New Mars Forums

Doggerland City could serve as a North Sea Free Port. A European Hong Kong with a liberal immigration policy, which won't alienate the existing population because there isn't one. Close to London, Paris, Rotterdam. The sea is only ~20m deep there, we should be able to build prefab breakwaters we can sink like the Maunsell Sea Forts?

The lack of existing population to complain makes them good for other purposes too. Like a prison. HMP Dogger Bank won't need much security so long as the boats are secured. We could also put asylum processing centres out there too...

I've suggested before that buildings on Luna will be hexagonal, with a circular pressure vessel in between two hexagon walls filled with radiation shielding. That way they can expand the way cities and buildings expand, with each new block added on to the existing complex.

Regarding Terran architecture, there are certain rules to follow for sure. Such as "he who builds in wood builds a shack" (Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn). If you want something low maintenance, or that can withstand extreme weather, wood is not it.

How Buildings Learn is available on YouTube, if you haven't already seen it you should.

About 1kW per household. The trouble is, that's just about enough for *average* demand, not winter demand.

Loops in Morecambe Bay might cut it.

But for space heating, I think ceiling radiators + air source heat pumps are the place to start. Having ceiling radiators makes switching to a heat grid later easier.

The centre of town is dense terraces, but with back alleys, and there are car parks we could sink boreholes into (car parks which absorb heat during the summer hmm...). Back alleys are already used for water mains; we could install the heating grid without too much road disturbance I think. Especially in the central triangle.

I care far more about my hometown than I do about Londoners. Afaic, I might as well work on one for Dublin lol. Or Berlin.

Also my town has obvious places to start and a somewhat functional town council. I suppose my university does also.

A London system would not be one system anyway. It's far too big for that.

As much as I love the the Boynton Monorail, I have to admit that this system is probably the easiest way to build out a public transit system, since it can switch to regular bus street running where right of way is difficult to acquire (and is simpler and cheaper than having an upper support rail). A metropolis such as Manchester, where there are plentiful open spaces but not necessarily contiguous ones, could construct dedicated sections where it is straightforward to do so and operate as buses in the built up patches. Then, over time, as space can be acquired, tracks can be laid down to complete the circuit.

If the rails are built to support the weight of a HGV, we could do the same with lorries, with the chassis having retractable steel wheels. Relieving the weight from the rubber tyres would cut down massively on the problems they cause in terms of road damage and pollution. We could build out a cross country network of such routes. Unlike using railways, there would be no time consuming step of transferring containers, though we could also of course connect them into trains to get significant labour and energy savings and separate them out at the end for last mile travel.

If we really wanted to go low embodied energy for solar... could the mirrors for a compact linear fresnel reflector be made out of wood and foil? The strength requirements should be a lot lower than for a parabolic trough, and the mirrors are either flat or slightly curved. AFAICT the mirror slats themselves are adjusted to account for changing solar angle.

In the area of sacrificing efficiency for cost, how do Fresnel lenses compare?

Trying to get figures for the round trip efficiency of ammonia energy storage -- Ammonia for energy storage: economic and technical analysis

The figures given range from 34% (Haber-Bosch, gas turbine) to 72% (reversible fuel cell). Predicted cost for the latter is $0.24/kWh, so pretty pricey. As previously talked about, ammonia can be shipped around the world, so it can be synthesised where there is cheap power available, such as deserts with solar thermal electricity generation.

I don't see ammonia being used in road vehicles, given its toxicity, but as a fuel for ships or electricity generation where we're not expecting Average Joe to handle it it could be a contender. Pricey, even with a cheap source of electricity for producing it, but the storability makes it one of the few options to keep the grid on for the dozen or so windless weeks we have each year in Britain. Probably we'll want to have a dual/triple tariff system where the priciness is made clear to consumers, rather than trying to average it out over the year...

What I'm seeing from discussions of solar thermal power and synfuel is, whilst getting cheap energy is difficult, we can probably get cheap enough energy to keep our technological civilisation going at least if we make a few adjustments. You won't get to drive a gaz guzzeleen muscle car, but keeping an efficient (hybrid?) compact on the road will be a possibility. Electricity will be pricey but we can make up for it in part by going big on cheap hot water. Maybe we have to cut back on energy intensive materials, but we'll still have a shipping industry. The core parts will keep going.

It's pretty clear that EROI for solar panels very strongly depends on where they're placed. It would not surprise me if the studies claiming the highest EROI are based on desert installations with high efficiency panels.

Which... sure, if you're looking to make synthetic fuel or ammonia, that's not necessarily a problem. If you're looking to produce electricity for non desert regions however, you find yourself needing very large scale investment in politically risky high voltage power lines...

No, not really. All you have to do is assume a capacity factor of 25%. Which for solar would be a really good capacity factor; in Britain it's more like 10% (but we're not exactly the sort of place you'd put solar if you were thinking straight).

kbd,

Why are you like this. You always answer innocuous questions in a really aggressive manner as if you've been personally offended. Go reread my post and highlight where I talked about lockdowns being brilliant and how it was great people lost their jobs.

Hmm. I wonder how the steel requirements compare for Vertical Axis Wind Turbines?

Contra-rotating floating turbines promise unprecedented scale and power

There's been a trend in wind power to go for larger and large individual turbines, but that's not necessarily the way to optimise for costs. VAWTs can be clustered together in ways HAWTs can't be, and not being top heavy their foundations should require far less engineering work. If they have foundations at all.

They might take up more space, but *gestures at the north sea*