A Russian unit considered elite, now down to using T-55's; https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2 ... -55-tanks/ I believe this is the correct URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/04/04/is-an-elite-russian-paratroop-division-still-elite-when-it-has-70-year-old-t-55-tanks BTW - I never p...
Jump to postComposites would help reduce the weight penalty for overly slender fuselages, at least for the top part of the cylinder (which would be in tension). I'm not sure what the effect would be for the other parts of the cylinder, though. The advertised strength increases for composites are usually referri...
Jump to postWindRunner specs are listed here: https://radia.com/windrunner Thanks for the link. I haven't seen reported what engines they will use, but the link lists a very slow M0.6 cruise speed, which I found interesting. The wing seems very small in the drawings, amd the large downward winglet is kind of s...
Jump to postJust curious since many potential paper aircraft proposals are approaching 80m in length (777X-10, A350-1100) would their be scope to exceed the 80x80 m box that many airports have settled on the maximum aircraft size. In particularly I'm curious about exceeding this dimension in only length as tha...
Jump to postWindRunner specs are listed here: https://radia.com/windrunner
Jump to postThere's news of a new cargo plane specially designed to deliver wind turbine blades onto wind farms. The company thinks it can begin transporting 341-foot (104-meter) blades onto dirt or gravel airstrips by 2027. Wall Street Journal report (via MSN): How the World’s Biggest Plane Would Supersize Win...
Jump to postHere's an interesting fact: Ohio has a bigger population than Washington state, and it has 3 cities with major-league sports teams (Cleveland/Columbus/Cincinnati) compared to just Seattle here, but Sea-Tac Airport hosts nearly twice the annual passenger traffic than those 3 cities' primary airports ...
Jump to post^^^^^Thanks for the update. I didn't realize there were two sets of tunnels on the Bakersfield-LA stretch of the network, and that the Bakersfield-Palmdale segment isn't actually the biggest problem. There will be 9 tunnels totaling almost 10 miles through the Tehachapi mountains near Bakersfield. H...
Jump to postIn both rail and air transportation, it have been observed that majority of demand from secondary cities are to head to larger cities instead of secondary cities. So even while people living in Central Valley can enjoy seeing the trains, they wouldn't be able to take the trains to major destination...
Jump to postThis is one of my main issues with the CAHSR project as it's evolved. It was one thing to have a debate over the alignment down the Central Valley. Do you stay close to Interstate 5 but avoid all the population centers or shift the tracks to the east to run trains through Fresno, Bakersfield, etc (...
Jump to postI'm going off of memory but Santa Fe installed Automatic Train Stop (ATS) across much of its network between Chicago and California in the 1920s-1940s (yes the technology is that old). Albuquerque to Barstow is a remaining section as well as Ft. Madison, Iowa, across Missouri towards Kansas City. H...
Jump to postThe difference in speed limits on the corridors is due to federal regulation and it's not just about track standards. After several nasty collisions in the 1940s and 1950s, the government mandated additional safety equipment in the signaling systems for trains operating at 80 mph and above. Most ra...
Jump to postFrom reading up on California's 3 in-state train services at Wikipedia and other places, I feel like that state hasn't skimped on conventional rail and is justified in making the jump to HSR: ⋅ The Pacific Surfliner line has 10 daily roundtrips between Los Angeles and San Diego. Between S...
Jump to postVery sorry to hear about your health problems. However, 5.7 is in the normal range for A1C. Above 6.0 is when you start getting into the pre-diabetic range. Did your doctor say what number he/she needs to see before taking you off the metformin? (BTW, you don't want to take metformin on an empty sto...
Jump to postThe last famous debacle in public works construction was Boston's Big Dig. The city took a lot of criticism during the budget overruns and scheduling misses. Ultimately the Big Dig was completed, Boston didn't descend into third-world destitution, and the project didn't cause a residual hit to the c...
Jump to postI think a solution like hyperloop and similar technologies only makes sense on very long very high density routes. While the technology might be working its as always a matter of the practical factors like what routes would be viable, where to build the track, safety matters (track accessebillity i...
Jump to postGetting through Chicago would be "interesting". Passengers leaving from St. Louis or Detroit will be too busy sleeping to be bothered by that. :lol: Last week the government made some rail grants from funds allocated by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. The Chicago hub only got a li...
