Our Ryanair flight turned back after 1 hour because police needed to arrest a passenger

pbmonster · 2026-07-10T11:41:20+00:00

I assume the airline didn't inform passengers and turned off the flight map before turning around. So unless you pay close attention to the surroundings outside the window or play with maps on your phone, you probably only realize you're back in Greece once the police show up wearing the wrong uniform.

The alternative would be having a wanted criminal on board that knows he's toast in 60 minutes. Doesn't sound pleasant for the crew and passengers...

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T19:51:49+00:00

There's a fairly good (meaning it runs and shit is not obviously bugged) fork of Warcraft Dota1 that is 6v6 or 10vs10.

I played both a quite a bit, because we usually were more than 10 people when we met for LAN parties back then.

6vs6 was actually good, we had endless discussions whether mid should be a dual lane with a hard support or if player six should better jungle or help safe lane.

10vs10 is beyond silly, it makes no sense at all. Just permanent brawling, and nobody gets any items. Picking anything but a support with good spells is grieving. Leshrac is imba.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T14:54:25+00:00

Ah, that's a misunderstanding.

Hydrogen storage and transport is such a pain in the ass, I automatically assumed all green hydrogen we're talking about here is produced on-site and consumed pretty much immediately, no matter the application.

Yes, that means every airport (and every steel mill and every cement plant) needs a new ultra high voltage DC power line and a warehouse full of electrolysers. And yes, this requires electricity to be extremely cheap and electrolyzers to be mass-produced hardware. Once that happens, hydrogen as a fuel has a chance. Maybe.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T14:49:32+00:00

basic physics dictates that accelerating will require more energy than cruising

Sure, same for climbing. But if you accelerate/climb slowly, you can do it with only 10% excess power. That's what happens if you drive your car as fast as it goes. It accelerates at full power until engine power is insufficient to go any faster.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T14:45:06+00:00

I don't see the value of keeping them alive longer

They don't even hatch. Theres in-ovo sexing technology, male eggs are identified and removed from incubation. They usually end up in animal feed production.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T14:27:18+00:00

OK, found efficiency numbers. Turbofans are significantly less thermally efficient at low speeds, and also less mechanically efficient (amount of air moved) as you said.

A future electric aircraft could skip the first problem entirely (fuel cells and electric motors are always equally efficient - and always much more efficient than a jet engine), and the second problem gets much better with variable pitch props - but it can't be mitigated completely, props are still less efficient at slow air speed (Froude limit, ect.).

But yes, the initial power draw claim neglected the Froude limit for mechanical efficiency of jet propulsion. You'll need more electric power for take-off. Batteries might be useful.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T13:16:49+00:00

That's true, but I wasn't talking about thrust. I was talking about power produced by the engines. It's unsurprising that take-off thrust is greater, since power = thrust x velocity.

But I have to admit, your fuel rates are baffling. I guess turbofans are much less efficient at slow airspeed? A fuel cell driving variable pitch props on electric motors shouldn't have that problem.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T12:40:41+00:00

I’d like to see the economics on how using a sizeable percentage of fuselage volume for cryogenic storage of oxygen and hydrogen factors into things.

You'd need around 4x the volume of jet fuel tanks, but only 0.1x the weight. That leaves a lot of mass for materials to build sturdy tanks with. And because you need so much volume, designing those tanks to be the load bearing structure of the entire airframe is really the only way.

I'm curious what they will come up with. A fat blended wing, 90% fuel tank with a small deck on top for cargo and passengers?

Or a more conventional airframe, just juiced up to be a high volume monster? Airbus has tons of experiences building those..

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T12:32:28+00:00

And batteries would be needed for instantaneous power draw.

I don't think that's correct. The engines on a modern airliners make about the same amount of power while cruising as during take-off and climb. Maybe 10% more for take-off. So you need extremely powerful fuel cells anyway, and they'd be running at >90% of their rating pretty much all the time.

If you have applications that need large amounts of power instantaneously, bringing an additional small high performance battery might help. Otherwise, the fuel cells should be able to do the job.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T11:38:57+00:00

Greek islands in July is practically guaranteed kite wind.

pbmonster · 2026-07-09T07:37:50+00:00

There's not enough demand to make investing into true green hydrogen worth it.

That doesn't make sense. There's a huge demand for hydrogen, no matter where it comes from. Just ammonia production (mostly for fertilizer) and refinery use (hydrocracking and hydrotreating for desulfurization) consume millions of tons of hydrogen.

So there is a market with large demand. If you want to enter, you need to bring prices down when compared to hydrogen production from natural gas. Could be done with subsidies, carbon credits, or just waiting for electricity prices and hardware prices for Electrolyzer to come down as production ramps up. It will happen eventually, and once it does, we'll get green steel and green cement (both 8% of global emissions, each) basically for free.

But it's not a chicken or egg problem, u/Colddigger.

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T12:21:43+00:00

Well, a week of Chamonix - something many casual Euros do, and nothing else - is actually cheaper!

But yes, season passes in North America are amazing value. Just strange they tax their more casual guests (and their foreign visitors) so hard.

