New Mars Forums

This is a problem almost exclusively created by leftists to justify their abhorrent behavior, but yes, I agree with this one.  The richest people in America are almost exclusively leftists.  Elon Musk is still a former leftist.  He's been a Republican for a whole New York Minute.  Bezos has always been a leftist.  Mark Cuban- leftist.  I could keep going, but you get the point.  For every Koch brother there are at least a dozen or more rich leftists.  The average American worker should be doing better than he or she is, but they're not, because rich leftists, who do in fact own most the means to production, but don't for one second believe in fairness, don't want them to.

Rich Leftist A-Holes and Hollyweirdos:
"Rich people are too rich.  Boo-hoo.  Oh woe is me.  We must make those silly poor simpletons forget that we've made them indentured servants by screwing up the rest of their lives in other ways while pretending to care about them than those annoying feckless Republicans we use as whipping boys when our policies fail.  Open the floodgates to the illegals.  They can't focus on us when they're physically being overrun.  Convince the boys that they're actually girls.  Quick!  Send some more billions to Ukraine while we shaft our voters in Hawaii.  Tell them the climate is dying when they so much as breathe.  That should keep them from noticing anything until we've finished robbing them blind."

Leftists here in America literally voted for that dog crap and eventually rioted when absolutely none of it improved their daily lives.  Well, how could it?  If you're already barely scraping by, how would your personal economic challenges improve by competing with third worlders for jobs?  Why do they vote for the people who literally and directly caused the problems they're complaining about, but expect a different result when they continually give power to people who state through actions that they want to economically crush them?

People voted Gavin Newsom back into office during his recall election, knowing full well he doesn't care about them at all.  The people who voted for him even said that about him.  After he won, what did he prove with the California wildfires?  He still doesn't give a crap about whether or not Californians live or die.  He's never going to change.  If you vote for him, then you actively seek to bring about your own demise through cold indifference to preventable human suffering.

Both Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris called their own young voters, "stupid".  They disrespect their own voters right to their faces because they know they'll vote for them anyway.  I would find that intolerable and I'm not even young anymore.

Umm...  No.  This is not "a thing" here.  Average American workers competing for jobs with below-minimum-wage illegals is a thing.  Bezos and Musk are not "tearing the country apart" by competing for NASA lunar exploration and basing contracts.  They are, however, employing standing armies of people trying to "reach for the stars".

This is very true.  Annual entitlement spending dwarfs all discretionary spending.  Who created and continuously doubles-down on the "Welfare State" to keep those poor people poor?  Once again, that would be our Democrats.  Free money for this / that / the other cockamamie nonsense.  It'll be someone else who pays the bill, so who cares if a bold faced lie gets us elected right now?  Fiscal responsibility isn't "cool".  It doesn't win any votes with people who feel entitled to the work of others.  Do Republicans spend too much money on wars and war machines?  Absolutely.  No question about that, either.  Be that as it may, line up all the war spending and all the entitlement spending over the past 25 years (2000-2025) and it's not even a close contest.  The purpose of legitimate government is not to rob Peter to pay Paul, nor to tell Peter why he should envy Paul.

The only "big decision" that never happens relates to fiscal responsibility and telling people to pay for their own wants / needs / desires, because public money is not their money.  I feel like almost all politicians, regardless of party, still haven't received and accepted this message.  Everyone thinks they're entitled to something that does not belong to them, specifically.  There is a refusal to stop digging.  Whatever their other past mistakes, I would happily forgive and reelect a batch of politicians who recognized the need for a balanced budget.

Resources are not low, though.  There's never been a more productive time in human history.  We're flush with resources.  Artificial scarcity is not the same thing as a hard environmentally-imposed limitation completely outside of human control.  The amount of Copper and Uranium on Earth are externally imposed limitations, for example.  If we needed to make houses out of Copper and Uranium, because those were the only suitable construction materials, then the world's Copper and Uranium supply would represent a true "low resource" situation.

Now that Secretary of War Hegseth is running the show, the military is hitting their recruiting numbers before the year is half-way over, which means Uncle Sam gets to choose who is fit to serve and who is not.  That's the way it should be.

