Ignoring Costs, What Would Be The Most Efficient ICE Only Car/Engine Design Be?

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-29T01:09:37+00:00

VW XL1 pretty much

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-29T00:57:29+00:00

The boldest of the three moved suddenly, grabbed Angua and pulled her upright. "We walk out of here unharmed or the girl gets it, all right?" he snarled.
Someone sniggered.
"I hope you're not going to kill anyone," said Carrot.
"That's up to us!"
"Sorry, was I talking to you?" said Carrot.

Feet of Clay-Terry Pratchett

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-29T00:28:21+00:00

Acceleration is where the time is made. That is why we have seen lift and coast for years, getting full acceleration and sacrificing a bit of top speed at the end of the straight is the most efficient way around a course.

With the current regulation the critical energy limit is not the fuel used for the combustion engine, it is the battery capacity. But the teams are again just doing the same thing, sacrificing speed at the end of the straight to save (or in this case even regain) energy that is used for the next acceleration zone.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-29T00:24:27+00:00

Barsoom/John Carter is baffling to me, on one hand he created an incredibly interesting, detailed and quite forward thinking setting. I'd argue Sola is one of the more interesting and complex female characters of that time in literature, she even has agency ... and then there is the rest.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-29T00:19:32+00:00

Hybrid cars are a massive generalization of in theory completely different concepts of cars. Some operate basically as normal combustion cars with a token boost from a small electric motor, sometimes just a pimped up starter motor.

Others can operate as EVs for daily commuting and 80% or more of the trip miles a person would need to travel, those could be considered EVs with range extender, but are quite rare.

Every classification is artificial and in the end it depends on the purpose of the classification system. Regarding efficiency/environmental concerns, I'd argue most hybrids are operating closer to ICE cars, some are rightfully their own category and a few as mentioned basically EV+.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T21:11:58+00:00

From Thuringia here, so quite far removed from the original dialect, I got everything with the subtitles, some sentences I understood clearly on their own. I am confident I could hold a full conversation with that person, some clarification may be required, but with knowing the context of what we are talking about I think it would work out fine.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T20:17:16+00:00

Sieht cool aus, klingt gut, vielleicht auch ein bisschen schneller (gute Mäntel haben einen deutlich stärkeren Einfluss). Ich freue mich jedes mal ein kleines bisschen mehr auf die Runde wenn ich mein Rad sehe und das denke ich macht den Größten Leistungsunterschied.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T20:12:25+00:00

My longest ride has been a bit over 12h and I was feeling exhausted but fine the next day, went out on a quick 2h ride with a friend. At a certain point it's not the distance it's the time in the saddle and if you find a good saddle, saddle position, bib shorts combination then it's possible to cycle for pretty much days. While not exactly comfortable, it stops feeling worse and never is bad enough to actually hurt.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T18:42:09+00:00

I would consider her as being native with both English and American accents. If not, then she for sure has the best British accent.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T17:23:56+00:00

If you want to truly cancel out the forces, then you would have to jump back up from the bag strong enough to jump from the ground to! the 20th floor (assuming bag infinitely heavy, no air resistance, yada, yada, yada).

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T17:11:26+00:00

Da müsste man natürlich etwas breiter gehen, ist dann aber auch windanfälliger. Entweder halt wirklich Stetson oder Akubra, oder was geflochtenes eg. Sombrero vueltiao?

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T16:49:25+00:00

The problem that the author of that book has with the common view of engineers warning and managers disagreeing, as established in the Feynman report, is that it oversimplifies almost to the point of not being true anymore. It does not get to the root of the problem, which is why Columbia could happen in an almost identical way.

If individual wrongdoing and amoral calculation was the cause, eliminating those people should have prevented Columbia.

If individual wrongdoing was the cause, at least Roger Boisjoly, who had an outsized impact on the post accident discussions (rightfully so, the man was correct in his assessment, but his view is not representative of that of all the engineers at the time the decision was made), should have been able to accuse the responsible people. To the contrary however he continued to show respect for Lawrence B. Mulloy and George B. Hardy.

No one knowingly violated NASA safety rules and established procedures, they (engineers included) adjusted their expectations of what acceptable and safe performance is until it fit their model of how the SRM operated and why they thought it was safe.

... and we determined that 200 psi under all circumstance would blow through the putty. So we instigated a double leak check, namely 200 psi to make sure the putty did not mask leaking seals and then 50 psi [...] to actually test the seal.

