Also because this is the afternoon of #scifi or more belike #toughScifi#VTOL aircraft and stuff...
I enjoy the Bell idea of a tilt-rotor aircraft where the rotors can stow down and switch over to jet propulsion.
Add a carrier stage that’s nuclear fission-powered (heavy and thus not at all suited for VTOL) and make that your transatmospheric stage, and you have a pretty cool assault shuttle-kinda design.
Engineering professor and materials scientist @debcha's new book How Infrastructure Works is a hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world, from sewers to roads to the power grid. It's a book that will make you see the world in a different way - forever:
More roads push everything farther apart. Once everything is farther apart, you need more cars.
Geometry hates cars. You can't bargain with geometry. You can't tunnel your way out of this. You can't solve it with #VTOL sky-taxis. You can't fix it with #SelfDrivingCars whose car-to-car comms let them shave down their following distances. You need buses, subways and trams. You need #transit.
#Helicopters played a critical role in the emergency response to the 1986 #Chernobyl NPP accident. They fulfilled many different missions. Read the 1998 paper Operation of Helicopters During the Chernobyl Accident by Major General Masharovsky (State Emergency Service of Ukraine). 🚁 #VerticalFlight#VTOL
No, because "flying cars" have never remotely made financial sense - particularly with the #SystemsSafety concerns which are almost always hand-waved away by the startups.
Lukasz Gadowski (a Berlin #VC investor) is comparing #VTOL air taxis against cars doing a 30km city to airport trip. He concludes air taxis are 8x more efficient.
My gut feeling is he is comparing air taxis to the least efficient mode of transportation (cars) and also in a corner case (most car trips are <10km).
How would the math look like if you take “passenger occupancy” and shorter distances into consideration? Would the air taxi still be on top? #autokorrektur