Waynos,
20 gallon tank. 1 refill per week. 17 miles 'there and back again', 5X.
170 miles. 20 miles on the weekends. 190 miles. 190/20 = 9.5. We drive a Honda CRV which is nominally a 22/27 mpg car.
>>
ch - 9.5mpg? "halve your fuel consumption and the arabs can go to hell"?
>>
We can buy sweeter crude from Nigeria. We can buy /higher priced/ out of South America. For an economy built almost entirely now on mercantile
service and trade, there is no greater threat to stability than high transport costs.
What is more,
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There seems something very wrong with this statement. My own car does 36mpg and there are many more that do much better round here, the very best, if
dullest, do up to 100mpg, on the plus side we hardly know the meaning of the word 'gridlock' here as long as you put your local knowledge to good
use
>>
Welcome to Mile Hi Insanity. It's the altitude you see. Thin air and sucking tailpipe for two hours a day dulls the minds of all but the meanest of
us.
Denver is highly sprawled with many 'suburbs in the city' type housing development literally encompassing a single high volume artery based on the
I-25/225 corridor which winds north then west through the principal urban center. South of this are multiple four and six lane east-west roads but
their speeds, aging bridges and meandering nature plus assorted stoplights and merging cross streets also prevent adequate posted speed limits (none
of which are obeyed anyway) to maintain traffic flow.
As a 'ring road' around the whole mess is the C470 system which now runs West to East from Martin and JM to pick up traffic coming out of Castle
Rock and CSprings (about 50% of our population commute more than 40 miles per day, Denver's prices and housing being 'that bad' for people who came
for a view of the mountains, not their neighbors). And then as a toll route which intersects I-25 before looping around to head north to DIA.
i.e. our most efficient transport artery is in fact the one which is most teats-on-hog useless to anyone living west of Saudi Aurora or North of
Richville in Highlands Ranch.
To say that they couldn't possibly have designed a more inefficient city plan would be wrong. But only because I hate challenging the stupid to do
something dumber than they already have zero-foresight shown an aptitude for.
>>
20mpg for the Moller Skycar is very poor by comparison, equal to maybe a Land Rover Discovery. Maybe you should get rid of your crappy american cars
instead of dreaming about skycars?
>>
And maybe Europeans should live in a nation not a collection of griping city states. We have twice the land that you do and NONE OF US (that I know)
enjoy living cheek by jowl with neighbors hell bent on breeding us into the same kind of population densities as Europe faces.
The big question here is whether you can invent /some/ kind of transport system that doesn't have Americans up in arms over their 'right to bear
automobiles' and yet manages to be competitive and efficient in a world which increasingly outproduces U.S. (and thus, IMO, has more right to oil) in
both Agro and Indu.
>>
Also, 20mpg for a VTOL flying machine sounds very dubious in its own right, what does it do, levitate unpowered?
>>
It's been on TV several times here and has actually been advertised as a 28mpg vehicle. I would assume that the lack of 'militarization' makes the
system vastly more efficient than our masters would like us to believe. That said, I would like the see more specific information on the cruise vs.
high performance profiles at specific payloads and denisty heights. My own preference being for a giant plenum in a blended wing body so that you get
more thrust from a single use motor than you do from a 8 of the things. I would then be willing to accept STOVL with a ramp if need be.
Such a system, with multidirectional 'nautilus' venting like the MP-18 once espoused should simplify main vs. stability posts in VTOL and also
perhaps provide an alternative to controlled-crash pararecovery if the principle Lift element fails.
Either way, if we can _get back_ our 7.5 weekly hours while 'saving the envionrment and foiling terrorist!' I think we should do so. If only
because the weekly jaunt down to Safeway or King Soopers 'by Soccer Moms Everywhere!' should be readily accomplishable by pure electric vehicles
with under 100 miles of cruise range.
Again _WHY_ play around with 'hybrids' when you don't have the clean burning fuel systems to replace the muck of a conventional petrocarbon engine
and you DO have high density Lithium Ion batteries?
I swear, half a cars weight is about suspending a heavy alloy engine, transmission and drive shaft/differential system 2 feet off the pavement. Yet
that very engine is _itself_ expending 70+% of its fuel burn solely to turn over 'on the off chance' that 120-170hp is needed to accelerate it's
own mass to 50mph.
WHY? When we average 15mph on the highway getting home every day?
A freakin' golf cart would do.
And THAT is the key, IMO. Isolate your entire energy debt to a single commodity value as terawatt hours (last I checked we were at 3,300 or so per
year) which can be 'Chapter 11'd' off to nature and then DESIGN an societal system around gaining the electrical capacity necessary to run
everything from that single basic measure. Cleanly.
Moller and a Fan-Air car is the first seductive step towards moving away from an automotive culture.
But there will be others. Free Electrical Power and a 2-10,000 dollar a year tax shelter for everyone willing to 'co op' pay their way into rooftop
wind or solar systems would be the next step I would look into.
The middle class is dying in America because we have all these legacy payments and concerns to pay for at the same time we are being asked to do more
and more as centrist tax base off a national economy which is increasingly running on Chinese Food style interest vs. inflationary credit spending.
Such will RUIN us, if we aren't careful.
And the first politician who sees the anarchy that we are headed for will win on a landslide of PWA/Great Society type programs that doesn't seek to
institute a welfare society or grand schemes but simply makes life /cheaper/ for all of us.
In this, I admire the Brits. Because they have something like 976 TWH in offshores Atlantic Winds. And far from the 2% per year that their
government is mandating as a 'growth industry' they are doing something like 5-7%. As I recall, Sweden is doing even better with a promise to be
petro indepednent by no later than 2015-17.
Far from fighting some Ali Baban Git for rights to the dinosaurs under sandbox, WE should be doing the same. Even if it means having The Fed
effectively buy out entire corporate sectors to facilitate a zero-inertia smoothing of the way.
Helluva lot better investment than our worthless milspec system of adventurist politick.
KPl.
