New Mars Forums

Sadly, China's BYD EVs appear to be equally dangerous disposable trash:
Vehicle’s Main Beam Twists as Easily as Tofu! BYD’s Luxury SUVs Are Trash

Chinese EVs sent to overseas buyers are not subjected to Chinese censorship:
Why China Can’t Censor and is Panicking about this EV Disaster

You cannot twist the frame or suspension control arms of an American made SUV using a box wrench.  Best of luck twisting the A-pillar or B-pillar without power tools.  If you've ever become pissed off at the Ford or GM vehicle you're working on and hit the frame with a 10 pound sledge, then you know what I'm talking about.  Some of the poorer tie rod designs on American vehicles can be bent with leverage and enough force.  The Chinese are either using "burnt" steel in their vehicle's primary crash structure or steel with improper heat treatment and hardening.  With modern manufacturing methods, there's simply no excuse which passes muster for these kinds of failure.  Any kind of testing would catch such errors in a heartbeat.  In many instances were these EVs have caught fire in China, the manufacturer requests that the Chinese government scrubs the data from the internet.  Brand new BYDs are also experiencing total brake failures.

The Chinese have pumped almost $150B Yuan into their EV manufacturers.  For the kind of money they're spending, they should be getting a much better result.  Something clearly ain't right here.

There's a reason Chinese motor vehicles are so cheap.  Their quality control is nonexistent.  If this is something you were contemplating putting your family members into, then if you value their lives I'd strongly reconsider until such time as real quality control is enforced at every level of the manufacturing process, from raw material to finished product.  If a 150 pound man can bend a control arm or subframe using an 8-inch long box wrench and one arm, then that overweight EV SUV is not suitable for on-road use, never mind off-road use.

Automotive manufacturers across the entire world are just slapping parts together with no regard for quality control or value to their customers.  Hyundai and others have air bags deploying from faulty sensors and computer inputs while the vehicle is in motion.

We need to get back to the basics of how to properly design and manufacture vehicles, as well as real quality control, so that people don't die from this utterly pointless cheapening of what was previously thought of as durable goods.  Good people will die unless engineers and craftsmen of good moral character tell the suits where to shove their nonsense.

Just to be crystal clear, this is not merely a Chinese problem, nor an American and European problem, it's a basic human problem at this point.  It's as if everyone's brain fell out of their head during COVID.  We need to start "caring again" about the quality of the products we're putting out into the world.

While we don't have much water or clay to work with on the moon, a rock crusher and electromagnet will still work.

To produce a superior grade Iron or steel product, we require extremely pure Iron and Carbon powder to work with.  We first crush and ball mill the Iron oxide powder from the regolith, use an electromagnet to separate out the Iron oxide from the tailings waste, and then perform an electrolytic reduction of the Iron oxide powder using electricity and an electrolyte bath.  This produces 99.95%+ purity Iron powder which is a suitable feedstock for a VIM/VAR process that smelts large quantities of nearly-pure Iron with an appropriate charge of Carbon and other alloying elements to produce steel ingots.

It may or may not be worth extracting Titanium and Aluminum at the same time.  Aluminum, regardless of alloy content, will be much weaker than a high quality steel.  It's very useful for low-stress castings and high voltage conductor wiring in power lines, but that's about it.  Titanium cannot go to higher temperatures than Inconel, nor can it be nearly as hard as steel, and any part not subjected to high temperatures is going to be a lot stronger and lighter if it's made from a composite.  Nickel, Chromium, Molybdenum, and Vanadium are certainly worth extracting at the same time.  Cold hard steel gets the job done more often than not.  Nobody with a lick of sense fabricates buildings, bridges, or ships using Titanium and Aluminum.  We've certainly tried, over and over again, but they end up becoming maintenance nightmares as they age.  A high quality steel doesn't have those problems.  The mechanics I knew who worked on Navy jets had some choice words, none repeatable in polite company, about the use of Titanium parts.  They had serial numbers and log books for all the Titanium parts on our jets to record operating hours and torquing cycles for Titanium shear bolts.  It would be fair to say that they despised Titanium.  No such nonsense was required for high strength steel pins and bolts, excluding D6AC or similar steels subject to stress-corrosion cracking, which we no longer use.

A nuclear powered crawler-transporter could potentially reduce the requirement for mining trucks and shovels, as well as their associated support equipment.  This machine, which I've proposed before, would combine a bucket wheel excavator and conveyor belt with a rock grinder, so that the machine only keeps and stores bins of extracted Iron oxide powder.  The trucks would be far more productive carrying Iron oxide powder to a smelter or integrated steel mill facility.  If it could also electrolytically refine the Iron oxide into pure Iron powder, even better.  It already requires megawatts of power to move, so why not use a few more to produce pure Iron?  Rather than having a small fleet of trucks carrying mountains of overburden and tailings waste all the way to the smelter, most of the "trash" is left wherever the crawler-transporter spits it out at.  Trucks can economically travel greater distances to drop off their load of Iron oxide powder at a centralized smelter, or pure Iron powder, because they're not carrying useless rock with them.  We don't actually need to have giant dump trucks if we're only transporting metal or metal oxide powders.  There's also far less build-up of tailings waste at any one spot, so waste products need not be moved twice.

Carbon and alloying metals could be collected in a similar manner, so that only the desired materials for steel making are transported away from the mining site.  Whatever we can realistically achieve in terms of economy of motion and machinery requirements will ultimately pay us back many times, in terms of reduced operating costs.  We don't use mobile Iron refining machines here on Earth because we can achieve greater economies of scale since labor, energy, and raw materials are not so limited.

It might be impractical to integrate the electrolytic refining machinery with the regolith processing machine, but if it is feasible, then the giant haul trucks are providing greater value-add by transporting ready-to-melt powders.

