PaulS1950

Using oxygen in a gasoline engine instead of air will decrease the efficiency of the engine while causing heat at dangerous levels. The engine is designed to run at a specific temperature (or in a specific range of temperatures). The engine pulls in about 14 - 15 pounds of air for every pound of fuel. In that air is the correct amount of oxygen to burn the fuel, around 70% nitrogen and some other gasses and water vapor which do nothing for the combustion process but they do aid in the production of usable power. They cool the flame as they heat up, expanding over 200% which helps to prolong the push of the burning fuel adding power to the engine. If you remove the extra gasses and water vapor then you would have to redesign the engine with better cooling and to take advantage of the shorter pressure impulses that make less power. A cheep shortcut to better mileage is to use the lowest octane gas you can get and use a water injector to prevent detonation. The water absorbs the heat and turns to super heated steam which raises cylinder pressures over a longer period of time. You have turned your engine into an internal combustion steam engine. The drawback to this shortcut is that it can cause corrosion because of the steam/nitrogen mix in the exhaust products. Over the short term it will clean out the carbon that has built up in your engine but soon after that it will become an electrolyte that carries galvanic charges to the dis-similiar metals used in your engine. It is better to use the lowest octane gas that doesn't cause detonation and leave the water for drinking. Paul

Cooling the intake air makes it denser, requiring more fuel to keep the mixture right for burning. It increases power but decreases mileage. Keeping the intake air at close to 200F will do a better job of providing good mileage and if the engine is designed for the specific rpm range in use you can get fairly good mileage. Lets say we need to run between 20 and 70 mph and that we have electronic fuel injection. An engine with high compression (around 9 - 10:1) will make better use of the fuel it consumes by compressing the mixture for more efficient burning and more extracted heat. With a four speed transmission (manual or auto with locking converter) where 3rd is 1:1 and 4th is .75:1 (overdrive) you could use a rear gear ratio of 2.80 - 3:1 and tune a moderate sized engine at 2000 rpm to get good mileage on the highway in overdrive and still get reasonable performance and mileage around town in second and third gear. Keeping engine temps around 200 to 250F and the intake charge at 200F using 10w-30 synthetic oil in an engine that reduces internal friction and you would get near the best that is possible through exhaustive tuning of the injection parameters and engine management (ignition and valve timing). Other factors are tire pressure, alignment settings, weight of vehicle and driver and the largest factor of all, the driver. Gradual acceleration and decelleration, long following distances so you don't have to use your brakes often or hard will go a long way to increase the mileage in any vehicle.

Dark matter does cause "gravitational lensing" this is how it has been mapped. Dark energy is a complete unknown - it could be the effect of the photons from the billions of stars in billions of galaxies exerting force (momentum) on objects that are not gravitationally bound. Then again it might be the effect of "anti-gravitational" forces of some new energy. Paul

Gravity is not described, in modern physics, as a force between two masses. The effect of curved time space is called gravity. Since light does "bend" around large mass objects it is described as following the time / space curvature. Gravity, as a force, cannot exist. Yet some folks still try to use it as a force in defining the universe. Paul

Gr shows that the symptom of bent space/time can be duplicated using inertia. we call it gravity but it isn't one of the forces - it is an effect of the matrix of the universe. Paul

Isn't the biggest stumbling block to the joining of GR and QM gravity? If you take gravity out of the equation it might be doable. Since gravity isn't a force but rather a symptom of curved space/time it should be eliminated from the solution. Paul

A photon has no "at rest" mass - but then it can't exist at rest so its a bit like saying If you got a lead ball that weighs 10 lbs to the speed of light it would have infinite mass - but you can't get it there. Paul

The chain mail weighs over 25 pounds, a Kevlar vest is 20 pounds and depending on how much poly-carbonate you use it is denser than Kevlar. Shark's teeth are triangular, the ice-pick is a round rod. Chain mail won't work. Kevlar is worthless against a pick. The poly is good for stopping the penetration of a sharp object but it has to be a minimum thickness (somewhere near 1/8"). To keep it flexible the poly would have to be multiple layers of scales and it would then be very heavy.

A photon in free space travelling at C has momentum; the mass is calculated from momentum as momentum/velocity=mass do the math. the nass of a photon is very small (close to zero) but it is more than zero. Paul

Kevlar will not stop an ice pick even in thicknesses used in bullet-resistant vests. A plate of HDPE thick enough to stop the pick will be heavy, uncomfortable and limit mobility. Empregnated fiberglass will not stop penetration of a pick any better that the first two. Rubber is better at preventing penetration but the weight and rigidity of it at appropriate thicknesses would limit mobility. Aluminum sheet is rigid but could be used to protect vitals or used as scales could solve all but the weight concern. PVC is brittle and rigid - again the weight of it in appropriate thickness would limit mobility Front and back plates along with neck and face protection is likely to be a good add-on. Lexan (or other name brands of similar polycarbonate) are candidates in the same range as other rigid materials. A heavy leather jacket and well placed 1/8" Lexan sheets that overlap would be as good as anything against an ice-pick. Paul

To step the voltage up to the extremes that you need to discharge a spark to some distance look up Tesla coils. I think you will find that any coil or transformer that will do the job is going to be too large to be mobile with a single individual carrying it. Paul

Joatmon, I would tend to agree except that as soon as the os is called the bootstrap is over. That is about the same time that a person can interfere with the process too so the difference may just be semantics. The OS typically looks for errors or missing hardware and then looks for keystrikes and checks memory and other periferals. It is the OS that lets you interupt the boot process and get into the BIOS setup routine - I think....?? Paul

