The parent of my comment here should get upvoted, to counter the nonsense of the grandparent who suggested the obvious staging that has already been done.

I logged in (for the first time in like a year) to upvote it, but apparently I don't know how to do that anymore.

In January 2007, GM unveiled the Chevy Volt concept car, the one you may recall looking like a Camaro. Because the range-extending gas generator allowed the gas engine to be decoupled from the wheels, GM said that the range extender could be any kind of engine, *including turbine*. The enthusiastic response to that concept car led to GM greenlighting the car for production, and then they got serious about the design. Rather quickly they determined that a turbine engine actually SUCKS (ha) for this application because of terrible emissions -- high NOx as I recall.

Power output and weight are not the only parameters to worry about in gas engines.

See other comments for discussion of hydrogen.

Hey can someone get the attention of a moderator / editor to alert them to the fact that they didn't actually link to the article? See parent of this comment for link. (facepalm)

Posting my first comment IN A DECADE to say yeeesssss ^^^THIS^^^. What this guy said. Wireless charging on the move (in roadways) absolutely only exists to soak up VC, government and institutional grant money. It's just the most awesome slow-motion fraud.

STATIONARY wireless charging is absolutely a thing, and I look forward to the J2954 standard finally arriving as a factory installed option, although I'm starting to worry that it won't ever. But in-road wireless? Not happening. Big batteries and DC Fast Charging have already mooted it.

It's like those partisans for cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. They don't even know that they've already lost the battle with battery electric vehicles. Or, more specifically, their funders don't know it.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/transport/2013/07/asiana_airlines_crash_stop_blaming_sfo_s_runways_and_korea_s_pilots_for.html

"Lastly, we're hearing murmurs already about the fact that Asiana Airlines hails from Korea, a country with a checkered past when it comes to air safety. Let's nip this storyline in the bud. In the 1980s and 1990s, that country's largest carrier, Korean Air, suffered a spate of fatal accidents, culminating with the crash of Flight 801 in Guam in 1997. The airline was faulted for poor training standards and a rigid, authoritarian cockpit culture. The carrier was ostracized by many in the global aviation community, including its airline code-share partners. But Korean aviation is very different today, following a systemic and very expensive overhaul of the nation’s civil aviation system. A 2008 assessment by ICAO, the civil aviation branch of the United Nations, ranked Korea's aviation safety standards, including its pilot training standards, as nothing less than the highest in the world, beating out more than 100other countries. As they should be, Koreans are immensely proud of this turnaround, and Asiana Airlines, the nation's No. 2 carrier, had maintained an impeccable record of both customer satisfaction and safety."

Last month, the annual Planetary Defense Conference took place, this time in Flagstaff, Arizona (down the road from Meteor Crater). If you are interested in this topic, you really should take a look at the incredible video archive which has ALL of the presentations -- like 23 hours of them. Seriously, if you really want to dive deep into this subject, imagine me GRABBING YOUR SHOULDERS AND SHAKING YOU and saying loudly right into your face "watch these videos!"

Here is the conference webpage:

http://www.iaaconferences.org/pdc2013/

And here is the program, useful for navigating the video archive below:

http://iaaweb.org/iaa/Scientific%20Activity/pdc2013program.pdf

But you really want to go to the videos. Here is the complete archive:

http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/folder

Particularly germane to the discussion here, check out this video which includes two presentations:

http://www.livestream.com/pdc2013/video?clipId=pla_48629586-65d2-44c3-a1f3-57c0c259d526

At the 1h21m point:
Overview of Collisional-Threat Mitigation Activities at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Paul Miller
(very dry delivery, but very interesting review of nuclear weapon solutions)

At the 1h42m40s point:
GPU Accelerated 3-D Modeling and Simulation of a Blended Kinetic Impact and Nuclear Subsurface Explosion
Brian Kaplinger
(new PhD, on the same team as Dr. Wie, the author mention in the post that leads this thread).

These guys have thought about these problems far harder than you have. You might benefit from listening to them for 20 minutes.

Or, you know, just skip this and resume your underinformed opinionating :)

Heh. I'm wondering who would be the bigger fool: you for believing this, or anyone else believing you?

CCS is a gigantic fraud, soon to be executed on an industrial scale.

Of course they've done that. They've done it all.

The fact that you even think you need to research it is a sad commentary on the real situation. Anthropogenic global warming (AGW) and the secondary effects are all settled science, and the only reason there appears to be a debate is that those who are profiting from the status quo have colossal megaphones. Funding of denier scientists, astroturfing letters to the editor, et cetera. All they have to do is sow doubt. Congratulations.

Sadly, we have been utterly screwed since we failed to ratify Kyoto 20 years ago.