America is definitely not short of food or water.  California's problems are entirely related to the people they elected to run their government, which are almost exclusively Democrats who simply do not care about their own people and never did, because they're so hopelessly lost in their left brain hemisphere.  That's not even a dig at leftists, it's simply a statement of neuroscience-demonstrated fact regarding which hemisphere of the brain is responsible for greed / envy / "need to control" thinking.

Mass migration was a problem created by Democrat President Biden, to "punish" working class Americans for being so...  American.

There is not "runaway inflation" at the moment, but yes, inflation remains a problem because the Federal Reserve Chairman wants it to be a problem for President Trump's administration.  Whenever leftists see their economic worldviews repudiated by different approaches to economics, they do everything humanly possible to destroy what better men and women have built.  When you install such people into positions of power that they cannot be easily removed from, disaster is sure to follow.

I'm starting to feel like a broken record, but the people who most consistently and knowingly put out disinformation are almost exclusively leftists.  If you have to constantly question whether or not someone is providing factual and unbiased information, then for goodness sake, STOP LISTENING TO THEM!  Send a clear message to them by turning off your TV.  When their sponsors eventually figure out that nobody is watching them, they'll eventually have to find real jobs like everyone else.

I know enough to not listen to someone who says:
Don't wear a mask because it won't protect you.  Wear a mask to protect yourself and others.  Wear two masks.
-Dr "I AM THE SCIENCE!" Fauci

Leftist media treated him as if he was the second coming of Jesus.  He literally provided the money to create a global pandemic, "for science".

Almost nobody from the left had the personal integrity and courage to call-out that kind of idiocy or simply ignore it.  Dozens of other similar patterns of behavior across a range of issues are why they lost credibility.  Everyone with two brain cells to rub together could figure out how directly contradictory that was.  Everyone, left / right / center, discovered that the people the left puts on pedestals are midwits at best, religious dogmatics at worst, and do not seem to care at all about the people they hurt.  The only time they reconsider the worst of their anti-social behaviors is when it gets directed back at them.

The historical left was filled with actual thinkers who questioned everything.  That's why they became such a powerful influence over modern society.  They promptly abandoned all the principles which made them so successful, as-if pursuit of knowledge and truth ceased to matter.  Today's left is filled with ideological dogmatics who are as incurious and self-assured of their own righteousness as the most vile "good book thumpers" from the world's traditional religions.

You cannot abandon truth and morality while expecting everyone else to blindly follow.  Most of us won't do it.

tahanson43206,

The pilot who was shot down, Jeff Tice, describes his ordeal here:

Fighter Pilot Podcast -  Shot Down! U.S. F-16 pilot explains Infamous 'Dodging Iraqi SAMs' Video (ep. 162)

His F-16 (Stroke 1) was shot down.  Another F-16 coming the other direction, that he tried to warn because he saw the launch, was shot down and converted into metal confetti on that mission.  That pilot did not survive.  One of his wingmen (Stroke 3), was the one who dodged 6 SAMs.  Needless to say, the Iraqis got his attention after shooting down his flight lead.

A lot of things went wrong, to put it mildly, but that's how it goes.  No matter how carefully you plan something, that typically goes right out the window the moment the shooting starts.  He sent 4 of his wingmen home, one who became "lost", so he detached him and another jet to escort him.  Another F-16 suffered a mechanical failure of some kind, so he sent detached another jet to escort him home as well.  In the end, he was effectively down to the flight leads in the formation he was leading to prosecute the attack against their target.  Keeping the most experienced pilots turned out to be a good thing, because things got "interesting" really fast.  Jeff Tice was previously a F-111 pilot and DACT instructor in the F-5, I think.