How would I go about calculating the strength of a wooden spar that is 5 inches high, has a web thickness of 1/8" and a top and bottom cap of 1.5" x .75"? One more at 9 inches high, 1/8" web, and the same top and bottom caps. The materials are birch plywood (3 ply) for the web and Sitka spruce for the caps. Paul

Using radio beacons to triangulate its position can keep you within your tolerance of .5 meters. Laser becons can be far more accurate but would require modulation at different frequencies to differentiate between the different laser "home" positions. Lasers may also require a vertical scan component as well as a horizontal scan as the terrain differs in altitude. Ultrasonic "sonar" could be used within the .5 meter using a transmitter on the robot and targets around the field (say at the four corners).I doubt that accelerometers would be any more accurate than a wheel with directional indication built in and measuring distance with the number of rotations. The slippage and directional errors would quickly lead to the accumulation of errors the would get you lost.You need an outside "standard" to measure from to maintain a real time position. Paul

Bootstrap is the bios. you can fix the bios by interupting the boot process by pressing one of the function or tab keys. Which one varies with the different mother boards/bios chips. The bios can be flashed or reset manually (if you know what you are doing). There are some bootstrap viruses that are particularly difficult to remove but not impossible.

Carbon nano-tube for the cable, light-weight materials for the elevator to reduce the load on the lift mechanism but strong enough for close to one atmosphere of pressure. Remember that it would have to be at least as big as the shuttle bay and have food, water, and air for the two week trip. The hurdle that needs to be jumped is production and assembly of enough nano-tubes to make a cable big enough and long enough to reach to a geo-synchronous satelite. Paul

The problem with NACA foil designs is that they are not designed for a maximum speed of 64 MPH and a minimum flight speed of 24 mph. Most are designed for speeds in excess of 200 mph and are inefficient at speeds below 70 mph. The airfoil above operates well in the range between 24 and 64 MPH according to the NASA Foilsim program and Aeval software. I would rather not change a design that seems to work well but I could use some help in designing a spar or spar system that will support the wing/aircraft combintion. The wing won't hold any fuel - the 30 pounds of fuel is located at the center of gravity. I will use Junker style ailerons and ungapped hinged simple flaps. A six foot chord and a 30 foot span provides for lift at 24 mph (14 with flaps down) and low drag co-efficient at the maximum level flight speed of 64 MPH. I would rather not use aluminum because it will fatigue and need to be replaced. If I use wood "I" beams and protect them from UV and moisture they will last for hundreds of years and be lighter than an aluminum box. I know very well how important my wing is to my life. As far as anyone in Germany or Switzerland having built even one wing that is designed to operate in the speed range that mine will and although they do have some microlight aircraft their aircraft do not meet the specs for the USA FAR 103 ultralight specifications for weight or speed range. Thank you for telling me to learn how to design the aluminum box to fit my needs - perhaps that is the most important thing your post said. You either are unwilling to help or don't know how to build the spars any more than I do. Thank you for the concern

There are natural gravity engines that already exist. natural satellites that orbit a large planet in relational orbits where the inner moons are pulled by the planet and the outer moons are heated internally by the gravitational compression and exhibit internal heat escaping at water fountains or sulfur volcanoes. You could easily tap into the heat with geo-thermal plants to make power in many forms. Using the heat to make electricity or turn turbines for grinding or milling operations. Gravity engines are not anything new it is just difficult to build an artificial one.

Sending nuclear waste anywhere is a total waste. The parts that are the longest lived can be removed and recycled to use for power production and the lower level that decays faster can be used in medicine and many other places that are safe and provide benefit. If we keep throwing it into "long term storage" we are going to run out of usable nuclear fuel. Recycle it and get the real benefit from "cheap" nuclear power. Paul

I am in the process of design of an ultralight plane for which I only have some of the skills needed. My plane will have a 30 foot one piece high wing with a chord of 6 feet and maximum thickness of 9 inches. It will take-off at about 25 - 27 mph and have a maximum straight level speed of 63 - 64 mph. Weight is a prime concern but drag is not. I believe that it would be lighter to use the leading edge "D" box spar and the rear spar that the flaps will hinge on as the load elements and attach the wing to the top of the fusalage and with struts at some length of the span for twist prevention and longtitudinal stability. Using 600 - 650 gross weight and a 6 g load factor will wood or wood / foam sandwhich work in this construction. The wing will be fabric covered so the covering is not structural. Here is what the foil looks like:

DH and swansont, I agree with you both. we don't have the complete answers for much of anything we "know". we have a set of working formula that we are able to "get by with" in those places we use them. we can make corrections to allow for errors but unless we open our minds to the errors we will never look for the sollutions. I use the same math that everyone else does but there are situations where that math is the wrong tool or is being used with errors. It has been said that there is no such thing as a "singularity" because infinitly small and large cannot exist. The "spheroid" shape of a singularity has dimensions and it contains less than infinite mass. We need a new mathmatics approach to realize that what is breaking down is our understanding and not the laws that govern the universe. Paul

But the Newtonian laws are incomplete at best and wrong in some arrangements - say in the study of Mercury's orbit..... Paul

You are confusing mass and matter. It is very likely that matter cannot exist at the "center" of a "black-hole" but it certainly has mass. Wow, the entire big 5 in one post and it doesn't seem to hold together at all... I guess we are still looking for the GUT. Paul

At least we know what we have wrong... Now we just need to learn something - that is correct. Paul

The speed of light appears to be constant because we allow time and space to change to keep it at that speed. If we were to say that time or space was constant then we could manipulate velocity to make it seem so. These are our perceptions of an existance that we are still learning about. The major stumbling block that I see is that we have to learn that matter is only a perception and has no real for other than energy. Paul