I work in satellite communications, where circular polarization (e.g. LHCP and RHCP) is common, especially in some C-band links. Can someone explain to me how OAM is different from CP? Because it sure sounds like CP to me.

And if they're modulating the data onto the phase, wouldn't that simply be phase shift keying?

I read a short IEEE Spectrum article about this just yesterday, and I'm still puzzled. Tech writers tackling this subject would be well advised to mention CP in their writing and explain how this differs.

I'm also an OS/2 refugee, ran it for six years or so as my primary OS. There were some frustrations, sure, but it was much more stable than anything else available at the time. And the apps seemed to be higher quality. To this day I still use PMView, an image viewing/processing program that had its roots in OS/2, and yes I pay money for it. I WISH I could still be using PMMail -- that email program was so beautifully done, everything working the way it should. Every time my Thunderbird install doesn't handle justification right, I pine for the days of PMMail and OS/2 (which means every day).

AntEater, you should check the link in my sig. Your misuse of its vs it's is distracting to the reader. I know that techies think grammar doesn't matter, but your smartest readers see that mistake as a cognitive speedbump.

Here's the 60 Minutes piece that everybody's mentioning but not linking to:

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=50121782

The seven-crew version of Dragon can be seen briefly in it. I believe it was the scene where Garrett Reisman was getting out of it. In a side note, it's too bad there wasn't more of Garrett, he's a real card.

Alexei Krasnov, chief of piloted programs:

"The malfunction was found in the service elements of the descent capsule....but no decision was taken to delay a forthcoming launch.

Krasnov acknowledged that several days ago some problems really emerged....but the problems are related to a service element, rather than the descent capsule,

Krasnov did not rule out that “the schedule of piloted missions will be revised,” but he sees no tragedy in this. “There are program reserves to deal with the emerged problem,” he underlined.

“It is very good that upon the results of the tests we received critical remarks before the spaceship was brought to the Baikonur spaceport, because we have some time and possibilities to examine everything in detail,” Krasnov concluded.

http://www.itar-tass.com/en/c32/328095.html

Might want to try a little harder.

The Volt functions down to -13 F / -25 C cold. That's the COLD SOAK temperature of the battery. If the battery pack is colder than that, then the gas engine will fire up to generate electricity to warm up the battery above that temperature threshold. Note that I didn't say ambient temperature; we're talking about the temperature deep inside the car, inside a 400 pound battery pack. It takes a long time at a given ambient temperature to get the battery pack itself down to that temperature. Does your weather stay at or below -13 F / -25 C for 24 hours at a time? If so then I agree the Volt isn't for you, but it's great for the rest of us.

37 MPG is pretty damn good by nearly any standard. "Atrocious"? Don't be such a drama queen.

Make sure you're doing a fair comparison. The Ford you are comparing to (you don't say which) likely will have it's doors blown in by the Volt's performance. Further, the Volt is likely more luxuriously appointed than whatever econo penalty box you are comparing with.

For lots and lots of current Volt owners, their previous car was a luxury sports sedan. Mine was an Audi.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. 10-Oct-10 will live in infamy in the annals of the Volt because it's the day that people like the parent of this post misread GM's very interesting disclosure about the Volt powertrain to mean "the engine comes on at high speeds".

FOR THE FIRST 35 MILES OF RANGE, THE VOLT IS A FULL PERFORMANCE ELECTRIC VEHICLE.

"Full performance" means it can go ANY SPEED and MAX ACCELERATION under only electric propulsion. Over and over, lazy bloggers (and blog comment posters) have misread articles about the transmission to conclude that the engine comes on at high speeds or high acceleration. IT'S NOT A PRIUS. I have countless jackrabbit starts and high speed runs in my Volt to demonstrate it is most definitely not a Prius. I'm with Dan Akerson on this -- I wouldn't be caught dead in a Prius :)

Read the actual article more closely. It's a complicated car, with amazing results.

They've said the additional bracket (it's a stretch to call it "steel plates" has it's not exactly armor) weighs about 3-4 pounds and will have no noticeable effect on efficiency.

Photo of the bracket is here:
http://gm-volt.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/ChevroletVoltPartsInstallation115-724x1024.jpg

From this excellent overview of the actual "fixes" that GM will be doing to customers that CHOOSE to bring their Volt in for it:
http://gm-volt.com/2012/01/06/gm-chooses-to-%E2%80%98go-extra-mile%E2%80%99-with-volt-battery-protection/

Also, you might want to google "Volt high strength steel". The car has some of the highest structural rigidity in the industry. Yet another way in which the Volt is demonstrating a big leap forward in automotive technology.