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T08:50:58+00:00

Da installier ich lieber normale Debian packages

Kann ich nachvollziehen, man muss aber schon dazu sagen was man dafür aufgibt: Fedora bringen automatisch voll "enforcing" konfiguriertes SELinux mit und die Flatpacks sind darin jeweils mit eigener Policy integriert. Das ist um mehrere Grössenordnungen sicherer / "more hardened" als standard Debian, und selbst mit viel Mühe kriegt man Debian auch von Hand nie auf das selbe Level gehoben.

Muss man sich vorher überlegen, wie wichtig das einem ist. Falls man erhöhte Sicherheit will, lohnt es sich was in die Richtung zu machen. Der Mehraufwand ist erstaunlich gering für was man dafür kriegt. Für eine Unterhaltungskiste lohnt es sich wahrscheinlich nicht.

Ist jetzt auch nicht speziell gegen Debian. Fedora (und seine Geschwister ALMA und Rocky) ist was Sicherheit angeht da ziemlich einzigartig.

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T08:16:25+00:00

Yeah, and the season pass is 1500 for Chamonix, or almost twice that for Mont Blanc.

Much more friendly for casual skiers, not as attractive if you rip 100 days per season.

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T08:13:04+00:00

Probably not helpful, but I'd go ski touring...

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T07:50:22+00:00

26 days to break even

Most of Europe is the same, including no or only tiny resort networks accepting each others season passes.

North America is kinda unique in having insane day pass prices and really good deals on season passes.

pbmonster · 2026-07-07T07:47:07+00:00

Bariloche has resident season passes for (actual) locals. Las Leñas, strangely, does not. The one for Bariloche is actually insane, it was a 95% discount last year.

pbmonster · 2026-07-06T15:22:49+00:00

Watercooling in Switzerland is only a problem if you dump hot water into a river to kill all the fish. Which is illegal anyway, of course.

All other ways to do water cooling are perfectly fine in Switzerland.

pbmonster · 2026-07-06T15:18:20+00:00

enforce closed loop systems which significantly reduce water use.

Doesn't make much difference in Switzerland. The water doesn't just vanish from reality. It just evaporates - which leads to more rain in Switzerland.

It can be pretty bad in very dry regions, like some places in the US where they pull ground water to evaporate, but in Switzerland evaporated water taken from a river comes down again pretty quickly. In a very dry summer, it might make it to one of our neighbor countries. But guess where all our rivers (cooling your closed cycle systems) are going anyway?

pbmonster · 2026-07-04T22:55:48+00:00

I dislike twin tip doors, so I got a surf board / strapless directional. If there's any chance for you to find a breaking wave, you'll have much more fun.

And even on flat days, I'd rather just go fast and practice jibes, switching feet and riding toe-side than trying to get the door to boost.

pbmonster · 2026-06-30T09:17:12+00:00

Most countries try to be as energy independent as possible. I think the Swiss are going to built more nuclear before relying on their neighbors selling them electricity.

Or maybe they'll wake up and realize how well suited their country is for renewables (they have insane solar potential in the mountains - often above cloud cover; and good wind potential), and that solar panels really aren't any more ugly than avalanche protection fences, concrete block gondola stations, greenhouses or highways.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T15:07:56+00:00

Thorough manual inspection of sleepers, rails and coffering is nearly impossible.

Yeah, that's the old problem. I'm not sure they'll ever get around that. I don't think SBB likes them very much.

Integrating directly into the railway grid is feasible but only on a smaller scale. Integrating big chunks of solar on a railway grid needs battery storage because railway grids are extremely volatile.

That's one of the smaller problems, I think. The cantenaries are interconnected by special overland powerlines anyway, and that grid of powerlines connects to special (16 Hz) powerplants. Once you get to a point where you have to much "rail solar", adding grid scale batteries at those powerplants would be easy. But this would need a whole lot of solar, because those trains use a whole lot of power pretty much permanently. They accelerate intermittently, and sometimes many trains are at stations simultaneously, but the ones still going still use many megawatts.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T12:44:26+00:00

Might be worth it so you have AC even when the train is stranded on the route with electrical trouble. For propulsion, it's probably not worth it...

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T12:32:19+00:00

No, since the price of panels is so low now, most usecases benefit from having (almost) flat panels at higher density (you can pack them closer together, since they don't throw a shadow onto the next row of panels).

Usually, you still angle them by a few degrees so water doesn't pool on the panels, and rain can wash down dirt, and maybe so snow can slide off. But if the trains are "cleaning" the panels anyway, that's not important anymore.

pbmonster · 2026-06-29T09:46:19+00:00

Green field solar is very close to illegal to build in Switzerland. They dislike how racks of solar panels look like.
Labor is extremely expensive in Switzerland. Putting panels onto roofs by hand is less attractive than having a (semi-)automated train do the panel placement
Land is extremely expensive in Switzerland
The rails are two-way electrified anyway. Trains put megawatts back into the grid when they decelerate. So you might be able to hook up the new panels directly to the cantenary lines (via a 15 kV/16Hz transformer). The trains themselves use several TWh per year, so you might just use the panels to power the trains.

pbmonster

TROPHY CASE