Rocket Man

a scroll compressor gives high pressure, low volume. a single stage turbine, generally gives high volume low pressure. you can use multi staged turbine on either side, just make sure you have stators between stages and run it fast. a piston compressor is about the simplest, cheapest compressor you're going to find. you'd do well to consider the working rpm of both sides and select compatible engines and compressors, a turbine running a scroll compressor is a bit ridiculous if you really wanted to get fancy, you could purchase a quaziturbine, a sort of rotary engine/compressor. it has much the same uses as a piston compressor but with less working inertia/vibration.

his design included several un-proven concepts, Einstein proposed stimulated emmision in 1917. however, you are quite right, the first laser was tested too late to be incorporated (Helium-Neon by bell laboratories in 1960) in the article he had published he clearly stated that it was based on four untested concepts, the description of one fits the laser perfectly.

i took a look at his "peace ray" idea, (i really dont like the name he chose) this is my understanding: he uses an electrostatic charge to propell a blob of liquid metal then uses a laser to ionise the air behind it allowing the charge to stay close behind the projectile repelling it from the air as it travels. the projectile cuts the laser so the net force is forward for as long as the charge lasts. the only problem i could see was that he neglected wind shear which would effect the projectile but not the charged path it was meant to stay in front of. he was a brilliant scientist but he eventually got a little over confident in his designs

the hindenburg blew up because of aluminium based paint, very flamable. the hydrogen makes a lot of heat but the explosion is fairly localised. if they stored the hydrogen as compressed gas, the main issue would arise from explosive decompression not combustion, lpg cars i think are more dangerous because the combustion of the fuel leads to an increased volume of gas - hydrogen combustion actually reduces the number of moles of gas and condenses pretty quickly.

the boundary is not flat. the dip is no where near visible but it is there. the droplet is of density greater than the oil so there will a net downward force if the boundary is flat. this downward force pushes the boundary down so the displacement of the boundary = the volume of the droplet the displacement is spread over the whole dish but is steepest close to the droplet. the density of the droplet or main body is not much greater than the density of the oil so the gradients are relatively flat. if you've ever made a paper clip float on water you'd know that the boundary effect "surface tension" draws the water down to displace enough water to match the mass of the paper clip. the same thing happens here. except the boundary is between water and oil so the gradients are far flatter. try to catch the light off the boundary, you'll see a slight irregularity in the reflections near a droplet. the droplets aren't of different density to the main body, it's the boundary effect due to the cohesion of the oil that holds the droplet as is.

neat, the attraction is bouyancy. the water droplets deform the oil-water boundary and create a pit where the others fall into. it works much the same way as bowling balls on streched rubber but the fluids have nil standing friction and the boundary is far more uniform, any deformation is evident over the entirity of the fluid. i'm guessing the whole thing moves very slowly, a denser oil will slow it further (less vertical displacement for the same mass droplets means the gradients are shallower) you can do this sort of thing with a water-air boundary, i think it's detergent in the main body that makes it work (dont use oil) but the events are much faster. (less viscosity in the top fluid layer)

a ye-olde' rifle with a blunder-bus uses caseless ammo. i think one of the few advantages of liquid fuels is the fine mixing. yet gunpowder especially the smoke less powder is completely mixed (sometimes as a liquid) then granulised. a liquid needs quite a bit of work before it can explode, jet fuel is very volatile in a jet engine where it's quickly vapourised, compressed, mixed with air then ignited, but the same kerosene needs to be preheated etc before it will begin to burn explosively. i think a liquid explosive brings in more problems than it's worth, high explosives give a really big bang for something that's almost inert when it's dropped or under humanly survivable temperatures. i think the best way to use a liquid wouild be to use a hard parafin (ablative casing perhaps?) and inject liquid oxygen into the tip then ignite, build the whole round as a rocket. nasa has shown a lot of promise in their hybrid boosters for the new shuttle and they use a good candle wax.

i'd go with edtharan on the revesrsing mechanism. the mouse trap can close very slowly, use a fairly small spindle and large wheels to get the most distance out of the trap. put the cart on the starting line, roll it forwards while winding the string on the spindle, get it as close as possible to the finish, put the string around the post, and wind it up backwards to the starting line. make sure you have a lot of traction, any wheel spin could have you slamming into the object or not reaching the starting position. use rat traps for more power!

thixotropic and dialatant, i think are the names given to the common ones. thixotropic flows easily with stress then locks up while dialatant freezes with stress then flows my favourite is of course ferro-fluids. magnetite powder in oil with emulsifiers i've seen a type of rubber / putty that hardens with high speed flex

4-hydroxy-3-methoxybenzyl -8-methylnon-6-enamide can cause neural damage if consumed concentrated. one hell of a chilli hit.. and i cant live without it!

well, it's definately a blue of some sort, the darker lines aren't solid black but the "blue" lines arent all to bright either. it's very dark (still visible) on my crt but the rgb values still say blue

again, Sam Barros "power labs" has both railguns and coil guns. (definately worth a look) theres many ways you can modify the behaviour of a simple railgun to be more efficient or powerful but the main issue of all these sorts of weapons is the power density of your supply. a 50kg capacitor bank might store as much energy as the chemical energy in a small bottle of apple juice. and takes substantially longer to charge than a replacable packet of powder.