There were actually some 74 airplanes in the mission package, with different flights assigned to multiple different but relatively geographically co-located targets near Baghdad.  Some were there to attack an airfield, while he and his wingmen were attempting to hit an oil refinery.  F-15s were assigned as "top cover" to perform a pre-strike fighter sweep so that the ordnance-laden F-16s would, hopefully, not get jumped by Iraqi MiGs.  F-4 Wild Weasels were also present to attempt to suppress enemy air defenses.  I've no clue if any EF-111As or EA-6Bs were also present to actually jam enemy SAM radars rather than attacking them with HARMs after the fact, but since they had so many SA-6s fired at them, I'm guessing not.  ROE was visual identification of targets before dropping ordnance.  They had dumb bombs, mostly 2,000lb Mk84s, not LGBs, and I don't think JDAMs existed back then.  Believe it or not, it was actually cloudy during the first week of the war, so many of the jets had to abort their attacks because they could not see their targets.

I can't speak intelligently on what the US Air Force allows or does, but the US Navy is still very big on accuracy with dumb iron bombs, which they regularly practice.  Even if you think you have a target fixed, they still want visual confirmation before you take a shot at anything.  Maybe we're just dinosaurs, but you'll remember a fratricide incident until the day you die, hence the rules about visual confirmation.

Jet and his wingmen dodged about 40 SAMs fired at them during the first night of Operation Desert Storm.  He describes exactly how you avoid a SAM hit, which involves a correctly timed hard evasive maneuver that takes advantage of the turning circle advantage I previously described, plus another little tidbit of info about how you can effectively cut the number of gees the missile can pull in half by forcing it into a kind of turn where it can only use 2 out of 4 control surfaces to maneuver with you.

Combat Story - Evading 8 Surface-to-Air Missiles | F-16 Fighter Pilot | Fighter Weapons School Top Gun | Jet Jernigan

I wasn't even aware that the USAF had a "Fighter Weapons School", but I also don't know much about the Air Force.  We have a "Fighter Weapons School" in the Navy, which used to be in Miramar.  If they do have one similar to the Navy school, then it must be their own response to the training failures experienced during the Viet Nam War.

Edit:
In case the point isn't clear, these are two different stories involving different pilots from different units at different points in the war.  In both cases when the pilot who is the target of a missile attack is aware of the attack and can see the incoming missile(s), he can use the maneuverability of his plane to evade the incoming missile(s).  If you're not aware or don't see the missile, then you're about to have a very bad day.

In both cases the jets being attacked were subsonic and remained subsonic.  Going supersonic would have made their jets much less maneuverable.  My conclusion is that the ability to "go supersonic", never mind going Mach 3, is not a particularly useful combat capability for a fighter to have.  Using excess thrust to recover energy (lost airspeed) rapidly after a hard evasive maneuver is very important, as is the ability to maneuver violently when defending against a missile attack.

My point is that modern piston engines and turboprop engines would put a fighter-type aircraft in the "sweet spot" for hard maneuvering combined with rapid-enough displacement (how far the aircraft travels per second) to avoid warhead blast radii, because that giant propeller would provide the ability to rapidly recover energy rapidly while offering much better cruise efficiency from sea level to about 40,000ft.  I realize that might not be as "cool" as flying at Mach 3 around 70,000ft, but I also question the military utility of that capability unless it's a recon aircraft flying high and fast as a missile avoidance tactic, which might not work as well against modern SAMs.

The cost of the engine itself, the maintenance / repair components cost, and the fuel burn rate all tend to be substantially lower for piston and turboprop engines.  I don't want to give the impression that these things can be had for pennies on the dollar, merely that if one thinks a turboprop is expensive to purchase and maintain, then they're in for a very rude surprise when they enter the after-burning turbofan world.  If IR signature reduction matters at all, pistons and turboprops also tend to be less noticeable than low-bypass turbofans suitable for modern fighter jets.  There are probably 2 to 4 or even more different types of aircraft which all share a common piston or turboprop engine, for each low-bypass turbofan application, which is effectively limited to military applications, typically a single type of aircraft.  F135s are only found in F-35s, F-119s are only found in F-22s...  F-15s and F-16s technically "share" a common engine, except that they don't.  Hornets and Gripens "share" the same F404 or F414 engines, except that they don't.  These days, every large military turbofan used is a bespoke design for a bespoke airframe.  This means production numbers are very low and costs are very high.  F-135 is a bespoke $20M+ engine that's only available from a single source and not used by any other combat jet.

