Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

  • 2 Posts
  • 911 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • No, what I’m talking about isn’t steaming bullshit fresh from the bovine’s ass.

    What is the major complaint people have about electric cars? Range, right? Because lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries do not have the energy density per unit volume or unit weight of gasoline. Electric cars are often heavier than their ICE counterparts because they’re crammed with so many batteries to make up for the relative lack of energy density, and they benefit from things like regenerative braking. Electric motorcycles often don’t have regenerative braking, which is why Kawasaki is right now advertising a $7000 sport bike with a 55mph top speed (65 if you push the boost button) and a range of 41 miles (if you don’t push the boost button). The Ninja 250 I bought in 2007 could do 120mph and I routinely went 300 miles between fill-ups with it’s ~5 gallon tank.

    Meanwhile these folks have a hexacopter that will out-carry and out-run a Robinson R-44 piston-powered helicopter, on Lithium batteries.

    Actually just right there, they say a 200 mph cruise speed and a 100 mile range. So that’s a 30 minute endurance. To legally fly cross country in the United States, you need to have enough endurance to make it to your first intended point of landing PLUS 30 minutes, and that’s day VFR minimum fuel when operating under Part 91. Are you telling me it has an hour of battery life but half of that will be in reserve? In something like a Cessna Skyhawk a half hour of fuel is something like 4 gallons of gasoline, or about 24 pounds. How much lithium battery do you need to make ~100 horsepower for half an hour? And mind you, that’s cruise power, NOT takeoff power. Which will be a LOT greater than cruise power especially in a VTOL aircraft. I get that it’s a tiltrotor and would have airplane-like performance in cruise, but it’ll still be more of a bitch to get airborne than a conventional plane.

    Anybody want to see me plan a 100 mile flight in a Cessna Skyhawk, figure up how much gas the trip would take, convert that amount of gas to kilowatt-hours and then look up the weight of a Li-Ion battery with that capacity?

    I’d also be real interested to know what the secret sauce is to make those propellers that quiet. Yes, electric motors are quieter than gas engines, but the noise from something like an airplane or helicopter is mostly made by the propeller/rotor blades, especially at the tips. By what physics are you going to make something with 6 propellers quieter than something that has one? I bet that thing is going to be louder - and shriller - than an equivalent helicopter. Stand next to a toy drone in flight and explain to me by what magic they’re going to make one that seats four make “a barely perceptible sound.”

    If you’re going to tell obvious lies, just say I’m pretty.



  • A pretty huge proposal to expand the Light Sport rule is in the works.

    For those unaware, in 2004 the United States made some pretty sweeping additions to the Federal Aviation Regulations, essentially adding what the rest of the world calls “ultralight aviation.” What Americans had been previously calling “ultralights” were more like the rest of the world’s “microlights.” The Light Sport Rule added the Sport Pilot certificate (lesser privileges than a Private pilot), the Sport Pilot Instructor certificate, two kinds of aircraft repairmen, and two categories of aircraft, Special and Experimental Light Sport.

    The rule has been a resounding success, so they’re talking about greatly widening what sport pilots can fly and what can be built and certified as a Light Sport aircraft. They’re talking about adding night flight, allowing controllable pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, 4 seats, higher stall speeds, higher takeoff weights, higher cruise speeds, possibly even eliminating the language that requires single engines or reciprocating engines.

    It’s possible there’s a boom time coming for General Aviation.











  • Nah, this is just pure economics like all the abusive shit in the video game industry, or the so-called “pink tax.”

    If gamers really cared about microtransactions, season passes, gambling mechanics, things like that, they’d stop playing games from studios that do that shit and only play games that don’t or none at all. But gamers love that shit more than rock & roll sex drugs. Gamers will pay extra to experience the abuse before it’s even ready. A lot of the indie gaming sphere especially on PC is largely free of that shit, but the so-called AAA industry is only thinking of new ways to twist the teeth out of their customers. I think they’re going to start charging console customers for controller support next year. Make sure to stock up on verification cans.

    Women want shampoo that smells like mango and pants that fit tighter than her own skin more than they want money in the bank or a roof that doesn’t leak. A few might bitch about it on Twitter and then proceed to do absolutely nothing about it. The store brand unscented bar soap that cost $6 for 9 bars is right there. The “Compare active ingredient to Head & Shoulders” shampoo for $2.49 a quart is 4 feet away. She’d rather eat her hand than wash with those.

    There is no business model for women’s pants with pockets, because pockets just don’t work well in skin-tight clothing especially on a curvy figure. Even if you made the pockets have plenty of room the outer cloth wouldn’t permit any room, and if you do cram anything in there it’ll print hideously. As much as you hear about “We want pants with pockets!” there hasn’t been and won’t be a cottage industry for this because pants that are loose and straight enough for functional pockets are already mass manufactured and sold in the men’s section. Women can and occasionally do buy men’s pants to have working pockets. By far most of them buy women’s skin tight jeans, I presume to prevent blacking out during high G maneuvers. There’s also enough women in the world who will willingly pay $1500 for a purse to keep Gucci Vuitton in business.





  • The number of updates I’ve seen on my phone has decreased because it’s old enough to be done with feature updates. I got out of Windows before it got that bad.

    Something I don’t miss from Windows was each app was responsible for its own updates, so you’d sit down to draw something in CAD or whatever and it would say “need to update to continue” so you’d have to sit there listening to the fans whine for a few minutes before you could start. This still happens occasionally on Linux because some software is just the Windows version running in some compatibility layer or something, but it happens a lot less because the package manager handles all that at once.