awesome! i didn't see much running though, it never really modified it's style. i'd be really impressed if they could get the thing to leave the ground with every stride. the honda biped has gotten to that stage, small strides but it's still a run.

two ways to do it, electricity can be the main power source or you could use the straight combustion. IIRC, they actually weighed out the propellant for the old guns on rotnest island, they shoved the shot in the barrel followed by cordite(?) wrapped in a type of cloth, sealed the back end and let rip. they had awesome accuracy over several kilometers for such low tech (books of trig ratios ect) Sam Barros has fired a prototype using electricity as the main source. http://www.powerlabs.org/electrothermal.htm otherwise i reckon peroxide is the way to go. maybe injected into a solid fuel cartrige with a bore hole down to the nose. essentially turning it into a miniature hybrid rocket engine.

i've seen goggles with 2 miniature high res lcds, one for each eye, you can crank 3d out of those, the one i saw also had bone conduction audio so the only person hearing it is you, the whole thing is water-proof and sets you back to the financial stone age.

walking on footpaths? what an idea!, these people really have time to burn. whenever i go out i invariably take a bike or run it. a bike normally cuts the akward time down to two seconds or less. so the only thing you have time to do is nod politely rather than say hi. auto pilot is taken to a whole new level when you ride from one end of town to the other without remembering anything about the trip. i think i have collision avoidance drilled firmly into my sub consious.

we're not all prepared for a 5 minute warm-up time, and potentially dangerous temperatures for some time after. most materials that are transparent to visible have difficulty producing IR (oil inclusive) i think you should keep it as simple and fail safe as possible, boiling oil on fire is pretty dangerous, (make sure you experiment with plenty of sand available) what about those gas radiators, they use a gas flame over steel mesh to produce IR, brushed aluminium reflectors seem to work well on far IR. you could make it into a gas stove attachment. it's also possible to experiment with more IR at lower energies (cooler mesh) to make a deeper toasting or less IR at higher energies to give a surface burn.

hence the (poorly worded) question of alternative IR sources i think you could do this with a heating element much the same as in a standard toaster but with a reflector/focussing optics im thinking a linear element at the focal point of a roughly parabolic mirror.

i've grown up christian, and it's really only recently that i realised i can cut my own path, i dont need to follow an organised "faith", a religion is a rationalisation, one designed to impart a feeling of higher purpose. a sudden stop to thought is a concept most people cant come to terms with. a religion gives you a "next life" to look forward to. your parents hushing you up like that is just plain wrong but then again, so is your determination to tell people that what they've believed for their whole life is wrong. dont bash the bible, or any religious text for that matter, you really dont want to get caught up in a religious dispute. thats where so-called "holy wars" come from. i think the only way an intellectual like your self can go through life is to pick a philosophy to run with, a religion is a ready made. you dont have to beleive everything they say, just make sure you still have purpose and direction.

my comment on post 52, what sources of infra red light would be capable of this sort of thing? you could have a reflector underneath the bread and the bread in a simple wire stand. if you felt like being really safe you could get a material for a veiwing window that blocks IR but not visible. (it really only needs to be as safe as a toaster, curtains are still allowed to catch fire)

i have another idea, why not simply have it sitting on a pedastal with an intense infra red source pointing at it. (co2 laser anyone?) of course you wouldnt see the light, but you'd see the bread going brown, a normal toaster uses mainly IR transfer of heat anyway, it does use convection to a limited extent but you'd get much the same effect by simply shining IR at the bread.

brilliant! YT, also, the oil isnt too viscous that you dont get convection. do you have any figures on the thermal densities? you may find it takes too long to heat up sufficiently. also, the peanut oils i've seen are yellow, is there any way of getting a bleaching effect? it'll need a warning label, "warning, do not smash when hot"

what about a hybrid between ideas, use a double glaze with salt solution in between. the salt solution is transparent and if it can be held without any room for expansion it wont boil either. simply run this as the resistor/element. another idea is a bit over kill, use magnetic induction to heat the water in the bread place the bread in the centre of a coil and link to high currnet AC.

suppose you have the linear config with even spacing but make the magnets eliptical or such (poles closer together) so that the force required to rotate them is null plus friction. in other words, work out a shape of magnet where by the force attracting the poles together is evened out by the distance between surfaces being closer at the 90 degree mark. i think that might give the required "no load, no force" coupling. (you'd have a hell of a time magnetising the peices though) if you lock one, the others will try to find an equilibrium, reducing the rotation as you go down the line. there's still the problem of lateral forces though, and the magnets would have to be exactly shaped so as to aviod the coupling being broken by uneven forces as they rotate. gcol, question of repulsion-attraction, there was once a thread where someone asked why a spinning manget is attracted to another magnet when the time attracting = the time repelling. i think the verdict was that the un-aligned particles in the magnets were aligning temporarily, constituting a net attractive force.

someone sneezed on something that ended up on the moon or something, i think it was either analysed there or taken back as a sample, im not too sure on the details but the common cold survived 3 years in a total vacuum and tremendous radiation and then continued multiplying when conditions became favourable.