itself

that's cool af user
I think the storms would whip those kites around too haphazardly though

There would have to be lots of motorized tensioning cables to keep it stable.

The Falcon Heavy is a rocket that trades off fuel efficiency for reusability: A good portion of fuel that would usually be used for launches is instead used for booster recovery.

However, what if the boosters could turn into conventional aircraft instead of self-landing rockets?
You'd need mass for the wings, and a landing strip unless you can figure out how to get the rockets to reliably do a maneuvre where they approach at low altitude with wings and then switch to their normal landing procedure.
But given that about a quarter of the booster fuel is being used to land, and more would probably have to be used for a high-alitude breakaway (e.g. if the boosters are launching a lightweight payload at unusually high speed), the fuel savings from doing most of the landing with wings would probably more than make up for the extra mass from adding wings.

They don't even have to be big wings: Even some very minimalistic wings could turn a blisteringly fast plummet into a rapid glide, and the rocket could make a hard turn up as it approached the landing site to switch to thruster-based slowdown and guidance instead of wing-based.

If I could find more data on the boosters (Empty mass, how much landing fuel they require) I'd be able to figure out how viable it would be to turn them into aeroplanes.

Energy production needs to be consistent.
It is much, much easier to produce energy than it is to store it, so if your power production relies on occasional weather events it's not very good.

Also, wind turbines don't thrive off of strong wind, they actually shut down when the wind gets too strong.

Though what power density would you get from liquefied air tanks?

Putting the impeller underwater lets it be much smaller for the same mass flow rate since water is approximately 1000 times denser than air. That lets it handle higher flow velocities without getting destroyed.

Also, since they're self-propelled they can follow storms. As long as there is a storm somewhere in the ocean they can be generating electricity.

Though you're right that energy storage is the primary bottleneck. They would need to use a fleet of repurposed oil tankers to ferry the liquified air back to the grid on a continual basis.
>inb4 some inbred autist accuses me of reddit spacing for using paragraphs

This was part of a /k/ thread to do with figuring out third-world-tier counters to the US military.

The idea is a "falling chandelier" airmine, a stealth hydrogen balloon (stealthy because of an internal cage that removes curves) that floats at extremely high altitude and carries dozens or even hundreds of tiny missiles.

The missiles are very simple for the sake of cost: They have delta wings which can have their ailerons remotely controlled, and can be detonated remotely (with a different RFID so that a simple device can't instruct detonation the moment it detects signals from these missiles)
They rely completely on falling to gain momentum, but due to being dense and aerodynamic, the altitude they're dropped from could allow them to approach the speed of sound.

The airmine itself is a bit more sophisticated, carrying a radar, an onboard computer, a transceiver, a mechanism to release hydrogen, and propulsion.
It drops a bunch of missiles when a target gets close enough that the falling missiles could intercept the target.
Instead of having all missiles guide themselves towards the target, the missiles fan out to every possible place the target could be by the time the missiles reach the the target, then converge on the target again as the moment of interception is nearer and thus the area of possible locations is smaller.

The missiles use stable explosives, since airmines are strictly defensive and you don't want to carpet bomb your own country.
They detonate if they miss, so they can frag the target like anti-air shells.
If they directly hit the target, whether or not they detonate depends on if the electronics survived. Either way, it's a lot of damage, since it's a heavy projectile falling at high speed.

This kind of system would rape drones: They're probably very easy to detect from above with radar, and they lack the agility to dodge a even just a handful of missiles.

Instead of selling electric heaters sell small computer servers that pay for themselves by doing useful work. Have the company selling them handle contracting them out so consumers don't have to do anything.