Our primary money makers are super grade VIM/VAR steels.  If we accidentally locate rich Uranium or Thorium or Lithium deposits, that's also worth extracting.  It's certainly possible to mine for Titanium and Aluminum, but those are high energy specialty metals requiring more complex refining processes.

Why can't electrical wiring be pure Iron on the moon or Mars?

It's heavier than Aluminum or Copper for equivalent ampacity, but Iron is very easy to come by and gravity is lower, so there's not as much of an incentive to go after specialty metals for large scale applications.

That's a verbatim quote from Vice President Harris, which was recorded on national television.

I'm starting to think that Democrat politicians are making fun of their own voters, which means they don't respect the people who are voting for them.  I cannot possibly understand how a Democrat's brain interprets that, but I know that I would be pretty upset if one of my politicians was literally laughing at us while our media asked a serious and consequential question, such as "Mrs President, we have a war going on right now in Ukraine.  What are our conditions for winning or suing for peace?"  I do not expect word salad followed by cackling.  That is precisely why Hillary Clinton was rejected by the American people.

Something I did not know, but found out the other day from her former staffers who spoke out, is that Kamala Harris is purported to be a drunkard and ill-prepared for her public speaking engagements, because she refuses to work with her staff in pregame "cram sessions" the day or week before the big public test, the way President Clinton did.  President Biden can't speak because his brain is fried.  Vice President Harris cannot speak by choice.  If she laid off the booze and showed up ready to work with her staff, then I think her staff could do their jobs.

I expect, at a minimum, that the person responsible for speaking to our allies and adversaries has studied the cliff notes handed to them in the morning briefing sessions, and at least "knows" what the CIA has put in front of them, so that "The Leader of the Free World" doesn't look like a total moron in public.

Edit:
And...  That's the problem with going off of memory of what a stupid person said.  I didn't fully capture the "essence of stupidity" that is Kamala Harris:

Apologies for the misquote, but I didn't feel like listening to her stupidity again, because I feel as though anyone who listens to her loses IQ points.

Here you go.  You can watch her yourself and lose some of your own brain cells trying to decipher whatever she's on about:
Her word salads are just incoherent.

A Caterpillar 797F mining haul truck costs about $5M USD.  That's a lot of money for a truck, but the cost is not outlandish for a mining operation.  Starship is projected to reduce launch costs to between $10/kg and $20/kg.  Every indication is that SpaceX is drastically reducing the marginal costs of producing and launching each new Starship.  Cat's 797F truck weighs about 260.7t and was designed to be broken down into multiple large pieces, of roughly 40t to 50t each, for shipment / delivery to a mining site using standard semi-trucks with modified trailers to support the extra weight.

At $20/kg, or $5,240,000 USD, that means launching said truck into space costs about as much as the truck itself.  There are certain optimizations we could make to the body and bed to reduce weight and cost, which we should do, but even after doing that, the weight savings would be nominal, absent a complete redesign to take full advantage of the moon's lower gravity.  I think that's a mistake, because drastically reduced wear and tear from reduced weight means the truck's useful service life should be significantly increased.  Careful selection of steels used must be made to ensure extreme cold and heat, relative to Earth, don't cause problems.  That said, this mining truck variant also operates without burning any diesel fuel.  All the steel produced on the moon isn't having any significant effect on Earth's environment.

There's an associated one-time transport fuel burn, specifically Starship's LNG propellant, but the total quantity of fuel consumed is only equal to about 109 days of operation of the truck here on Earth, assuming said truck is operated for 2 shifts per day.  If the truck is operated 24/7/365, then Starship Super Heavy V3's fuel burn represents 2 months of truck operation here on Earth.  Mining trucks are typically operated for at least 20 years.

3,099,853lbs of LNG fuel is the anticipated LNG burn for Starship V3, or about the same as 436,599 gallons of diesel fuel.  The truck's engine delivers a maximum of 3,550hp / 2,647,235W of power, which implies 6,618,087.5Wh of fuel burn at 40% efficiency, or 166.49 gallons per hour.  However, daily fuel burn per truck here on Earth averages out to about 1,680 gallons, so the Starship delivery flight is equal to 260 days of continuous operations here on Earth.  I presume that's why 797A had a 1,000 gallon tank, 797B had a 1,800 gallon tank, and 797F (current model since 2009) has a 2,000 gallon diesel tank.  That would mean regardless of how heavy the use was, the truck only has to be refueled once per day.  Mining trucks have to be operated for 20 to 25 years here on Earth, so 12,264,000 gallons of diesel fuel burn over 20 years of mining operations, so that fuel burn rate is equal to 28 Starship flights.  We're already way, way ahead on fuel burn rate, which is a good sign.

Our mining truck costs $10M, for the truck and transport flight purchases, but on the moon our "fuel cost" is non-existent.  Our lunar metals mine and smelter doesn't pay any fuel bills or taxes or land / environmental permitting fees after its equipment has been delivered.  There are no mining reclamation fees when the mine shuts down, either.  Up-front delivery costs are clearly quite expensive, but operating cost is limited to spare parts and a handful of machine operators who cost $120,000 per operator per year.  Transporting them to and from the moon every 6 months isn't much money.  We'll assert that they'll receive $250,000 worth of training as well, to ensure their survival and productivity on the moon.  They're graduate-level truck operators.  That means salaries and training amount to $1.11M per machine operator per year.

$10M truck purchase / transport (one-time)
$2M (one-time operator training cost for 8 machine operators)
$0.48M for 4 machine operators per machine (per year salary, but they only get paid while they're working, so 6 months on and 6 months off)
$0.52M for spare parts and consumables per year

That's $32M per machine, over 20 years.  At current diesel prices, the fuel bill for operating said truck here on Earth is about $24.5M.  Our all-in cost is $1.6M per machine per year.