For nations like Canada that want an effective defensive capability but have never had the budget or manpower to operate something as complex as the F-22 or F-35, modern engines / materials / electronics miniaturization provide a pretty compelling case for foregoing the gadgetry incorporated into the latest and greatest American and European fighter jets in favor of more affordable home-grown solutions that can (mostly) be locally produced and operated on their own terms.  Supersonic capability is a major design compromise that greatly detracts from other flight characteristics that are far more frequently utilized by combat jets during real world combat, such as maneuverability, range, loiter time, and lower approach and stall speeds to improve safety during critical phases of flight.  Checking that supersonic box doesn't make for a better fighter in all but the most narrowly defined use case scenarios.  Kids ask how fast the jet can fly.  Trained military personnel with flight experience want to know how stable the plane is on a crosswind approach, where the jet can takeoff and land, how long it'll be down for maintenance between flights, and its fuel burn rate.

Every military operation I've seen has demonstrated that drones can be effective force multipliers, but they're no more "magic totems" than stealth aircraft are.  If the asset is available when and where required, then we'll find a way to exploit its strengths and live with its limitations.  Predators can't fly very fast, but that "remain aloft for 24 hours" feature tends to get used quite a bit more than firewalling its throttle.  Drones still get shot down, their cost is directly tied to performance and capabilities, and as of yet they're not suitable replacements for crewed aircraft.  What is badly needed is more affordable crewed aircraft so that aircrews accumulate enough flight time to become proficient at using their plane as a weapon.

The F-4 Phantom was able to reach 82,000ft in 3 minutes 50 seconds, using full afterburner, despite its inferior thrust-to-weight ratio as compared to the F-35, so what makes you think F-35s cannot quickly reach 50,000ft?

Thrust-to-Weight with Zero Fuel / Zero Weapons of Select Fighters
Avro Arrow w/ J75 engines: 0.96:1
F-106A: 1.00:1
F-4E: 1.18:1
F-14D: 1.23:1
Avro Arrow w/ Orenda Iroquois engines: 1.25:1
JAS-39E/F: 1.25:1 <- Edit: I somehow forgot to include the Gripen in this list
F-18E/F: 1.37:1
F-35A: 1.47:1
F-16C/D: 1.54:1
Rafale C: 1.57:1
F-22A: 1.62:1
F-15C: 1.64:1
F-15EX II: 1.66:1 (no CFTs installed)
Eurofighter Typhoon: 1.67:1

All the rest of the fighters on that list are at least as climb-capable as the F-4 when proportionally laden with fuel and weapons.  The F-35 has a significantly greater excess of thrust, relative to its own empty weight, than the Avro Arrow ever did, even if the Arrow was equipped with Iroquois engines that were never installed.  The F-14D's initial climb rate was nearly identical to the F-35A.  I've never heard anyone claim that a Tomcat couldn't climb very well.  If all fighters on that list were proportionally encumbered with fuel and weapons, then as a general rule the fighters with higher excess of thrust would still climb better than ones with lower excess thrust.

Does aerodynamics still matter?

Absolutely.  Quite a lot, actually.

How much less aerodynamic are the non-stealthy jets when they're carrying 2-4 gigantic fuel tanks on wing pylons as part of their combat configuration?

There's a reason why all the latest jets are carrying significantly more fuel internally, even if that means the base jet design has greater drag than a more streamlined airframe carrying less internal fuel.  Drag penalties from multi-hundred gallon external fuel tanks are very real, to say nothing of how external point loads affect real world maneuverability limits to avoid over-stressing the airframe.