50W of electrical energy turns into 50W of heat whether it's running a computer or just being dumped into a big resistor. The later seams really wasteful when you think of it like that,

you know,if you built it on top of a shield it might work, but it's just not feasible. the sheer scale of that undertaking is hard to imagine. Just setting the first layer of rocks would be an undertaking of immense scale, and for what? We already have rockets that be reused and the benefits of this are dubious. Also i think the rocks at the base would start shattering after a few tens of miles of upward progress.

are you unironically retarded?

that's been considered before and I think the soviets some sketches of boosters with folded wings

Some other company, I forget who they are made concept art for this but never followed up on this. SpaceX’s method has the advantage of being able to slow down to prevent aero stresses from destroying it. A plane booster does not. It’s not quite as bad as the shuttle in terms of flight (it is surprisingly light)but it’s still pretty darn bad. If you can fix the re-entry problem then it’s probably more reliable than musk method

Third-world countries and being able to afford radios on every missile you control is not reasonable. The US is humanitarian : that is how you beat them. Let them occupy your cities, you can’t win face to face. Be a nomad and fight asymmetric warfare.

I like this one

Tfw $80,000 heating system

And they often don’t pay for themselves.

Third world countries will happily pay thousands of dollars for missiles.
I'm talking about missiles using technology no more sophisticated than what you'd find on a tiny RC plane (which can cost mere cents for China to produce), except with more protection against signal hijacking, and stronger aileron motors since the speeds they're used at are so much higher.

Buying in bulk, the technology for each missile should cost only a few dollars at most since it's just two motors, a very simple circuit board, a radio reciever, and a detonator.

If the third world country uses insanely cheap local labour to produce metal casings and explosives, it could once again be only a few dollars for the casing and warhead of a missile comparable to an RPG (But more like a very powerful grenade, since it's not counting on direct hits)

$10 per missile is a very reasonable estimation of the production cost, assuming they're produced by a single company. Since multiple companies are likely to be involved, it could be a few times higher, but even if you're paying $50 per missile it's a pretty sweet deal if it costs you only a thousand dollars to treat a multi-million dollar fighter jet to crazy amounts of shrapnel.

Ionize all of our waste material and beam into the magnetosphere and, ideally, into the interplanetary magnetic field where it would leave earth's vicinity for good.

I should also point out that probably the biggest cost would be the balloons the missiles drop from: It's not cheap to have a balloon that can track the 3D position of 20 or more missiles, as well as the 3D position of aircraft specially designed to be hard to detect.

ad.nl/wielrennen/kunstmatige-berg-van-twee-kilometer-komt-er-niet~aae89081/

Adjustable wings would probably be necessary.
Surviving the intial drop to gain some horizontal speed which can then translate into a vertical speed reduction would require swept-back wings, but after that the wings would need to move forward to be more glider-like to have both a low horizontal and vertical speed.

For my senior project, I want to create a polymer coating for batteries that cools to some specified temperature as a function of the activity of the battery. How viable is this, Veeky Forums? It's borderline violating a law of thermodynamics or energy I feel but I want to do it. I NEED to do it.

What, you mean the polymer coating gets cooler than ambient temperature to help keep the batteries cool?

Not than the ambient temperature, I was going to say room temperature and I just didn't for no reason really. I think having it be lower than ambient temperature would be far more difficult in that it definitely violates the law of cooling.

tower bridge made out of staples and duplos

This you can easily win a war against the US just by complaining every time they bomb your city.

The heat has to go somewhere, this won't work. Best you can do is put the battery in an aluminium heat sink.
Isn't a server bigger than a heater? And this isn't very secure.

How could we detect and intercept nuclear warheads, Veeky Forums?

We can detect them by the large flashes of light they make when they detonate

>Energy is stored in the form of liquified air tanks inside the barge.
Couldn't you find a shittiest way to store energy?

You can’t count on bureaucratic efficiency to emulate LBJ and tell Air Force pilots to not attack any anti-air installations and also never attack North Vietnam to pursue diplomacy. You need to fully detach yourself from the cities and be like the Parthians

How else are you going to store a bunch of energy in the middle of the ocean that can be quickly offloaded from vessel to another?

Slave defined radio

Kite guy here, have crewed on flights of several of the biggest kites in the world. (Yop six are the mega-ray, the mega-bite, the mega-flag, the mega-moon, a mega-flag kite owned by a team in Kuwait that as far as I know has no name, and a giant blue ray owned by the same team that I think has been given a name but I don't know what it is.)