JoshNH4H,

I feel as though much hay has been made over cattle feed and water consumption non-issues, mostly by people who lead lifestyles that are only made possible by vast natural resource expenditures on their behalf.  They obviously won't see it that way, but it is fairly obvious to an independent observer who is not hellbent on achieving an ideologically or aesthetically pleasing outcome.  Humans also live in a lot of different places that make life more difficult than whatever is or could be "most ideal".  Life on Mars is quite clearly "next level" difficult, in that regard.  So what?  Rather than figuring out how to best use all available resources, or to make more of what we wish to consume, certain people would rather fetishize their lifestyle choices and focus on all the different ways that someone else's lifestyle choices are wrong or bad, according to them.  For example, I think people who live on top of each other the way they do in New York or Tokyo are a little "out there", but I still support their right to do that, even if it means they consume more of X or Y or Z and less of A or B or C than someone living on a farm.

I'm neither friendly nor hostile towards golf courses.  I view sportsball as yet another giant "so what" issue.  If I never saw another golf tournament or football game for the rest of my life, it wouldn't affect me in the slightest.  My father and his father played golf for many years.  I see nothing at all wrong with the guys who dress up like painted clowns to cheer on their favorite sportsball team.  Good for them I say, if that is what brings them joy.  I don't think golfers need to give up golfing anymore than other Americans need to give up eating beef.  When most people, regardless of other personal beliefs, quit basing their beliefs about others on "me" or "not me" when we decide what public policy should be, I think we'll all lead much better lives.

In the grand scheme of things, what people choose to eat or where they choose to live ultimately doesn't amount to a hill of chili legumes.  People who believe otherwise have my deepest condolences for never having learned that they're just not that important, and whatever they value so highly won't be valued at all by the next person.

Ruminants have roamed the Americas for at least as long as humans have.  Killing off all or most of them to somehow "save ourselves" is about as nutty an idea as any I've ever heard, sort of like pecan pie without the pecans.  It's a solution in search of a problem to solve.  Cow farts vs no cow farts is not going to make or break humanity's future.  I would humbly opine that anyone who believes otherwise is suffering from the noxious effects of their own brain farts.

As far as market-based solutions are concerned, water services are typically public utilities for good reason.  They make a modest profit in return for guaranteed market access, which usually incentivizes them to deliver the demanded water so their customers hand over their money.  Centerpoint thinks they're special, in that regard, but their customers and our Governor disagree.  Water and water services are already taxed here in Texas.  I think we all pay enough taxes already.  We don't have nearly enough to show for all the billions and trillions spent on our behalf.  Have you ever heard of a country that was taxed into prosperity, or merely economic equilibrium?  I haven't.  The ultimate solution is to desalinate water, and to distribute it to wherever it's required.  That will cost money, obviously, but it's an organic economic activity that brings life with it.  You get more of whatever you incentivize.

Cat 797 Offroad Mining Truck
Fuel: 1,000 gallons to 1,800 gallons
Engine Power Output: 3,550hp
Steering Tank: 67 gallons
Steering System, incl. Tank: 95 gallons
Brake / Hoist Tank: 203 gallons
Brake / Hoist System, incl. Tank: 489 gallons

1,800 gallons is 71.55MWh worth of diesel fuel energy, of which the truck might receive as much as 40% as mechanical energy output.  I presume we need 1/6th of that for lunar operations, because we only need 1/6th the engine horsepower for the same speed, so 11.925MWh.  It's feasible to get 60% of that energy back out at the extreme temperatures involved, using a 3-stage sCO2 gas turbine with heat reinjection / recovery between the stages.  The means we need 19.875MWh of thermal energy storage.

Calcium oxide or "lime" heated to 1,414C can store 1.2Mh/m^3.  That means we need 16.5625m^3 of CaO for thermal power storage.  Calcium oxide is 3,340kg/m^3, so 55,318.75kg of mass (9,220kg on the moon) is devoted to thermal energy storage, excluding the mass of the tank.  The Caterpillar 797's engine is rated at 3,550hp.  Presumably, we require 592hp on the moon.  A Caterpillar C-175-20 diesel engine weighs 23,400kg for comparison purposes.  Its diesel fuel supply weighs 5,797kg.  The fuel tank must also weigh something, but so will a thermal energy storage tank.  I'm guessing a refractory alloy tank and insulation will make the scO2 gas turbine engine and thermal energy storage tank weigh every bit as much as the 797's original diesel engine.  It's a different form factor and weight allocation.  The original diesel engine does occupy a physically greater volume / space claim than the storage tank, so that's a good thing for technical feasibility without a radical vehicle redesign.  Extreme width across the outside of the tires is 9.14m and vehicle height is 7.21m.  Given a 2m diameter / 7m long thermal energy storage tank in lieu of the diesel engine, the salt storage tank volume is 21.99m^3, so plenty for the CaO and embedded piping to transfer thermal energy into and out of the tank.  Inconel 625 has a 982C maximum service temperature limit in air, but we're not placing any real stress on the tank, which will be coated with Silicon, with interior insulation.  It has to support its own weight and that of the CaO.  The tank itself is not pressurized at all.  The sCO2 in-tank piping and radiator, however, will need to be much stronger, which implies the use of a refractory Molybdenum-based alloy to withstand both high temperatures and high pressures.