If the F-35s ultimately receives the 50,000lbf F-135 or F-136 engine refresh under development, then A model TWR becomes 1.71:1, outclassing the very best Gen 4.5 fighters.  If the CNT / BNNT wiring replacement is fully implemented and Aluminum wing spars fully replaced with CFRP, there's a real shot of re-engined and re-manufactured F-35As hitting 2:1 TWR and F-35Bs being able to take off vertically with full fuel.  C models would perform better than current A models.  A models would be able to climb vertically, and quite rapidly, when laden with full internal fuel and 6X AIM-120s.  Up to high subsonic speeds, they'd accelerate faster and therefore recover energy following hard maneuvering faster than all other jets with lesser TWRs and proportional fuel / weapons loads.

tahanson43206,

Elemental Carbon and "CO", which is Carbon Monoxide, are two different chemicals with different properties.  Elemental Carbon is a solid.  It does not require a pressurized storage tank for bulk storage.  Coal, which is mostly elemental Carbon, can be stored on the ground outside in the elements, because it's a solid.  Carbon Monoxide and Carbon Dioxide are gases or liquids, dependent upon pressure and temperature, which does require pressurized storage tanks.  Carbon Monoxide and Carbon Dioxide will both "freeze solid" when you get them cold enough, but again, you have to keep them cold, which generally implies a pressurized storage tank and cryocooler.  Elemental Carbon, on the other hand, is a solid and remains a solid until it's combusted, which then forms Carbon Monoxide (partial combustion) or Carbon Dioxide (complete combustion).

Martian nights are so cold that Carbon Dioxide can and frequently does become a solid near the planet's surface, similar to water vapor becoming "frost" on cold nights here on Earth.  For Carbon Monoxide to freeze, it has to be cooled to cryogenic temperatures well below what the ambient Martian environment provides at its North and South poles during the night.  The described "freezing effect" is sufficient that frozen CO2, aka "dry ice", can be collected from the surface of Mars at night, even near the Martian equator during summer, for very modest energy expenditure.  The dry ice is fed into an empty pressure tank, which then creates liquid CO2 (LCO2) after the tank is sealed and begins to pressurize as heat is applied.  An electric heating element inside the tank would add heat to cause the dry ice to become LCO2 or SCO2.  LCO2 is a dense liquid that's easy to pump, unlike dry ice.  Adding a little bit more pressure using a bit more heat transforms the LCO2 into supercritical CO2 (SCO2), which does not require any pumping power to transfer the batch of collected CO2 from Storage Bottle A to Storage Bottle B, because supercritical fluids flow like gases.  While LCO2 can also flow (expand) without pumping power if pressure is slowly released, so that it does not re-freeze from expanding too fast and isn't allowed to expand so much that it becomes a gas again, the speed of the flow is much more pronounced in SCO2, so tank fill / transfer operations can be very fast.  For our purposes, though, LCO2 flow speeds are likely to be completely acceptable and required pumping power is very modest.

Powdered solid fuels burned by external combustion engines, such as SCO2 gas turbines, can have the solid fuel fed into the combustion chamber using CO2 gas to "fluidize" the powder.  SCO2 gas turbines are external rather than internal combustion engines.  The heat from burning this "synthetic coal" is indirectly fed into the SCO2 working fluid that drives the power turbine.  Hot exhaust CO2 is recirculated into the combustion chamber to moderate the temperatures produced by combusting synthetic coal / elemental Carbon.  The Allam-Fetvedt cycle burns coal powder or natural gas in an external combustion chamber that drives a SCO2 power turbine via a heat exchanger loop (exactly like a refrigerant loop) that carries hot expanding SCO2 through the power turbine, then back to a pump to repressurize the SCO2, and finally back through the burner.  95% of the gas fed into the combustion chamber is CO2, the remainder being pure O2 and coal powder or natural gas.  The hot section of this "engine" is effectively a blow torch adding heat to a thermal power transfer fluid (SCO2) with density more closely comparable to liquid water than steam / water vapor.  The 95% CO2 "atmosphere" in the combustion chamber is put there to soak up additional heat to dump into the working fluid and pumps responsible for SCO2 repressurization.  This is the penultimate "lean burn" combustion engine.  It does have a cold side heat sink, because like every other heat engine it has to, but it's as miserly as it possibly can be with the fuel and oxidizer.

