• 0 Posts
  • 1.25K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

help-circle




  • EVs don’t need to beat petrol vehicles in every way, in the same way that a sedan doesn’t have to beat a minivan, or a laptop doesn’t need to beat a smartphone.

    a) EVs are getting relatively cheaper every year, while all vehicles are getting more expensive. b) They have range far in excess of what 90% of people use in a day. c) You can rent a vehicles for road trips if you really want to drive non-stop for dozens of hours at a time. d) Cold weather range isn’t too bad, and batteries usually condition themselves now. EV’s have a cold weather advantage in that they don’t need to idle for 10-15 minutes to prevent danage to the engine. e) Charging infrastructure is already ubiquitous, you can plug them into any electrical outlet and charge dozens of kilometers overnight. That’s zero fill-up time. Most residential parking infrastructure already has available plugs for block heaters and such, basically only street parking would ve annoying here. If you regularly drive more than dozens of kilometers in a day, you can get a larger charging plug from residential circuits, like clothes driers and ovens use, for a few hundred dollars, and all but guarantee a full charge every night. f) All else being equal EVs have better torque for towing, and unless the trailer is a giant billboard they don’t effect highway efficiency too much. Most importantly, 90% of people never tow anything.

    EVs have different strengths and weaknesses to petrol vehicles, and the millions of people who commute under 40 miles a day would find an EV cheaper and easier to own. EVs have many of the same weakness as petrol vehicles however, and insisting they have to fill the same niches makes that worse. You don’t need to be reliant on fill stations, or have gigantic vehicles. EVs are best for smaller vehicles anyway, and smaller vehicles are better for roads and people’s safety.





  • Yes, ion thrusters still use conservation of momentum to generate thrust. They aren’t limited by how fast or how hot we can make something explode though, so we can shove way more energy into the stuff they’re throwing out the back. They’re basically tiny coil/railguns, using electricity to move individual ions really fast.

    In terms of efficiency, Ion thrusters are 4 to 40 times better than liquid fueled rockets. The draw back is that ion engines make very little thrust for the mass of the engine.


  • Memes can be propaganda, yes, but they need to be something more, otherwise they won’t reach people.

    You can make an image macro of a cat with the text “cucumber bad”, but it probably won’t be very popular. Even then, there’s a history of memes about cats reacting to cucumbers that gives that idea more traction than “Nazis did a nazi”.

    Someone asked “why the downvotes”. I explained “bad meme”.