Jump to postTheoretically, a St. Louis-Detroit night train that covers over 500 miles could become viable now or in the near future. (Most of the Michigan line is single-track according to Google Maps, so that's something that will need to be fixed.) Getting through Chicago would be "interesting". Pa...
Jump to postConsidering how many historic miles of track are in Illinois already, it's disappointing that the Chicago-St. Louis line has only just recently been double-tracked. https://i.imgur.com/4TYsU.jpeg Source: https://imgur.com/4TYsU Having a reliable train line that cruises at 110 mph uninterrupted betw...
Jump to postGiven Clark's obsession with capacity, I believe Emirates will be retrofitting their A380s to go 11+9 abreast sooner or later. That would be a lot more reasonable than going 10 abreast on the A350.
Jump to postSimply Railway posted this video introducing the new Railjet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnB_vSVkX3k It looks really great and introducing mini cabins in couchette cars. The mini cabins solve the privacy issues. The whole train looks really cool, the sleepers are great. However, I'd point out ...
Jump to postStory today on how airlines at SNA have had to reduce flights late this year to ensure airport stays under its 11.8mil annual passenger cap. Airline load factors ended up being higher than estimated leading to passenger counts that would exceed the limit. https://www.ocregister.com/2023/11/27/john-...
Jump to postUnlike Priscilla Barnes, Suzanne Somers never appeared in a bikini on Three's Company (IIRC). She did in the intro briefly. Not much if it all in the show. Technically, it was a one-piece swimsuit. Didn't Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore make the highest wage of the actors on their own shows? If t...
Jump to postThe newest NightJet trainsets can travel at 230 kilometers/hour (142 mph), or about twice the speed limit of the automobile freeways in Washington state. I'd love to be able to get on one of those things at 7 pm in Seattle and arrive in Chicago at 11 am the next morning. It used to be that the US wa...
Jump to postUnlike Priscilla Barnes, Suzanne Somers never appeared in a bikini on Three's Company (IIRC). I still wouldn't agree (without seeing more evidence) that Somers was standing up for female rights. Didn't Lucille Ball and Mary Tyler Moore make the highest wage of the actors on their own shows? If they ...
Jump to postImagine 2 different airlifters - one fitted with fanjet engines, one with with propjet engines - with identical take off runs at 1013mb air pressure, then the same two aircraft taking off at 10,000ft. Will one of them need a longer run than the other to get airborne? If the takeoff runs at 1013 mil...
Jump to postI am beginning to think something pretty prosaic is about all that can happen. PAE and BFI go to a couple hundred takeoff/landings a day, Tacoma maybe 100, SeaTac maybe move Delta's and Alaska's maintenance to Bremerton(SeaTac almost desperately is in need of space), Surface transportation between ...
Jump to postShe was quite a nice lady, met her once. Handled recurring cancer with grace. Interesting byline is that she was one of the first women in Hollywood to fight for equal pay. It made for ugly times with Three's Company and backfired bigtime, but it's an interesting sidenote in TV/film history. Kind o...
Jump to postGrow plants->dig hole->fill hole with plants Repeat Too complicated for governments to understand. ;) I'm actually not too crazy about using living plants for carbon sequestration. Most of the United States has experienced unusually bad wildfire smoke conditions at some point in the last decade. Th...
Jump to postIf electricity generation moves away from using fossil fuels and emitting CO2, is there a way in which the excess night-time generating capacity (nuclear/hydro/wind etc) could be used to convert CO2 to something else along the lines of the C2CNT process mentioned above? One of the major problems wi...
Jump to postProm/rel is actually on the table for a Pac-12/Mountain West tie-up. I like this proposal better than the other one from earlier in the thread.
Promotion/relegation in college football? Game-changing idea could help save Pac-12
Plant trees. Not a good idea, because we need the most CO2 reductions within the next 10 years. A tree will take up the most CO2 when it is 70 to 100 years old. For the same reason nuclear power isn't a solution - when they're all built and running, 20 years have passed... If the goal is saving the...
Jump to postThe Pac-12 is now the Pac-2. Stanford, California, and SMU are going to join the Atlantic Coast Conference. (Who knew that San Francisco Bay emptied into the Atlantic Ocean? ;)) Stanford and Cal are headed there with reduced TV money, and SMU is completely forgoing that money for possibly the first ...