The reason we would want SCO2 gas turbines for land vehicles is their incredible power density per unit weight and volume, as well as their ability to operate at extreme temperatures and pressures.  The kerosene burning AGT-1500 conventional gas turbine that powers our M1 tank produces about 1,500hp (~1MW) and is so large that a relatively strong adult cannot pick up the turbine wheel (the rotating assembly that compresses air and expands combusted exhaust gases) with both hands because it's so large and heavy.  The AGT-1500 engine's dry weight is 1,134kg, so about as heavy as a subcompact car.  That same person can easily pick up a 1MW SCO2 turbine rotor with one hand, since it readily fits in the palm of their hand.  The power density of the rotating machinery in a SCO2 gas turbine is "extremely extreme", meaning 1MW/kg and 10MW/L.  Only nuclear thermal rocket engine core power density surpasses SCO2 gas turbine rotor power density.  Large commercial nuclear reactors fall in the range of 100-200kW/L.  There is no other kind of rotating or reciprocating engine with SCO2 turbine power density.  The RS-25's high pressure Hydrogen turbopump's power density is about 33.8kW/kg, so even the most powerful rocket engine turbopumps, which are a type of conventional gas turbine used to force-feed propellants into liquid rocket engines, have a power density 10X lower than SCO2 gas turbines.  However, SCO2 gas turbines also require other attached equipment such as heat exchangers and combustors, so overall power density is much lower than turbine rotor power density alone would suggest.  However, power density for a full ceramic composite SCO2 gas turbine / heat exchanger / combustor package is on-par with a rocket engine turbopump.  Since a rocket engine turbopump is only designed to feed propellants into a combustion chamber, that makes the SCO2 gas turbine more useful for powering non-rocket vehicles, particularly heavy ground vehicles like mining equipment.

For a mining truck, a SCO2 turbine would generate electricity used to drive electric motors directly powering the wheels, eliminating a lot of  the heavy rotating machinery connected to the diesel piston engine of a more conventionally powered mining truck.  If something happens to the engine or drive train of a conventional mining truck, that truck is a paperweight until the component is replaced.  SCO2 would make the critical components compact and light enough that multiple engines could be carried for redundancy.  A 10MW diesel engine weighs tens of tons, so there's only space and weight allocation for one of those diesel engines in the mining truck.  A Mars mining truck could have quadruple redundant 10MW SCO2 turbine engines, but all four engines wouldn't come close to the weight and bulk of a mere 1MW diesel engine.  Since solid Carbon isn't as energy dense as diesel fuel, the extra space and mass could be occupied by larger fuel and oxidizer tanks.

Anyway, I think I made my point about the various common forms and phases of Carbon and Carbon-Oxygen gases, as well as how we might use them on Mars in a more practical manner than any other fuel.  We would definitely like to have Carbon-Hydrogen fuels if we can synthesize or extract them in useful quantities, but synthesizing and storing them is significantly more challenging.  There's no way around that.  If conventional gasoline or kerosene synthesis proves to be a "bridge too far" until the colony is more highly developed, we now have a simpler and less energy-intensive alternative that wasn't available before- fewer energy sinks, fewer pieces of equipment, fewer people to operate it, and fewer failure modes.  Here on Earth we have easy access to enormous amounts of liquid water that simply doesn't exist anywhere else, so far as we know.  Even if we find ice, we still have to extract, melt, purify, and transport the water.  Since transportation cost will remain an issue for quite some time, why complicate fuel synthesis when you don't have to?  The benefits of adding Hydrogen to Carbon are marginal when you have to expend additional energy to make the Hydrogen and attach it to the Carbon.  The entire purpose behind creating chemical energy stores is to use them for other useful work unrelated to dumping energy back into the energy generating and storage systems.  This is merely another way of saying that we don't create energy storage products to justify creating additional infrastructure required to create more of said energy products, because we know that energy invested into energy storage is always a losing proposition, unsustainable past the point where energy must be devoted to other uses such as purifying drinking water, food, shelter, clothing, etc.  If obtaining 1kg of Uranium to fission in a reactor required expending the energy equivalent of 10kg of Uranium, then there would never be a commercial electric power plant powered by a fission reactor.  That's effectively what Hydrogen synthesis entails on Mars.  The only rational reason we would want to do something like that was if a Hydrogen powered rocket was the only feasible way to leave the surface of Mars to come back to Earth.  Powering someone's personal car or home that way makes even less sense- something to be done only in the complete absence of more energy-input-favorable alternatives.