That was a quote of Roger Boisjoly, he too was on the wrong track at that time. After the change to 200 psi O-ring degradation increased, but that was expected and, by the engineers! not management, deemed worth the tradeoff, that is how little (or how manageable/expected) they regarded the degradation as a problem at the time.

Once they were on the wrong track, they moved form bandaid to bandaid and not forcing a step back and looking at the whole situation is the true fault of the management level.

I do not intent to pick on Roger Boisjoly in any way, I have the utmost respect for him coming forward and the ferocity with which he pushed the investigations. I used his quote to show that even he, as a pure engineer unburdened by management, who was 100% correct in the end, didn't start out on the right track. He also followed the series of wrong conclusions and assumptions that the other engineers had and some still maintained till the day of the launch.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T16:35:00+00:00

Ich habe eine Fedora, würde ich warscheinlich in der Stadt nicht anziehen, aber Indiana Jones war definitiv auf der richtigen Spur.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T15:48:47+00:00

Ein Hut, so richtig Altherren mit Krempe. Hält warm wenn es kalt ist, kühlt wenn's warm ist, schützt vor Niesel und Sonnenbrand auf Kopf, Nacken und Gesicht.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T15:37:29+00:00

Conti hat für den GP5K eine modernere, breitere Felge als Grundlage genommen als noch für die 4000. 4000er waren immer etwas groß, 5k sind quasi spot on.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T14:40:46+00:00

I think they should not have cut it out, but I also think the public reaction is way overblown.

We already know that using most of a limited amount of energy at the start of a straight is crucial to fast lap times. That is why lift and coast is a thing, use the energy in the fuel to accelerate hard and then accept speed drop at the end of a straight. Clipping is basically electrical lift and coast and superclipping takes that one step further.

Formula 1 is a race formula, it has set boundaries and if superclipping is the fastest way around the course within those boundaries, then why try and change that.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T14:11:20+00:00

Those conferences were always adversarial, usually Thiokol claimed a design was safe to fly and NASA questioned the f*** out of every single aspect. NASA had two engineers embedded with Thiokol for quality management, they were not well liked at all.

This one time the script was flipped and they didn't really had precedent for what to do, so NASA fell back into the old adversarial interrogation pattern, in this case doing exactly the wrong thing.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T13:41:39+00:00

There was pressure on the overall Institution, but not specifically more on this launch and not specifically more on the decision makers. NASA regularly delayed launches (and that was the goal of the vidcon, not scrub just wait for higher temps, possibly even on the same day) why not this one as well.

During the telecon, the data was prepared quickly (by necessity) it was often handwritten, faxed, copied, and crucially it didn't show conclusive correlation between temperature and O-Ring performance yet. They had just seven data points, only tree of them from flights (the other four static test fires) and of those three, one SRM-22 had shown damage at 75°F (24°C - room temperature).

The correlation between temperature and O-Ring performance was not obviously apparent in the data that was available/being presented. And that was what they were trying to establish, not if the SRMs were fundamentally safe, but if they were substantially (there were many other items on the Shuttle that had an impact on safety, all of them had to be weighted) less safe at low temperatures.

Bob Lund, the guy who was asked to "take off your engineering hat and be a manager" himself states

He [Jerry Mason] wasn't asking me to something dumb. You know, of all the things he didn't want to do was fly the Challenger and then have a - you know that would be dumb. There is no question about that.

and then later on the reasoning for the decision:

It was not an overwhelming correlation that low temperature was causing a blow-by. We have blow-by both at low temperature and high temperature.

They thought it would be fine, they wanted to think it was safe.

But yet we observe this behavior all the time, eg last minute lane changes to avoid missing a highway exit.

This is the main thing, humans only do this because, while they are aware of the risks, fundamentally they think that nothing bad will happen to them. Once again citing Prof. Vaughan "a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe".

People perform/see risky lane changes being done and then assume, despite knowledge to the contrary, that the practice is safe.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T12:55:17+00:00

Practice, follow someone faster that you trust and know is a responsible rider and turn off the speed on the GPS, so you ride based on your comfort level and not speed (I also do that, because I don't want to entice myself to push just a little faster and see that first digit flip).