Jump to postPlanting trees can backfire if not done right. I've even read somewhere that the wrong plant can be a CO2 emitter, in particular with temperatures rising. Plants emit CO2 at night and also during the day, I read. Plant material contains cellulose, a carbohydrate, so on balance plants must absorb mo...
Jump to poststlgph wrote:Amazing how he was able to get so close to 100 without going over.
Loved him on TPIR. Still consider him the best game show host ever.
Didn't like that he funded the Sea Shepherd Society to harass a coastal tribe that was trying to resurrect its ancient tradition of capturing whales for food.
Can't help much with the numbers, but all of the current narrowbody offerings would become more efficient (at least on long flights) if they had folding wings that extended beyond the 36-meter Code C wingspan limit. From some people's POV, the A320 fuselage is inefficient because it's nearly a half-...
Jump to postHeresy !!!! A plan to overhaul college football is gaining social media interest - featuring PROMOTION and RELEGATION. How are athletes going to learn about capitalism and the competitive world while not suffering any consequences of failure ? https://www.msn.com/en-gb/sport/other/college-football-...
Jump to postIt's too late for the Pac-12 now, but what I would've done is moved to a winter-to-early spring schedule. That would've been feasible weather-wise for a majority of the members, and I believe this was done post-COVID in at least one of the minor football conferences. It also would've made their TV ...
Jump to postIt's too late for the Pac-12 now, but what I would've done is moved to a winter-to-early spring schedule. That would've been feasible weather-wise for a majority of the members, and I believe this was done post-COVID in at least one of the minor football conferences. It also would've made their TV r...
Jump to postIs anyone following the ongoing saga of musical chairs in college athletics (er, football)? It looks like football TV money (in this case, Fox) is set to kill the Pac-12 -> 10 -> 9 -> 8, a conference that's over a hundred years old. https://www.johncanzano.com/p/canzano-tv-picking-apart-college
Jump to postI believe in the last several years, months and currently, Iran, India and China have seen more severe and even dangerous summer heat temperature and heat-humidity indexes broken. https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/heat-index-at-iran-airport-hits-66-degrees-celsius-as-climate-scientist-warns-earth-wil...
Jump to postHere's a dissent against James Cameron's criticisms of carbon fiber, from a competing manufacturer of deep-sea submersibles: https://www.designnews.com/industry/carbon-fiber-safe-submersibles-when-properly-applied But CET has already proven that carbon fiber composites can be used safely in this app...
Jump to postFWIW, here's an article about the manufacturing process and specs for OceanGate's vehicle, from 2017: Composite submersibles: Under pressure in deep, deep waters Manned deepsea exploration calls for a highly engineered composites solution that saves weight and preserves life — at 6,500-psi service p...
Jump to postBoeing will fly CFM's open fan on Sustainable Flight Demonstrator (paywalled)
Boeing sees long life for X-66A, the NASA lower-emissions test aircraft
https://theaircurrent.com/technology/boeing-will-fly-cfms-open-fan-on-sustainable-flight-demonstrator/
Whaddya know -- another Everett company gains notoriety by downplaying safety and causing a transportation disaster... :( :( Actually the company cites SpaceX and Virgin Galactic as inspirations on their web site, with regard to circumventing the "impediments" to innovation. It certainly ...
Jump to postThe new engine design touted to power the successor to Boeing’s 737 MAX https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/the-new-engine-design-touted-to-power-the-successor-to-boeings-737-max/ On a half-size scale model on display at the GE chalet, the fan is certainly impressive. ... In the ...
Jump to postWhaddya know -- another Everett company gains notoriety by downplaying safety and causing a transportation disaster... :( :( From the June 2019 Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/worlds-first-deep-diving-submarine-plans-tourists-see-titanic-180972179/ Second, tourist sub...
Jump to postThe new engine design touted to power the successor to Boeing’s 737 MAX https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/the-new-engine-design-touted-to-power-the-successor-to-boeings-737-max/ On a half-size scale model on display at the GE chalet, the fan is certainly impressive. ... In the R...
Jump to postAviation Week has an article with spitballing about a mini-CFM RISE on an A220 stretch. It seems a little farfetched as far as the timeline, although I feel like just the open rotor component of the RISE probably wouldn't need until 2035 to be production-capable. https://aviationweek.com/shownews/pa...
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