tahanson43206,

I went back and actually read all of the Nature article he posted most recently.  I was wrong.  That one is actually related to solid Carbon production, so I'll study it in greater detail.  The prior articles he's posted were related to CO production, which is great if the goal is syngas for liquid fuel production, but not for elemental Carbon.  I can easily understand why he places great emphasis on liquid fuel production, though, since those are the forms of energy we consume the most of.  Nearly all of the machines that do the real work necessary for cities to exist are burning diesel or natural gas, so he would rightly view production of those fuels as of greater importance than coal, which remains relatively abundant.  The problem, at least as I see it, is that even coal is finite.  Our ability to completely replace extracted coal with pure Carbon from CO2 would mean as long as we have access to CO2 and thermal energy from sunlight to capture the CO2, our synthetic coal supply is functionally inexhaustible.  Most of the nasty stuff in coal (Sulfur, heavy metals, and radioactive elements) would no longer be spewed into the air, either.

Here's a Science Direct article using a different Gallium alloy and ceramic catalyst that also requires no external energy input to drive the reaction:
Room-temperature CO2 conversion to carbon using liquid metal alloy catalysts without external energy input

Regardless, I think I'm on fairly stable scientific ground when I assert that any chemical process which does not require any kind of external energy input is likely to be more efficient than one which does require external energy inputs, provided that there's not some other kind of serious "gotcha", such as absurdly low selectivity or an unstable catalyst or extreme energy input to obtain the catalyst in usable form or to construct the chemical reactor device.  If the chemical reactor to break CO2 into Carbon and Oxygen had to be made from pure Platinum, that might make the process economically infeasible, even if the tech worked exactly as advertised without using any energy input.

I can think of various other similar reactions requiring no energy input, though.

If you drop a chunk of Magnesium Oxide (MgO) into Fluorine, the Fluorine is so electro-negative that it will break the bond Oxygen has with Magnesium, strong as it is, without any energy input at all, creating MgF2 in the process.  Similarly, Magnesium metal will immediately and rapidly generate Hydrogen gas when dropped into water without further energy input of any kind.

Calliban,

This is the process I'm thinking of:

Liquid metal proven to be cheap and efficient CO2 converter by Neil Martin, University of New South Wales

This is the device:

This CO2 splitting process does not directly consume electricity for the purpose of stripping the O2 from the CO2.  There will obviously be the bath vibrator to help "bubble" (disperse and react the CO2 through the eutectic mixture) the CO2 through the column of liquid metal, which is electrical, and pumps to pump-in the CO2, and another pump to pump-out / compress the O2 if the O2 is also captured.  I presume the pumps would be electrical because that's how we normally do it whenever we can.  Maybe the pump doesn't have to be electrical and maybe some kind of mechanical device could vibrate the eutectic mixture tube in its hot water bath, but that seems like a lot of extra work when electrical pumps already get the job done.

All that said, there are combinations of purely chemical and electrocatalytic processes involving various room temperature liquid metals and lanthanide catalysts.  IIRC, the express stated purpose of these catalysts is production of syngas (for fuels and plastics) and alcohols (presumably for Alcohol-derived fuels, but also for chemicals), not solid Carbon powder (as close as we're going to get to synthetic coal).

I believe the papers you're looking at are for partial CO2 splitting of syngas and other short-chain hydrocarbon molecules.  Almost everyone is primarily interested in synthetic liquid fuels, not synthetic coal.  The general idea is that refinement of these new processes or something similar can produce the gasoline, diesel, and kerosene fuels we prefer to use.

All the headlines say "40 months", but that's for each of his three convictions for government-unapproved music, to be served concurrently, so it's actually 10 years.  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was only sentenced to 8 years in the gulag for his various criticisms of Stalin.  10 years for music that the British government finds distasteful is more punitive than criticizing the Soviet government's leader during his purges.