I'm not sure kites are the best way to drive a vessel forward in that sort of wind. Sails would be better -- gusts or turbulence won't dump them in the water, and sails can be reefed to adjust for stronger winds more easily than kites.

But in hurricane winds, you probably don't even need sails. The best way to ride out extreme winds on a sailboat is to "bare stick" it, the wind on the masts and hull is sufficient to drive the boat at some speed downwind, sufficient to maintain enough movement through the water to steer and remain under control.

Detecting them is easy with satellites, they have an extremely obvious heat signature.
Almost unique too, the only thing that looks like an ICBM on infrared is a spacecraft launch.

Intercepting them is what's hard, because ICBMs are huge and travel insanely fast.
You need one of three things to stop one:
>an insanely fast missile that can correct its course very quickly (these exist)
>a slower missile that has good enough targeting to not move much and let the ICBM hit it (these don't exist as far as I know due to how limited their range would be)
>a satellite-mounted laser (Ronald Reagan wanted this, and called it "Star Wars")

stupidhackathon.com/

best regards,
/g/

body in tread other than me is old enough to remember the Zip-Wing Rocket Glider toy. For some reason I cannot fathom, I remember the damn jingle from the commercial. That's wasted memory storage I'll never get back.

*kike

Wat?

I misstyped and I was correcting my post.

I heard that when turbine inside the dam is turned from the water, the water then is released with very high pressure, why dn't we put another second stage turbine outside the dam and it will generate electricity from this high pressured released water

But you are quoting my post, not yours. I'm the kite guy.

Yeah, let's fry the electric grid just for fun.

>Post your terrible ideas here.
keep doing what the other guy says instead of what I say

You fucked that up.

actually implied
>This is a sturdy thing
>All things that look like this are also sturdy.

NOT

>All things that are sturdy must look like this.

That's false, though. There is a quadratic relation between height and orbital velocity, given by Earth's rotation speed. If you could get an object to a geosynchronous orbit altitude with a space elevator and left it there it would stay there in a similar fashion to other satelites.

you're a fucking idiot

I think the point they were trying to make was more that an impractically large pyramid wasn't the only option for an ultra-tall structure.

But a much shorter space elevator, like the pyramid described, would get things to nowhere near orbital velocity.

Of course the heat has to go somewhere. My (stupid) question is: is there any way that, assuming heat can be treated as a form of kinetic energy, to have the heat be transferred partially back to chemical energy or some other form of energy? I figure this would still convert back to heat but I also imagine it would take a lot longer. Essentially have the coating's purpose be to absorb the heat from the battery and convert that energy to another form?
t. Brainlet trying to be creative

>have to mine and transport ~1600 cubic miles of rock
>the inside of the structure would heat up to thousands of degrees during construction if you built it too fast, limiting construction speed
>the whole structure would just depress Earth's crust and sink anyway, probably causing some major Earthquakes in the process

>1600
Sorry I'm a brainlet, meant 160,000

You want to make a mountain that is twice as tall as the Earth's crust is thick. Ya, that will go real well. Especially considering we could only dig a hole 7.5 miles deep before the heat and pressure was too much to continue.

>what is inherent material stress limit and fatigue
Not to mention soil Inconsitensies and don't even get me started on a foundation for that shit

Hydrogen maybe?

Also this sounds easier than your storm thing
youtube.com/watch?v=vMTchVXedkk

Diminishing returns. You generate less and less power for each stage and you have to justify the cost of building it.

That could be solved just by adding more magnets to the turbine.

As water (or any fluid for that matter) flows through a turbine, it experiences a pressure drop. This is a result of the fluid's enthalpy being converted into work. At some point, there's simply not enough enthalpy left in the fluid to keep extracting work.

We should use magnets to create flying cars. We should try to harness the gravitational power of black holes to create perpetual energy devices.

