Just increased his horsepower if nothing else.

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I cheered at 17,000rpm.

Horsepower is all well and good, but torque is what gets you moving.

Good call. I hate it when you go up against horsepower that's been underrated.

Thanks for those insights---so, is NOTAR a bit less efficient in transferring power (ran out of horsepower to correct the yaw because of that?)

Or do you think it was just the gust was so large (the turbulence at a crest could have been ferocious) that it wouldn't have matter what model helicopter or whether it had NOTAR or a regular tail rotor--it simply would have been overmastered?

ok, i'll do my best:

"It's where the program does the animation for you using physics (or other) algorithms. As the artist, you place a "flag" in the scene, and attach it to a "pole" then tell the program there's a "45 mph wind from the East".
Then you hit "Play" and you get a movie of a flag waving in the wind."

this is called a sim, and yes it's a type of procedural animation but it doesn't replace some kind of "classical" method of animating. sims are used for all kinds of things: particles, cloth, fur/hair/feathers, crowds, fluid, rigid body destruction, etc, etc. the artists who do this are not animators, they're FX artists and it isn't as simple as plugging in "45 mph wind from the east". not even close. for something seemingly that simple you're dialing in things like direction, turbulence, gravity, plus the cloth properties. once you have your settings, you sim it, which can take days on a render farm for complex sims. if that sim is approved then it goes to lighting, gets put into the scene, has textures/materials/shaders applied, and then gets rendered, which can take another several days on a render farm depending on the complexity. these sims are the only way to get realistic animations for these types of materials. and there are generally many versions made at this stage to get the sim right, fix broken frames, fix intersecting, get the lighting and textures/materials/shaders working right, etc. THEN it goes to the compositing dept for a couple dozen more versions.




"As opposed to regular animation, which can be thought of as glorified stop-motion animation. Each single piece moved by you, individually, for each frame of video."

regular animation is like stop motion except it's not every frame (it's interpolated between keyframes) and is for character animation.

anim and FX are 2 different departments and often use 2 different software packages.

mocap is also not handled by the anim dept. it would be done by match move and/or tech anim.




"You create a flag and a pole. Then the next frame you bend it here, here, here, and here, then click forward to the next frame, and bend it a bit more here, little less here, invert this bend, add another, make this corner whip a bit."

no one in there right mind would do this, it's completely impractical, and would look like complete shit.




"It basically allows less technically savvy artists play in a world where only "nerds" used to play."

the FX people are way more nerds and technical than anim people. you need to be technically savvy for every dept. but the real nerds and really technically savvy people work on pipeline who were probably heavily involved in this project building custom toolsets for it.




"Really kind of lazy way of animating."

no, it's fucking hard, requires a lot of knowledge, a lot of people, a lot of cpu horsepower, is used all the time to get high quality animations, is a collection of several departments other than animation, and is used in conjunction with animation.

Oh god... this is what it will sound like when cars start doing ads to sell themselves.

"Downtown Chicago at rush hour was always bad, but nowadays it's worse than ever... however, with my enhanced 3.5-liter DOHC 24-valve V6, rated at 300 horsepower, I am extraordinarily equipped to handle whatever is thrown at me. Of course, if things go sideways, I'm more than ready to get right in there - I can activate my predictive forward collision warning and forward emergency braking for a stealth approach, or trust in my shadowy master to take action with my driver attention alert... or maybe I should make a statement, and test the limits of my extruded aluminum roof crossmember and additional frame crossmember. If some jumped up elitist pedestrians want to get in the way, I'm more than willing to go all in, as I roll through like a... well, like a car. The only certainty, is that my driver will get to Baby Parkour to pick up Karen at exactly 4.30."

As was mentioned above, the cost of the fuel is a non-starter. Currently SpaceX uses a Kerosene / Liquid Oxygen fuel mix.

After the anomaly (the space industries way of saying accident) in June SpaceX did a complete vehicle review. They are now using a more advanced technique to cool the LOX which means for a denser LOX liquid in their tanks, which ultimately means they have more oxidizer on board for their flights now.

Coupled with the LOX improvements they have made upgrades to the engines which means 30% greater efficiency. Basically the horsepower per engine has increased.

This means they can get their payloads to orbit plus have more then enough fuel left over in stage 1 to return it to land.

The greatest efficiency comes from returning the stage(s) and then reusing them in future launches (not proven yet). ALL launchers (u.s, soviet, indian, ESA, Japan, etc) ditch ALL of their hardware into the ocean when getting payload to orbit. Bye, bye multi million dollars worth of engines and hardware.

If SpaceX can turn that scenario on its head and reuse those stages and MORE importantly the engines they will cut their costs per launch by a substantial amount. Ultimately that means cheaper per pound cost to get material into orbit.

