Comments

blaj345 - thank you for your comments. Information is what it is, but in this imperfect world those who have to make decisions often have inadequate information at the time these decisions have to be made. Farmers the world over have to contend with imperfect weather forecasts, markets that are so volatile as to be unpredictable. Spring sown barley is an important crop in Scotland and no one can gaurantee if it will be profitable next year -for many it was a loss this year. How could you encode and accurately transfer all the information, much of it held at a subconscious level, that makes Roger Federer the champion he is? It would be difficult to know what seemingly trivial bit was not important in some situations. Some things you have to do and practice to become skilled and farming is one of them. On my question about the bombing of Nagasaki - you missed, or were unaware of the point. All of the points you raised were to do with the bombing of Hiroshima. Did it not occur to you that one of the reasons for bombing Nagasaki was to do with Stalin.At that time Stalin was in absolute command of the largest and strongest and best equiped army in the world, and had most of them poised in Europe. Allied analysts, based on his previous behaviour had good reason to believe that he might push on to conquer the rest of europe. The basic principles of the atomic bomb were known to soviet scientists and they, like the rest of the world's scientists knew that production of weapons grade material was difficult and expensive. One atomic bomb might have been all the allies had. Two bombs close together meant that it was difficult for Japan and a would be agressor to guess at the number of bombs the allies actually had. The other aspect was that Stalin was demonstrably ruthless and would not have been stopped unless he was sure the allies had the "bottle" to use this weapon repeatedly on live targets. Perhaps you knew all this, but it was not in your comments so how are we to know

I'm sorry , I should have checked the illustration. The catalytic converter comes after the exhaust turbine. The wasteage this involves could be rectified with another turbine after the catalytic converter, or putting the catalytic converter first and if the temperatures were too high , manage them by bleeding in a controlled amount of cool compressed air. It is a neat idea to use the camshaft covers as inlet manifolds, but it requires careful design of the camshaft and valve lubrication to avoid drawing lubricant into the combustion chambers. I stand by my assertion that exhaust turbines would be better powering the generator than some form of blower / compressor.In the world of air compresssion a big one going slowly is more efficient than a small one going fast and though bulkier, need not weight more as the components are less stressed and can be made of lighter materials.

This calls for a bit of joined up thinking.If the tube were quite a lot longer, say 15 kilometers,and exited near the top of some mountain. If the tube were evacuated and had a door that opened and closed just before and after each "shot" a space craft accelerated at a bearable 3g would exit the gun at over 2000 mph which would put into the speed range for a scram jet. As other comments have pointed out very high speed much lower than 30 kilometers would consume a lot of energy in air resistance.

As with wind power the key measure is what it costs per unit of energy it provides with all costs considered. Wind energy has gone down the route of large horizontal axis machines(HAWT), because they can deliver the best aerodynamic efficiency at typical wind speeds. They have fundamental problems that mean they are unlikely to produce power any cheaper than they now do. Vertical axis machines, though less efficient aerodynamically have the potential to be economically superior because they can be scaled up in two dimensions ( not one as the HAWT )be constructed with cheaper materials, and much easier to maintain. One aspect of wind generated wave energy production that does not seem to get it's due attention is the angular momentum factor. Anything that has kinetic energy also has momentum and the transfer of both to some device, such as a turbine, is governed by the rule that in collisions, momentum is always conserved. It also is the case that the maximum transfer of momentum ( and therefor kinetic energy ) takes place when the two things in collision have the same inertial properties ( like two pool balls ).This rule applies to angular momentum as well as linear momentum Wind generated waves have angular momentum ( and therefor angular kinetic energy ) and that proportion of the total kinetic energy of the wave grows with the fourth power of the wave height. This explains why larger waves are steeper and the ratio of wave length to wave height gets smaller. It also explains the phenomenon of "tubes" that intrepid surfers admire, and sometimes the withdrawal of the sea before a tsunami strikes. Consequently a wave energy generator hoping to extract as much energy as possible from the waves has to be able to vary it's moment of inertia depending on wave height, and that the motion of the device colliding with the wave needs to have an angular component( rotation about some axis )if it is to absorb the maximum momentum, and thereby kinetic energy from the wave. In the device described it might improve efficiency if the point about which the underwater floats rotated could be altered according to the wave height above.