Lighter drive train components could be used since the 797's axles are extremely heavy to support its crushing weight here on Earth, but then they'd require complete redesign.  Who wants to do that when we have something that we already know will hold up well under Earth-like gravity?  If it's completely over-built, that's a good thing.  It won't require as frequent repair when it's nowhere near as highly stressed / loaded.  If we used tracks instead of tires, CG would be reduced, reducing the possibility of rollover accidents.  Shock absorbers and spring rates will require appropriate adjustment for lunar gravity.  We could devise a lighter bed design, perhaps a welded honeycomb design that uses thinner sheet metal instead of thicker plate.

For our choice of steels, we require something that is both strong and incredibly tough under modestly cryogenic temperatures.  Mangalloy fits that description, now that we have techniques to weld and shape Mangalloy plate steel for LNG tanker ships and tank farms, at the lowest possible cost.  It's ye olde alloy steel, the original.  It was/is used in rock crushers, forging hammers, tank track links, and bank vaults.  Manganese is also used to remove impurities from steel, especially Sulfur and Phosphorous.  Both initial and off-world fabrication cost and availability of metal for repair on the moon or Mars will be enhanced by not requiring Chromium and Nickel.  The stainless will be reserved for chemical processing plants, life support, and kitchen or surgical uses where Mangalloy would be sub-optimal.  However, if Silicon-coated Mangalloy is cheaper to produce, then there's no reason to waste perfectly good Chromium and Nickel making weak or brittle stainless steels.

I think we've already proven that we can devise much simpler thermal power systems that match or exceed the energy density of batteries, and high temperature radiators are much easier to maintain than photovoltaic arrays.  They tend to be very durable and long-lasting, because they're made from steel.  This point seems totally lost on people who think we're going to make everything electric.  We've done no such thing here on Earth.  We power all mining machinery with electric motors AFTER a thermal engine burns fuel to provide on-demand electrical power.  As everyone has already pointed out, there are no known underground reservoirs of hydrocarbon fuels on the moon, nor atmospheric O2 to burn them with.  That doesn't mean a thermal engine isn't viable, it only means a thermal engine burning fuel isn't viable.

He briefly touched on the numerous manufacturing difficulties involved with producing high-tech items such as electric motors and electro-chemical batteries, but then his solution for mining and infrastructure build-out mandates using those devices.  He said he couldn't evaluate how complex any of that would be to set up on the moon.  Essentially, he's "hand-waving" all the real complexity the way almost everyone does.  That means all such high-tech devices need to be imported from Earth, long after mining starts.  Creating a storage tank for molten salt or molten Silicon thermal energy store is drastically simpler than creating an assembly line that produces or refurbishes electro-chemical batteries, electric motor-generators, photovoltaic cells, wiring, etc.

According to his ideation about how this mining and industrial plant build-out will occur, we're going to create all the mining and manufacturing infrastructure required to produce steel and concrete on the moon, but then we're going to additionally mandate the use of all these high-tech items which also don't presently exist on the moon, because we cannot make them on the moon using the exact same technologies we're already developing to produce steel products and more / larger / more efficient mining machines.

There is an actual electric mining truck.  It's batteries can supply just enough power to make it up the mining pit one time, and then they partially recharge going back down into the pit, but the machine can effectively make a single trip over multiple hours because a battery recharging "time out" is then required to complete subsequent trips.  Perhaps the reduced weight on the moon would enable more trips per shift, but the same would be true of a simpler yet more power-dense purely thermal / mechanical power delivery subsystem.

Someone please make this make sense.  It's as if actual mass manufacturing knowledge has become a "lost art", and nobody is aware of the "snowball effect" of mandating additional complexity and specialization.  We're going to build-out the infrastructure to produce vast quantities of steel and steel products, which are also suitable for making mining vehicles and thermal power systems, but then the most obvious choice for both producing and powering more of these machines on the moon, using the very same materials we just spent so much money to dig out of the lunar regolith, are then NOT used to power these retro-futuristic mining machines.

Umm...  What?

What is the reasoning behind building out multiple entirely separate manufacturing facilities to fabricate electro-chemical batteries, photovoltaics, and electric motor-generators?

Option A
Metals mine
Metals smelting facility
Metals fabricating facility (can produce the desired end product, more mining machines, and power)

Option B
Metals mine
Metals smelting facility
Metals fabricating facility
Battery fabricating facility (requires its own mining and smelting, plus specialty machines)
Photovoltaics and power electronics fabricating facility (requires its own mining, plus specialty machines)
Electric motor-generator fabricating facility (requires its own mining, plus specialty machines)

If you're already contemplating building these "steam punk" machines, as Terraformer calls them, how does adding unrelated "critical path" infrastructure assets assist with the prospect of ultimately creating a self-sustaining economic endeavor that doesn't require endless materials support from Earth.  Modern civilization was built using heat, steel, and concrete, not photovoltaics and electro-chemical batteries.  All electrical and electronic devices are artifacts of heat engine simplicity, productivity, and durability.

Having to import microchips to regulate life support vs having to produce both the materials and photovoltaic cells to power the entire endeavor are two wildly different materials and mass requirement propositions, which is why we can import the life support equipment but have no hope of importing enough energy generating devices to establish much more than an outpost that doesn't really contribute much, economically-speaking.  Using functionally unlimited hydrocarbon energy supplies here on Earth, we've been making photovoltaic cells and electro-chemical batteries since the Industrial Revolution started.  None of them provide 24/7/365 power to anything whatsoever, beyond tinker toy scale systems.  There's always a thermal engine back-stopping the fact that these systems don't scale-up to the degree required, typically an internal combustion engine.

The spouting-off about Aluminum conductor electric motors being 25% bulkier but somehow lighter than Copper is pure ignorance on display, someone who clearly knows nothing about EV electric motor design.  Also, he seems to not understand ampacity ratings for Aluminim vs Copper wiring, else he would know that the conductor is 50% lighter for equivalent electrical conductivity, not 66%.