There are some materials that can convert heat transfer (note transfer) to electrical energy.

newatlas.com/cantilever-piezoelectric-device/16628/

It won't generate a ton of power, not for say a smartphone. However, remote areas sensors with low power, it might be useful.

If you recently found out that you are working for the enemy of him to whom you have sworn your undying loyalty then you shouldn't unfuck yourself tomorrow but just go ahead and do it when you think it will be best for you and your money situation

>when children's toys could maim and kill
it was a different time

Black holes are troublesome to orbit anything around at a close distance, because orbits decay very quickly there.

And if you orbit something around a black hole at long range, you might as well be orbiting it around a star except with no light.

Neutron Stars, however, could provide some source of concentrated energy.

Fuck it I guess for my senior project I'll work on making these more efficient then, at least to the point for smartphone use. Thanks, user.

Guys
What if we genetically engineered
Cat grills? :33333333

Kansas.

>marketing to useless subhumans who can't provide you with any money of their own
>not genetically engineering people into staying young-looking forever
>or catboys

Who on Earth wants to be a catboy?
The kinds of people who would want to be a catboy would probably prefer to be a catgirl.

Ok but I get to keep my dick

What is a...
>thermoelectric cooler
>strapped to the batteries its protecting
>with a tiny temperature probe attached to batteries
>and a microcontroller that activates the TEC whenever it goes over a temperature threshold
>everything running off the same battery pack being protected

I'm actually thinking about doing this as a system to protect some Li+ batteries that I have in a project. They experience heavy drain, and they are very close to humans, so I want a fail safe. The key is to get a microcontroller with the smallest power drain possible. It just has to read an analog value from the temp probe and activate a relay if needed. Arduino nano or smaller would be totally sufficent.

>tfw Nano Tech is closer to Printing a computer with a regular household printer than we are of pic rel

sure, for some definitions of a computer. I mean you can print a slide rule with a regular household printer.

No I mean, we can already do transistors in a paper substrate

let's have both

also I would be catboy

Yeah really fucking shitty ones. That's also materials science not nanotech.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shimizu_Mega-City_Pyramid

It's not an option at all -- structural strength of the rock would not permit it to stand under its own weight.

Kite guy again.

A friend of mine is a consultant on this, they safety issues of a large enough system to be worth doing are much, much larger than they have admitted.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_(rocket_booster)
Mad commies are way ahead of you

Okay bois hear me out on this one.
There are space elevators.
But are there space rollercoasters?
I'm thinking a 1000km long tube stretching across asia and up mount everest with addittional height added, resulting in a final height of 15km in air.

The tube works like a rail gun and accelerates the payload all the way into space. Inside the tube is vacum, so friction can be neglected up untill the upper layers of the athmosphere.

The payload can't be humans tho.

It's one thing to build a 15km high vertical structure, but it's much harder to build a 15km high horizontal structure.
You have to remember that at that scale, even metal behaves like soggy paper.
Either you'd need thousands of support columns (and each one would be a huge project to build), or you'd need a crazy way to keep the whole thing in the air.

Here's a crazy idea for how to keep it in the air: Make the whole thing a giant glider.
It has lots of pairs of wings, and on a windy day the entire thing will be lifted up.
Ailerons on the wings would allow the structure to make itself as straight as possible, since the wind would be different depending on the altitude.
I don't think it'd need to be anywhere near 1000km (20km long would be plenty) but if it was 20km then it'd need a circle of clear and flat land 20km in radius.
Could work in Africa.

Hmm. This m i g h t be more feasible than the space elevator autism, but I think the greatest challenge would be to prevent the payload from getting valorized. The exit velocity would be arond 10km/s.

It wouldn't have to be 90 degrees tier horizontal. A steep curve could do the trick.

I remember about a decade ago there were reports of children in China being born with cat-like features. We should encourage them to marry and have kids of their own when they reach adulthood so that these traits might persist.

flu virus that increases intelligence of the pleb to acceptable levels by doing gene therapy on them

why not just dump the rods inside an active volcano?