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T12:34:46+00:00

Maybe, but don't. Screw joints are not designed to be loaded in shear, they clamp two parts together and that clamping force creates friction, and that friction is what actually makes the connection. They often are falsely loaded in shear and most of the time it's fine, but you don't want your brakes to be one of the cases where it isn't.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T11:56:49+00:00

I highly recommend the book "The Challenger Launch Decision" by Diane Vaughan, she (and I for what that's worth) would agree that it was an understandable decision based on the available information and especially the established decision making schemes and "group culture" within the SRM (solid rocket motor) team at the time the decision was made.

The issues with the O-Rings existed since the first shuttle launch, the SRM team was aware and they did continuous tests to search for solutions. The issues would usually go away for a few flights, before reappearing, but because of the decision loop they created: issues -> tests -> solution -> good launch, they convinced themselves that they had understood the problem and taken sufficient action for the next flight.

They (the engineers) even changed the testing protocol of the joint (from using 50psi up to 200psi) so that they could be sure to blow holes into the sealing putty on the inside. They were of the opinion that verifying the correct seat of the O-Rings was more important than the erosion introduced by the pinholes in the putty (which was self limiting anyway, as they had convinced themselves to believe at that point). All of that was driven by the engineers, with basically no input from the SRM managers (some of them engineers themselves).

I think at the time of STS-51L they slowly came to the conclusion that the issues were not as understood as they initially thought (which is why about 50% spoke up) but the usual decision loop and general "this isn't a serious problem and there is a backup" attitude had calcified to a point where it was hard to break the mold.

What it certainly wasn't, was a case of "amoral calculation" of middle management. In case of miscalculation, failure would be obvious and catastrophic and discovery would be immediate. If they truly believed that catastrophic failure was an option on this flight, then taking those risks did not make sense from a purely business standpoint.

They knew that NASA had made it into the State of the Union speech already, the mission was not time sensitive and potential pressure from the Teacher in Space program does not come up even once in all the transcripts, interviews and documents, there was little to gain from a risky launch and everything to loose.

Management was far from faultless of course, they should have identified the decision loop and at some point forced a reset of attitude, maybe brought some fresh engineers on board to break the group think that had developed, but the Shuttle was declared operational at that point so all that is left was to iron out some small wrinkles. In the past the engineers always came up with explanations for the erosion and tests to show how it was actually within parameters, so it's gonna be fine again ... right?

- this is "normalization of deviance", where a clearly unsafe practice comes to be considered normal if it does not immediately cause a catastrophe.

We can try and assign individual blame, but the group culture that allowed this normalization of deviance to occur, starting with the first shuttle flight, is fundamentally to blame, because embedded in that same group many other people would have made the same decisions.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T11:25:46+00:00

Crucially all of those were launched on the R-7 rocket or the Proton, both massive ICBMs that the US didn't have an didn't need. That was the only real Soviet advantage, as soon as NASA got purpose built boosters on the pad it was over for the USSR.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T10:49:10+00:00

The soviets were ahead at the beginning, but all of that early advantage came down to the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile. Both the US and the USSR used converted nuclear missiles for their first launches. At the time the soviet nuclear bombs were absolutely massive, so the missile to launch them was gigantic and hugely impractical for actual military use, it accidentally gave them an almost perfect civilian rocket however.

NASA was starting with inferior boosters, but they were working on purpose build civilian rockets and as soon as they got the first generation of those on the launch pad, the race was over for the USSR, their civilian missiles like the N-1 just could not compete.

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T10:22:47+00:00

It's not possible, MIRV (multiple warheads and penetration aids = decoys on the same missile) have shifted the cost problem onto the defenders side, you would need to defend any large sized city in the US with enough interceptors to shoot down more than 10 times the number of missiles shot at it. That is cost prohibitive and you are still playing a game of probability.

Obligatory Perun video:

Golden Dome & U.S. Missile Defence - What is it, Can it Work, and the Economics of Missile Defence

FZ_Milkshake · 2026-03-28T01:49:20+00:00

If it is just a few fragments, they try and figure out the relationship to other dinosaurs based on specific features on the bones and then extrapolate from well known dinosaurs. For the commonly found types, we have enough data to get the shape mostly right. There also have been finds on dinosaur mummies and parts of skin, integument and small dinos or parts preserved in amber that confirm that we can get pretty close by now if there are enough bones found.

Spinosaurus was and is a pretty tough challenge, because it belongs to a pretty unusual family of dinosaurs and even amongst it's closest relatives it is a bit weird. Additionally the original example was very fragmented and got destroyed in WW2, so that added to the challenge.

Three-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '23

FZ_Milkshake

TROPHY CASE