He would also know that, at least according to a real EV motor engineer who designs electric motors for EVs for a living, an equivalent electric motor using Aluminum conductor wiring ends up about 50% larger AND 50% heavier (because most of the motor's weight is in all those other materials not comprising the conductor wiring), and that it has significantly impacted cooling performance (is more difficult to adequately cool to maintain the ampacity rating of the Aluminum wiring).  The cherry on top was Aluminum wiring fracturing more easily than Copper from motor or vehicle vibrations, thus requiring multiple annealing steps during and after winding.  Those are the real reasons EVs don't use Aluminum conductor wiring.  It's not because no electrical engineers who design motors have ever thought they could possibly use Aluminum wiring if and when Copper became too difficult or expensive to source.  The motor ends up being larger, more expensive, requires a larger and more expensive cooling system, and that confluence of confounding design factors adds up to a highly undesirable end product whenever Copper is available.

To adequately cool Aluminum wiring electric motors in +250F conditions using radiation alone, I presume a fairly substantial low temperature radiator array will be required.  Radiator array size substantially decreases by using higher temperatures, as a thermal engine would do.  The materials used by the array to cool electric motors can be a lighter Aluminum and glycol coolant vs heavier steel for a thermal power system using liquid metal (NaK) or supercritical CO2 for thermal power transfer, but said vehicle power subsystem component will still be present in any actual vehicle design of similar size and weight to an excavator or haul truck suitable for large-scale mining operations.

At 200F / 93C, 1m^2 of radiator panel can dissipate 1,882W of heat.

At 1,382F / 750C, 1m^2 of radiator panel can dissipate 114,337W of heat.

At 1,832F / 1,000C, 1m^2 of radiator panel can dissipate 274,125W of heat.

You'll need special refractory alloys to operate at high temperatures, and a ceramic sCO2 gas turbine, but the components become truly tiny for the amount of power output they generate.  Something like this can be imported from Earth, because it represents such a tiny fraction of the total vehicle weight.  The bulk metal for the vehicle itself and the high temperature ceramics used to insulate the very hot salt tank (Calcium Oxide melts at 4,662F) can come from the moon, not Earth!  CO2 begins to break down at 5,840F, so CO2 can transfer heat energy into the Calcium Oxide salt.  Even if we imported the first batches of salt and CO2 or NaK from Earth, CaO and CO2 don't break down at the temperatures involved, so unlike an electro-chemical battery that is constantly losing energy storage capacity over time, the salt and CO2 never do.  NaK boils at 785C, so CO2 might be a better thermal power transfer fluid at very high temperatures.

Moreover, since lunar regolith is so good at insulating, we could cast blocks of pure Iron to store thermal power from sunlight using the very material (Iron) we're trying to mass produce for other uses.  For bulk energy storage, until and unless we quit fixating on "the great disabler" which so greatly hampers all of these grandiose schemes for industrialization and colonization, namely the production / generation / storage of electrical energy, then we're never going to create a self-sustaining colony.  Electricity is a brain dead solution to our energy problems, endlessly proposed by well-intentioned people lacking a rudimentary understanding of what they're proposing when it comes to bulk energy production and storage.  It's not their fault, though.  They teach more ideology than engineering in colleges now.  Electrical power's primary applications should be computing and lighting, but not much of anything else, because the very moment you select this option, it's tantamount to developing a Rube Goldberg machine.

Electricity is efficient at transmitting power over great distances (relatively speaking) and converting stored electrical energy into mechanical work output.  Due to entropy, it's wildly inefficient in terms of materials inputs and complexity.  All electrical / electronic machines are "entropy machines", as I call them.  You start with the most highly disordered forms of matter (scarce specialty metals) and energy inputs (photons) and must then convert them to the most highly ordered output (electricity with a very specific voltage / amperage / frequency if AC) humanity can produce.  We never directly store electrical energy at anything approaching the scale required for industrial mining.  None of that means its overall usage is efficient as a substitute for thermal and mechanical systems, because it requires such a diverse and energy-hungry smorgasbord of materials and machinery inputs to function at all.

Think of mining in terms of electric trucks that the entire City of Chicago cannot recharge, all at the same time.

1 haul truck equals 10 Tesla semi-trucks, meaning think of each haul truck as a 10,000hp machine, vs a 1,000hp machine.

A company very recently wanted to purchase and run 120 Tesla semi-trucks using Chicago's electric grid.  If all of them were plugged in and recharging at the same time, the electrical energy demand exceeded the total electrical energy supply that provides energy to millions of people living in the City of Chicago.  It's entirely plausible for an industrial mine to run 4 excavators, 4 loaders, and 4 haul trucks, 24/7/365 (until they break down and require repairs).  If each of those machines is a 10,000hp mining implement, then the electricity production required to keep them up and running probably exceeds that of the entire City of Chicago.

Maybe those machines require less power than that because they're on the moon in 1/6th Earth's gravity, but you know what?  That still doesn't matter the least little bit, because the smelter still requires power to refine the ore into metal, and the machines that make the steel products really do require electricity, because those machines used for that purpose (metal shaping) actually do represent the most efficient use of electrical energy.

How plausible does it seem to generate and somehow store more electricity than the entire City of Chicago, for a single mining operation?

You know what that looks like to me?

Blind ideologically-fueled silliness.  It's not a serious proposal.  It's futurism drivel.  It's something that ain't gonna happen because it's a ridiculous proposition.  We're primarily building on the moon so we can reach further out into the solar system in an economically sustainable manner, and also to move some of our people off of Earth, and to move heavy industry off of Earth using their input labor, primarily so that we don't environmentally destroy the only as-is habitable planet in the solar system in pursuit of ideological silliness masquerading as something it is not now and never will become, because the people fixated on it are mindlessly building Rube Goldberg machines that fewer and fewer people can afford while they wonder why sensible people aren't buying into their futurism fantasies.

