No, what I’m talking about isn’t steaming bullshit fresh from the bovine’s ass.

What is the major complaint people have about electric cars? Range, right? Because lithium ion or lithium polymer batteries do not have the energy density per unit volume or unit weight of gasoline. Electric cars are often heavier than their ICE counterparts because they’re crammed with so many batteries to make up for the relative lack of energy density, and they benefit from things like regenerative braking. Electric motorcycles often don’t have regenerative braking, which is why Kawasaki is right now advertising a $7000 sport bike with a 55mph top speed (65 if you push the boost button) and a range of 41 miles (if you don’t push the boost button). The Ninja 250 I bought in 2007 could do 120mph and I routinely went 300 miles between fill-ups with it’s ~5 gallon tank.

Meanwhile these folks have a hexacopter that will out-carry and out-run a Robinson R-44 piston-powered helicopter, on Lithium batteries.

Actually just right there, they say a 200 mph cruise speed and a 100 mile range. So that’s a 30 minute endurance. To legally fly cross country in the United States, you need to have enough endurance to make it to your first intended point of landing PLUS 30 minutes, and that’s day VFR minimum fuel when operating under Part 91. Are you telling me it has an hour of battery life but half of that will be in reserve? In something like a Cessna Skyhawk a half hour of fuel is something like 4 gallons of gasoline, or about 24 pounds. How much lithium battery do you need to make ~100 horsepower for half an hour? And mind you, that’s cruise power, NOT takeoff power. Which will be a LOT greater than cruise power especially in a VTOL aircraft. I get that it’s a tiltrotor and would have airplane-like performance in cruise, but it’ll still be more of a bitch to get airborne than a conventional plane.

Anybody want to see me plan a 100 mile flight in a Cessna Skyhawk, figure up how much gas the trip would take, convert that amount of gas to kilowatt-hours and then look up the weight of a Li-Ion battery with that capacity?

I’d also be real interested to know what the secret sauce is to make those propellers that quiet. Yes, electric motors are quieter than gas engines, but the noise from something like an airplane or helicopter is mostly made by the propeller/rotor blades, especially at the tips. By what physics are you going to make something with 6 propellers quieter than something that has one? I bet that thing is going to be louder - and shriller - than an equivalent helicopter. Stand next to a toy drone in flight and explain to me by what magic they’re going to make one that seats four make “a barely perceptible sound.”

If you’re going to tell obvious lies, just say I’m pretty.

Abby Someone.

Remember the gloss black fixtures that were very trendy for a brief time in the 80’s?

A pretty huge proposal to expand the Light Sport rule is in the works.

For those unaware, in 2004 the United States made some pretty sweeping additions to the Federal Aviation Regulations, essentially adding what the rest of the world calls “ultralight aviation.” What Americans had been previously calling “ultralights” were more like the rest of the world’s “microlights.” The Light Sport Rule added the Sport Pilot certificate (lesser privileges than a Private pilot), the Sport Pilot Instructor certificate, two kinds of aircraft repairmen, and two categories of aircraft, Special and Experimental Light Sport.

The rule has been a resounding success, so they’re talking about greatly widening what sport pilots can fly and what can be built and certified as a Light Sport aircraft. They’re talking about adding night flight, allowing controllable pitch propellers, retractable landing gear, 4 seats, higher stall speeds, higher takeoff weights, higher cruise speeds, possibly even eliminating the language that requires single engines or reciprocating engines.

It’s possible there’s a boom time coming for General Aviation.

There’s a game by Devolver Digital called Heave Ho which is pretty fun. And has a free demo.

It’s like the whole of Japan just decided to kill all the interesting or fun cars they made.

Toyota put out the Scion badge for the young’uns, marketing cars the same way Texas Instruments markets calculators: Let’s sell replaceable colored face plates at $20 a pop, $30 for the pink ones. They were designed to last 5 years and the brand was discontinued like 7 years ago now. There are no more Scions in the world. Meanwhile the Toyota marque went full diaper bag. The Celica, Supra, MR2, all gone never to return, in their place were minivans with built-in vacuums and other 2000 pound self-propelled diaper bags. If they made a 2-door Corolla, they would have discontinued it. And for the folks who sit and watch the Weather Channel while waiting to die, one of the dull colored unnamed loafers on the Lexus lot is waiting for you.

Honda did basically the same thing at the same time though they weren’t as Japanese about it; they kept making an Accord with a spoiler on it.

Subaru and Mitsubishi both kind of faded into the background to the point you forget they ever existed and Isuzu and Suzuki both actually stopped making cars for the North American market.

And the Koreans didn’t really rise up to fill the gap left by the Japanese.

One of the Celicas looked like a 7/8 scale Mustang, those were cool.

That format was pretty good for “Come see us live at the Sodbury Theatre in Glurpfortshire, Feb 32nd @9PM!”

I remember an instance where a Cracked.com article pointed out something like “5 creepy places on the internet” one of which was a dicussion forum in which one account was posting over and over, many times a day, about public appearances and such of the cast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and readers showed up en masse to harass this person. Turns out she was off-label using a forum engine as her own little microtwitter to publish alerts to a fan club. But when the Cracked author rejected that context and substituted his own, it smelled a lot like Humanbeing151.

But yes in general I find discussion boards to be more useful; I think it’s why they were invented first; Reddit and Lemmy are basically just different approaches to implementing Usenet.

Depends on the soldering iron. I’ve got a Craftsman brand one that runs on drill batteries and it’s got a little too much oompf, it’ll burn itself up if you leave it on high. But shit like that “Cold Heat” one they were selling in infomercials? Nah those have never produced a single solder joint.

On PC, not N64.

fear a man that carries a framing hammer and a gas powered soldering iron in the same bag.

It is my understanding that Green Boots has already disappeared.

Eventually every article just reads “Delve delve delve delve delve delve delve.”

I don’t think any of our Walgreens stores are 24 hours anymore. Since I was a kid, I watched Kerr Drug go out of business, Eccard’s (or however it was spelled) merged with Rite-Aid and then Rite-Aid was bought by Walgreens and half of them shut down. Meanwhile Wal-Mart and Harris Teeter both now close at 11. So if Sheetz doesn’t have it you can’t buy it after 11 pm.

The problem I have is there isn’t a 24 hour pharmacy in my town anymore, and sometimes you suddenly need to by immodium at 3 AM.

It’s Atlanta municipal branch water.

So talking about portability, I had a job in another city, I would do some of it from home like CAD work and then drive into town a few days a week to run machine tools etc. I had a system of bags I lived out of. My backpack which contained my laptop and my portable “office,” my tool bag in which I have a wide variety of capability, and a duffel bag with clothing, toiletries and such to keep a man running for 3 days. I could carry all three at once with a free hand and I can be ready for a 4 day, 3 night away mission in minutes.

I always liked cat reddit.

My house had carpet when I moved in. Fuck - and I cannot stress this enough - that noise.

Team Fortress, I’m assuming you mean TF2, was one of the very first games to have microtransactions. They aren’t required for play but they’re definitely there.