You Brits gave up your arms in the 1980s.  Within a human lifetime you lost your freedom of speech.  You will likely lose even more of your freedoms in fairly short order.  Don't expect to get any of them back without a fight.  That's how government works- all of them, to include our government here in America.  It's always worked that way.  Anyone who thought otherwise thought wrong.

Calliban,

Irrespective of how light or heavy the completed rotor assembly happens to be, it's going to work better when balanced.

Have you already done that already, or is it on your "to do" list?

tahanson43206,

A 2.5MWe Horizontal-Axis Wind Turbine (HAWT), uses over 400t of materials in its construction, mostly steel / concrete / CFRP composites by mass.  For comparison purposes, a 2.5MWe AirLoom Wind Turbine (ALWT) only needs 15t of materials, also mostly steel / concrete / CFRP composites by mass.  In either case, all of those materials must be mined, or at least refined even if we do have existing scrap metal to use, and transported using diesel-powered machines.  A construction crew arriving by off-road-capable pickup trucks can erect an ALWT.  To erect a HAWT, you need to first build a gravel road leading to the field so a train of semi-trucks can deliver the tonnage of materials required.  That's a dramatic difference in time and materials investment.

For the ALWT, the construction crew is also carrying the materials with them in the beds of their pickups because so much less mass and therefore transport machinery is involved.  From a storage depot in a town, I send the guys out in their own Ford F250s with the materials to build one turbine base per day.  In the case of the HAWT, you need to hire independent contractors to facilitate materials shipment via a small convoy of semi-trucks and the construction crew still arrives in their own F250s.  Assume for a moment that I don't want to spend the money or time to obtain permits to build a road.  I don't want to hire two or three different trucking companies (one for the concrete, one for the steel and other heavy equipment that requires cranes, one to transport the delicate blades) to transport the materials, either.  I cut out all of that cost and annoyance by using a technology that's almost 30X lighter for the same power output.  I have to interact with the FAA, amongst other government agencies, in order to build the giant HAWTs.  ALWT seems almost effortless by way of comparison.  I have to pay a little bit more for the land use, but that's about it.

I've never heard of a HAWT having its steel-reinforced concrete base recycled to reclaim the materials consumed.  An ALWT doesn't need a 50ft deep crater excavated to pour its concrete base, because the "towers" are not as tall as the Statue of Liberty and don't have to resist the force of the wind pushing on the very top of that tower, via 3 turbine blades longer and heavier than a jumbo airliner's entire wing structure.

I can't speak for anyone else, but it's obvious what the real benefits are- a wild difference in weight and therefore cost.  If this thing works even half as well as they claim, I would never entertain the idea of erecting miniature skyscrapers for a few megawatts of power per unit.

tahanson43206,

A 2.5MWe Airloom device consumes 15t of materials in total ($225K) vs 435t for a HAWT.  That means it's 29X more materials-efficient in a real physical sense (embodied energy efficiency) that no amount of money manipulation schemes could ever change.  It does use modestly more land area for HAWT-equivalent power output, but there's no gigantic yet fragile tower and blades which may come crashing down due to high winds and/or manufacturing defects.  The probability that far less highly-stressed components can actually last for 25 years or more is dramatically higher.  Theoretically, the blades could be made from natural materials like bamboo.  They may not be quite as light or durable as Carbon Fiber, but when the time inevitably comes for replacement they can be readily converted into other useful materials such as particle board filler.  The race track poles consume far less concrete and steel per unit of power generated.  Since the device can still work on uneven ground and doesn't absolutely require a service road to be laid down to assemble the machines in the field, it's a lower total investment for the same end result.  Perhaps more important than all of that is the fact that it uses significantly less Copper or Aluminum wiring.  We don't have access to infinite supplies of technology metals, here or elsewhere.  4X more power for the same total project cost is a massive "win".  1GWe nameplate capacity for $300M is practical, and the hardware cost is only $90M of the $300M total construction cost.

A Red Eléctrica Report on the Spanish Grid Collapse of 28-APR-2025:
Incidente en el Sistema Eléctrico Peninsular Español el 28 de abril de 2025