SpaceNut,

Democrats spent $392B of tax payer money on "Climate Change Action", which meant handing over money to their political campaign donors to pocket.  We received the bill, but no new energy.  Anyone who says we cannot build a decent energy system with $392B to spend is a bold-faced liar.  We didn't even try.  Democrats think they can throw money at a problem and a solution will simply materialize, because they're magical thinkers.  Nobody who actually knows anything about energy, which necessarily excludes both Democrats and all other magical thinkers, was ever in charge of disbursing funds after a credible business plan was presented to Uncle Sam and a realistic implementation pathway was established.

The majority of these startups were involved in producing Hydrogen using electricity.  So-called "green electricity" is incredibly expensive and unreliable.  How was that supposed to work?  Did anyone even ask that question?

tahanson43206,

I came back to your concept of a floating city after reconsidering how to power it.  If trompes were used to provide power from compressed air, then the energy savings over time would be tremendous.  The generation of air power from gravity would also be a way to make this entire endeavor pay for itself.  Photovoltaics and conventional wind turbines are hurting for raw materials, but Iron is plentiful.  We would have these "floating cities" offshore to maintain the air compression infrastructure required to power both the floating cities and land-based cities.  We need enough people to make this work, but offshore jobs pay well and this ties in well with my concept about how to repower the major infrastructure pieces without hydrocarbons, nuclear energy, or intermittent and weak output from photovoltaics and electrical wind turbines.  The operative buzzword here is "synergy".  We need more reliable power, so we use gravity to compressed air.  We need people to maintain all the ships and floating cities, so we revitalize our marine industry to employ them.  They need homes for them and their families, so we create floating cities.  The floating cities need to be paid for, so they generate electrical power and compressed air power for vehicles.

Aeromine's internal wind turbine device trades external moving parts for internal moving parts.  No concrete data on typical system performance, dimensions relative to conventional wind turbines for equivalent power, or other specifics were provided, merely assertions without specified conditions.  No explanation as to how leaves, pine needles, insects, or other dirt and debris are removed is provided.  I'm guessing (but not really guessing) that it requires periodic cleaning, much like an aircraft's wings and tail surfaces.  How cheap and easy or costly the maintenance is not easy to determine.  Can it be made from fiber-reinforced plastic and easily taken apart and sprayed off with a pressure washer or a hose?  What kinds of tools are needed for inspections?  Is it possible or likely that ingested organic debris could make the motor-generator a fire hazard?

Apart from using the venturi effect to drive a smaller wind turbine, I find their claims about cost and space required unconvincing and highly dubious, because overall system performance is still highly dependent upon the volume and velocity of air ingested into the turbine, as compared to the much larger conventional wind turbine units using incredibly well-established aerodynamic principles and math.  Aeromine's units are quite small, so the power they generate will be reduced due to their small size.

As to whether or not it's less obtrusive, that's a matter of perspective and design characteristics.  If a field contains thousands of these devices instead of dozens of traditional wind turbines, then all they've done is increase the quantity of man-made materials clutter (bases / mounts, machines, power inverters, electrical wiring, etc).  To obtain more consistent wind speeds resulting in more constant and reliable output, their units are as dependent upon wind speed and volume as any other more conventional wind turbine device (this means they're still best mounted far above from the ground on a pole).  They can validly claim that the probability of their devices killing birds is far lower, so that is a major point in their favor, but said devices will inevitably become insect / debris vacuums or possibly homes for various types of stinging insects.

It looks like it does provide the ability to generate more consistent power onsite from wind, provided it's mounted high enough overhead, but without fast storage (electro-chemical batteries) it's a system that has near-zero "spinning reserve", so I hope they have one heck of an inverter design paired with their device.  None of these systems "work seamlessly with the building's existing electrical system".  That is outright lying, plain and simple.

There are no "inherent aerodynamics of a building", just as there are no "inherent aerodynamics of a tree".  As always, a building's effect on wind current velocity and direction is a function of its shape, size, height, and geographic features that vary by location, much like the air currents over an airfield or the efficiency of a particular type of airfoil moving through the air at a particular speed.

I really wish the company would provide detailed design studies and send some samples of their devices to different locations to accurately evaluate real world performance across a broad spectrum of environments, both deserts that might sand blast the device's internals, cold locales that might ice-up the internals, and humid maritime locations to see how salt water vapor affects the entire device.  Give them 5 years to see how well they hold up over time.  If they truly are better, then we'll start using more of them.  I do like the inventiveness of the device, the use of natural principles to eliminate gigantic high-speed airfoils that can easily injure / kill / destroy entire buildings, and at least the potential to be cleaner / greener machines, but this really does require much more performance research.  The reason we have so many conventional wind turbines deployed across the world is that we do know how they perform.

Verdict:
Aeromine's device might be a better mouse trap, but the jury is out until the performance data rolls in.

Calliban,

The Democrats want to de-industrialize America while also bringing millions of people here illegally by thumbing their nose at our existing immigration laws, because their donor class wants a "new generation" of serfs / slaves to work for them, without calling it slavery, while subjecting those poor illegals to the same worst aspects of their greed and lust for power that they subject their fellow Americans to.  They keep promising citizenship to these illegals, yet never deliver it, even when they control both houses of Congress and the White House.  If their intent is not to make the illegals citizens, which is self-evident by their failure to make them citizens, then there's no path forward for them in America that doesn't ultimately end with jail or deportation, presuming we follow any of our other laws.  Democrats think laws are for other people they don't like, not them.  When the law is applied to them, they throw tantrums or claim racism, but that is the only way these bratty self-destructive "kid-dults" are ever brought to heel.