All of the media uses the word "explosion" when describing the June anomaly which is funny because there was never an ignition of onboard fuels.

The LOX tanks have smaller Helium tanks inside them. The helium is released during launch. The helium rises in the LOX quickly, expands and pressurizes the tank to ensure the LOX is "squeezed" into the pipes in order to keep up with the turbo pumps.

One of the struts holding a helium tank inside the LOX tank failed. The helium tank shot up and blew threw the top of the LOX tank and took a good part of the top of the stack off. The engines actually fired for a few seconds after the anomaly and then sputtered out. The rest of the vehicle at this point is still fairly intact.

Without proper structural integrity the vehicle started to veer off course, dynamic pressures built up and the vehicle was essentially ripped apart by those forces.

At 3:20 the Helium tank rips off its struts. At 3:27 the remainder of the vehicle disintegrates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuNymhcTtSQ

SpaceX mentioned that in June, the dragon capsule continued to relay telemetry until it smacked into the ocean. If the Dragon had better software onboard it would have detected the anomaly and recovered with chutes. Elon said that software would be active on Dragons from now on.

I'm not sure how much credence I can give the wiki page...I note it claims things that are obviously wrong, like "the design does not have a long lifespan when compared to other engine designs due to large numbers of moving parts" while in fact this motor has far fewer moving parts than normal motors. It did make some good points, like the first one that occurred to me about friction, but also made some bad points such as claiming 'mechanical complexity' as a drawback, while in fact it seems far more simple than normal motors.
"extra complicated machined parts" also exist in normal motors, and can be made fairly cheaply and easily in bulk.
Excess use of oil is an issue, but one they should be able to solve with proper machining and materials. Low RPM is fine for many applications, like a generator, so long as it's efficient it's fine and might even be better. Since you get high torque at low RPM with this design, low RPM seems to be ideal.
They claimed it had comparable horsepower to the same displacement normal motors in the prototype...if true, that point is moot.
Actually, there seems to be less moving mass in this motor, consider the mass of the crank shaft and counterbalances, connecting rods and pistons, the camshaft, rods, lifters, rockers, and valves. This motor only had a compact 'crank' and the connecting rods and pistons, and the output shaft. That's less actually moving to my eye.
The 'potential for explosion' was claimed on Wiki to be a design flaw of the case thickness around the 'crank', which could easily be thickened if it doesn't have to fit inside a torpedo....potential removed.
I'm not saying it's perfect, or necessarily even feasible, but it does seem to have more going for it than you give it credit for and is worth following it's progress to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_cylinder_engine

Read the last few paragraphs to see that this is basically another "Solar Roadways" situation. E.g. too much hype, not enough practical purpose.

Let's breakdown the problems here: extra complicated machined parts, excess usage of oil (to lube everything up), low rpm and horsepower due to the amount of material needed to move (sure a standard engine might weigh more, but less of it actually moves), additional wear over time, and the potential for explosion with extended use.

Basically, these things are only used in torpedoes, where a massive explosion is the whole point.

My high school French teacher would love this. She taught us that 2CV stands for deux chevaux, literally "two horses", or horsepower, which apparently the first of these had.

S'gonna be cool to live long enough to have been one of the last generations to have experienced the thrill and abandon of gasoline horsepower, legal bonfires, gunpowder projectiles.....farting without being ticketed by the local constabulary...Har.

Then, amusingly, he gets passed by the two blue cars working together (drafting, which requires less horsepower at speed; it's why they pass him on the straightaway)---at about 12:30...

I'll give the guy all the credit for a suberb run (and balls of steel) but it's just not the same thing as driving it on gravel in a group B car.

Even if you ignore the sun in the eyes, stick gear changes and the way Vatanen had to use the clutch in the corners because the engine just had too much power, the sheer difficulty of traversing a low friction surface like gravel puts his time in a league of it's own.

Watch the two videos and you see the complete technical difference, Loeb goes in to low gear through the corners, doesn't drift at all (even drops in to first at points), and uses the cars acceleration combined with tarmac traction to get back up to speed. He even hits 6th gear quite a few times in the run. His control of the wheel is very smooth and measured.

Now watch Vatanen. Most of the corners, he's probably riding 2nd or 3rd and instead of breaking, is using the crazy horsepower of the engine to keep him going round the corner. He doesn't reach the same sort of top speeds of course because he's constantly fighting the loss of traction even in a straight line. His wheel control is excellent, but you can observe how he is constantly fighting to maintain his place on the road.

I suspect Loeb probably could better Vatanen's time with the same car and similar conditions, but we'll never know.

No way! I wonder how much horsepower that Volvo had to have push that barn door aerodynamics (or lack thereof) through the air at that speed!
LOL