The Airship era, had some pretty crazy stuff. Engineers in each engine nacelle with a normal sea-ship style Full Ahead, Ahead Standard, Full Reverse etc indicator for what Captain wanted from the Engines. There was also the late WWI German Riesenflugzeug large biplane bombers which either had the engines inside the fuselage with gearboxes and driveshafts transferring power to the propellers out on the wings, or large nacelles to accommodate the engineers. In some desperate attempt to get reliability out of early engines.

The original rigid airships had a series of bladders containing the lifting gas. These bladders were effectively open bottomed. As the air pressure dropped they simply let the lifting gas vent out of the bottom of the bladder. I thought this was pretty crazy when I read about it, and it did lead to a nasty loss of an early airship. The windscreen of the open top cockpit/gondola created a vortex that trapped the venting hydrogen. This eventually led to a fire/explosion and loss of the airship. Although not as crazy as the really early dirigibles before they mastered mass production of hydrogen. They used coal seam gas as the lifting gas, and even ran the engines from a feed from the balloon.

I would imagine to preserve the helium the Airlander 10 could use a compressor to store the helium in tanks and reduce the internal bladder pressure.

Also the crew capsules will be staying docked for months at a time. The Dragon v2 is not going to have big extending solar arrays like the current dragon, instead it will have some solar panels wrapped around the trunk. While it is docked and can't keep its attitude aligned to keep these panels in the sun it will need power from somewhere.

You missed: Timing belts, accessories belt, spark plugs, ignition leads, coils, distributors, ignition modules. Some transverse setups are a pig for these, especially transverse V6s. I make it a habit of when buying a used card, replacing most of that in quick shape.

You might need a set of sleeve valves or similar to seal off the intake ports. So the combustion chamber of the deactivated cylinder can act as the air spring.

I wonder if there is a limitation to how much power you can make from that size of linear generator/stator though, so you wouldn't get much advantage, I don't know that much about that side of things though.

They can be horizontal opposed in motion in the parallel twin design. This will give some second order imbalance though. Piston rings don't fail all the time, or you would see new cars blowing blue smoke all the time. They gradually wear out.

The other thing the article doesn't state, is that the cylinder and head design is similar to 2 stroke diesels. With exhaust ports at the top, and intake ports at the bottom, blocked off as the piston moves up. They generally use a supercharger or a turbocharger to force the exhaust gases out and the fresh intake charge in, so I assume this design is using some sort of electric supercharger in it's place.

I'm confused by this. I have 7 monitors on one machine, 3 connected to an AMD Radeon, the other 4 connected to a Nvidia Geforce (using a matrox triple head 2 go, to make 3 appear as 1 monitor to the card). And it all works seamlessly. Even have 3d applications/meda players spanning across them and it works. (Not quite sure how the 3D side of things work, backbuffer from one copied to the other?)

Depends, if the work is done under warranty, the manufacturer has how many hours they estimate the job to take. And that is what the dealership will get paid to do the work. If the mechanics takes longer, than the dealership gets screwed but that isn't your problem. These book hours may be used as estimates for out of warranty repairs, and if the customer quibbles they can claim that is what the manufacturer estimates the job will take. Independent mechanics, different story of course.

I can remember reading an article about how landing on mars was a bitch compared to the moon or earth. Earth has a descent amount of atmosphere, so you can rely on aero braking then parachute. On the moon you have no atmosphere so you can fire rocket engines in the direction your flying, and do a powered descent.

Mars has the problem of so little atmosphere that aero braking barely slows you down to a speed where you can open a parachute and not have it ripped apart as you are still travelling at supersonic speeds. And the atmosphere is just thick enough to upset rocket engines firing into the oncoming stream/airflow so you can't do a powered descent.

The Aerodynamic flight wasn't all that new. That was based on what the Apollo command module did on reentry. The sky crane engines were based off the ones that landed the Viking landers.

You could all buy my game, and learn to make correct car analogies.

That is a 104 years of theatre subscription, in your sound system alone!

Do we have the full story here? Has the maintainer done this repeatedly, or was this his first mistake? We are all human.