Notice how all the proposed mines and Keystone XL Pipeline were rejected outright by the Biden Administration?

Those were "shovel ready jobs" that their own Democrat voters could perform (working class unionized labor), yet they deny them jobs because the anti-humanist nutwhacks in their coalition would rather see their own people starve and freeze to death than use any form energy, "green" or otherwise, to prosper.  It's repulsive and it needs to stop.  I want Democrats to go back to what they were in the 1970s, before they became totally captured by monied special interest groups who only know how to destroy, and do nothing else except lining their own pockets.

Regardless of what Democrats falsely claim to the contrary, that is what they're actually doing, while paying lip service to the idea of caring about the American people, or at least the interests of their own voters, which they clearly don't, else they wouldn't subject poor people from other countries to their horror show that America has become under their psychopathic lemmingship.

That's why I ignore their blatantly false accusations of hating immigrants or being racist or any of their other baseless personal attacks which are only bad-faith attempts to avert public attention away from their obscenely criminal behavior.  Anything they accuse the other side of is something they're actively doing to our people.  Making everything about race or gender or politics is a way to "pick an issue, fix it, and polarize it", taken from Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals".  If they accuse the Republicans of hating the Jews, it's to avert attention away from the fact that the radical left's own "work product" (the growing masses of brainwashed lunatics with degrees in anti-sociology or gender studies or lesbian interpretive dance), are busily chanting "death to the Jews" or "from the river to the sea" or "punch a Jew" or all the other violent and hate-filled extremism they exhibit towards anyone that their cult has determined is "not them".  Naturally, the cult members are the only people who don't know they're part of a cult.

If it was truly a cult of peaceniks, then America would be none the worse for wear.  Unfortunately, they're busily starting new wars and undermining the foundations of civilized society.  I guess they ran out of arguments for their various incompatible causes and/or new issues to polarize, but I'm sure they'll think of something.

I simply can't abide by their brand of insanity.  Every time our political left has their next identity crisis, largely driven by the fact that they're a coalition of voters don't share very many common interests, they start shredding the fabric of American society.  The political right doesn't feel the need to reinvent itself every time their next lie falls flat on its face.  Both parties tell lies, but some lies are more destructive than others.  Any lie that undermines the fundamentals of human civilization cannot go unchallenged.  The left wouldn't have incessant identity crises if they actually decided that they stood for something, and then focused on implementing policies to deliver what they claim they want.  They can't do that because by the next election cycle it's apparent to at least half the country that the cult has become "more culty" and less "we stand for this / that / the other" than they were when they took office.  Apart from maintaining their own power, Democrats don't actually agree on what they believe, which is why you have wanton destruction with no building of anything new when they gain power.  They spent $392B on "climate change action".  There are not $392B worth of new "green" power plants, regardless of definition.  There's only $392B in tax money missing from the federal government's IOU stack, and nothing else.

The right has had three core issues:
1. Articulating their messaging to prospective voters
2. Registering and motivating prospective voters to show up to the polls to vote
3. An unwillingness to stand up for what they believe in on the part of their so-called leadership, because most of what they want is to be left alone (something the political left is unwilling and unable to do, because incessantly messing with other people is an inseparable part of their modus operandi)

1. Jobs that pay a wage sufficient for family formation for working class people (no pandering to the poor or the rich or special interests groups with dumb ideas and no accountability for results- help the poor become middle class while remaining ambivalent rather than antagonistic towards the rich; economic success is commendable, but impoverishing large numbers of people to do that is not)
* Work-centric and family-centric policies, not anti-social and anti-humanist self-destruction masquerading as "caring" about other people
* Promote the idea that the optimal living situation for children is a two-parent household, rather than "marrying" women to our government by incentivizing them to engage in promiscuous behavior and/or divorcing their husbands to collect cash and prizes from the person doing the work to provide for them and the kids (by their own actions, far too many women are either terrible judges of character when it comes to who they choose to sleep with and marry, or they're terrible at placing the well-being of their own children above their own "happiness"- something that changes from moment-to-moment)
* Work with rather than against the various religious groups who take care of each other and their communities (millions upon millions of people would be dead following natural disasters or famine or war or whatever, were it not for charitable organizations such as the Catholic Church; whatever my other misgivings about how they operate happen to be, or religion in general, I can still recognize that their people do good works for the express benefit of their fellow citizens)

2. Use domestic energy, natural resources, and labor to avoid doing business with countries that hate America
* Drill for our own oil and gas, because otherwise it has to be imported from other countries, burning even more oil to do that, and mostly ignoring our own environmental regulations
* Work on a truly diverse portfolio of alternative energy schemes which could be much less costly than trying to use electricity for everything, due to the wild materials-based inefficiencies associated with electrical power generation and distribution
* Develop a publicly accepted nuclear energy source which we won't permit to be endlessly lied about in our mass media (China Syndrome and other similarly idiotic nonsense repeated by people too ignorant to speak about energy)
* Add transportation options for people, rather than government mandates (if people can make EVs work in their personal lives, then they will become a de-facto standard, so it doesn't matter what anyone thinks is the exact right solution for transport, because the customers and car makers arrived at something that works for them)

3. The Defense Department is used for clear-cut cases of self-defense, rather than what the previous War Department was used for, which was starting wars (if anyone attacks us, then we bomb them right off the map and into the afterlife without exception, but otherwise we leave you to your own devices and don't pander to the economic interests of our multi-national corporations- they do business overseas at their own risk)
* No more cost-plus or winner-take-all contracting
* No more weapons for people who refuse to pay for their own defense (something of tangible value is traded, or we don't hand over weapons that the American tax payer are ultimately on the hook for, regardless of all the blather to the contrary)
* No more pointless development programs that never increase true combat capability:
The absurdity that is the Ford class- an aircraft carrier which can theoretically fly 20 to 40 more sorties per day compared to the carriers it replaced, but never has and never will fly more sorties because the Navy has no money left to put enough jets on the ship to use that capability
Independence and Freedom classes- littoral combat ships designed to "fight pirates and terrorists" (not peer-level nation-states with real naval power)
USS Constellation- an existing frigate design that is not an existing frigate design
Future Air Dominance fighter- because past, present, and future air dominance will be decided by who actually has functional combat jets to fly, not how much money was sunk into each fighter jet
Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, Stryker, and similarly asinine Tonka Trucks for little boys- "high mobility" wheeled infantry fighting vehicles that aren't highly mobile, except on paved roads, which is where troops go to get ambushed and killed by poorly equipped terrorists with AKs and RPGs, since the Derpistanis who designed such vehicles were never forced to fight for their lives in what they designed and foisted upon unsuspecting mechanized infantry troops who were falsely told they were getting "game changer" weapon systems (well, the game was "changed" by increasing how many people got killed
M-10 Booker "Mobile Protected Firepower"- a light tank that is not light (as heavy as the first generation M1 Abrams MBT), nor is it well-protected against modern anti-tank weapons

There's a very long list of very dumb yet very expensive ideas which were never tested against realistic operating conditions.  A tank, or vehicle that looks just like any other tank, regardless of what the military calls it, will eventually be forced to fight other tanks, period, because that is how combat actually works.  You use a series of asymmetric counter-weapons, better tactics, and better training to win.  Better technology can and often does help, but only to a point.  We've gone broke trying to develop and field "nazi-esque wunder waffe" which are still quite vulnerable to counterpart weapon systems fielded by our adversaries.  We used to understand what General Lee clearly understood, "He who gets there with the firstest and the mostest, wins!"  We're not going to fight dudes with AKs using sticks and stones, but that's not what we're talking about doing.  We're talking about the general utility of an artillery piece that shoots 50 miles in comparison the enemy's 25 mile artillery piece, but at 50 miles it cannot reliably hit the broadside of a football field after 50 shells have been sent downrange.  That's a dumb capability to have, even if your enemy claims they have it.  We know full well they don't, because physics is involved, and there are no magical ways to overcome basic physics, except with absurd amounts of money.  If you need to shoot 50 miles, then you're talking about something only a missile does with repeatable accuracy, and only at a much greater cost than an artillery shell.

We have Standard Missiles strapped to Super Hornets now.  The problem is that the Super Hornet isn't big enough to also strap an AEGIS Combat System to it, to guide said long range air defense missile all the way to the target at its maximum range.  It's a theoretically great capability to have, but what are you going to shoot it at without the fancy computer-controlled radar targeting system that an Arleigh Burke class destroyer has mounted to its superstructure?  Why did we "want that"?  Russia and China claimed to have a long range air-to-air missile operational.  What do we know about their claims?  All of them are highly exaggerated, any testing they did was highly scripted, and their practical demonstrated capability to do that in combat conditions is almost non-existent.  S-400 can theoretically shoot down an aircraft 500km away due to the kinematics of the air defense missiles it launches.  Can it stop a $1,000 Ukrainian FPV drone with a RPG strapped to it from obliterating the radar and missile launcher?  Apparently not, based upon the drone footage.  Well then, that wasn't a broadly useful capability to have, now was it?  All counters are asymmetric in nature.  Enemy puts a multi-million dollar missile system to "defend the skies" around their air base?  You send a special forces guy with a backpack-carried FPV drone to go blast it for the cost of a few RPGs.  Keep the system if you think it's useful in other ways, but accept it's not survivable against a determined enemy, so maybe you spend money on things other than the most glamorous and expensive "kill toys" imaginable.  The moral of the story is that sheer numbers and asymmetric tactics win battles and logistics wins wars.

4. The administrative and welfare state needs to be dismantled, piece-by-piece, so that there is no large and burdensome centralized government to either grant every wish, regardless of how absurd, nor can it take everything away from you (we want government out of our personal lives and all power not specifically delegated to the federal government gets returned to the individual states- so if you don't like the laws in one state, then move on to the next)
* Abortion - no part of our law or Constitution guarantees your right to kill your own child, but if your state hates accountability, then by all means, go live there
* Health Care - see above (another thing Americans are now obligated to pay for, not only for themselves but all others, that is found nowhere in the Constitution)
* Guns - I think California should be allowed to ban all guns if that is what they want (and hopefully all the criminals move there to prey upon the idiots who voted for that)
* Bathrooms - Anyone can claim to be anything they wish, but regardless of their personal beliefs, the state they live in can either recognize basic biological differences between men and women, because they believe in biology (part of science), or that they believe whatever nonsense someone makes up in their head, so this is yet another issue that should be decided at the state level

5. Lawful authority will not be subverted or the law ignored for political gain
* Border - The law is what it is, so either change the law or enforce it
* Drugs - I don't agree with legalizing them because the evidence about the social problems they cause is crystal clear, but if my fellow Americans vote that into law, then I will accept the results of their vote
* Violent Crime - Assault, rape, robbery, murder - either we're going to agree to prosecute these crimes at every level, with no special regard to race or immigration status or any other consideration besides the facts of the case, or we're not going to have a country very long

This kid seems to understand that we're committing suicide:

Reality Based. - Society Is Broken And There Will Be a REVOLUTION! | @WhatifAltHist

Watch WhatifAltHist's video on "Mouse Utopia".  This is what I see happening to pretty much every country.