[Aeronaut]

Breakable wrote: First you probably should define it from player perspective : what is it there to play with.
Then define it from programmers perspective : how the game responds to player actions
The rest it just the implementation details…

That makes sense. I’ve never looked into Farmville, Pillow Fights, or Mafia Wars, so I have no idea what those games are about. What types of resources do the players have, and how much strategy is involved?

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

afaik it uses a mechanical trick: by physically moving each magnet at particular parts of the cycle, it allows gravity to assist. the result is, for low overall torque, an efficiency boost. it ends up making a good fan motor.

Now it’s starting to sound like an unbalanced wheel is helping it past the magnetic lockup zone. 🙂

[Aeronaut]

I get the impression that the thin foil layers are at or a micron or few thick, and that a production onion could be less than 1 mm thick. That’s why I keep insisting that we’re going to need some variation of CVD- and we’ll probably need custom tooling as well.

[Aeronaut]

vansig wrote:

It’s a motor made entirely from permanent magnets, Keith. That fan gave us several clues that it has enough speed and torque to make a hidden battery highly unlikely. Still, I’d like to have seen them move the table and the machine right up front to show conclusively that there’s no hidden power wires hiding in the table leg.

My concern is how long before it uses the energy stored in the atomic spin alignment that makes the magnets magnetic. He also seems to have eliminated the drive rotor without using the clamshell drive magnet arrangement of another YT magmotor that didn’t do a full walk around.

the power source is that rectangular block, 2x2x6″, seen at 7:40 during disassembly. looks like a stack of fuel cells, to me.

and the remainder of the device is a Minato magnet motor.

The YT vid of the Minato motor looks very similar to one I built last year from a lazy susan and a bunch of tiny N-42 magnets, but was trying to power mechanically instead of inductively. If the article I just read is accurate, Minato has an inductive motor running on 20% of the power that it should be. What am I missing here?

[Aeronaut]

It’s a motor made entirely from permanent magnets, Keith. That fan gave us several clues that it has enough speed and torque to make a hidden battery highly unlikely. Still, I’d like to have seen them move the table and the machine right up front to show conclusively that there’s no hidden power wires hiding in the table leg.

My concern is how long before it uses the energy stored in the atomic spin alignment that makes the magnets magnetic. He also seems to have eliminated the drive rotor without using the clamshell drive magnet arrangement of another YT magmotor that didn’t do a full walk around.

[Aeronaut]

Breakable wrote: I think its much to early to talk about the onion, and especially its design. Its yet to be proven as a x-ray to electricity converter. I believe it is possible to reach 50-60-70-maybe even 80 % efficiency in this conversion, but it is probable the final device will look nothing like the onion, especially when no efficiency has been demonstrated yet (as far as i know).

While I agree that the final form may not even resemble an onion, all of those layers (donkey) and our existing convention make it a good name. It also helps counter the sterile scientific sounding nomenclature of the FF and Polywell projects, imho.

I also believe that the best time to begin solving a challenge, especially one as big as the onion’s engineering, is well before funding and trying to build anything along those lines. Nothing to gain by approaching the engineering phase(s) like a cram session the night before a final exam.

Nor would I expect early onions to have impressive stats- the first performance breakthroughs may well be adding 125 or 250kW to the previous best performance level.

[Aeronaut]

@Henning, glad we’re on the same page except for possibly the laminating. That might work on the outer layers, building inward toward the plasmoid. I’m still thinking CVD building outwards, but that’s not the only way possible.

My key concern is that the patent reads that the onion’s radial cooling passages are most likely only going to be a few degrees apart- i.e.- a complete onion would need around 180 slats to provide the electrical conversion, cooling, and mechanical support. And those cooling channels are very narrow.

Supposing that each X-ray energy band can be converted using 10 to 100 foils (each a different thickness), and a multi MW onion would require several of these slats stacked vertically/ radially, I’m having problems visualizing how to cool, support, and wire a commercial onion without building at least the stacks at the molecular or even atomic level using automated machinery.

Put another way, a research machine could test over 100 slat designs on a monthly robo-building schedule in a networked lab environment. Something like Edison’s 1,000 experiments managed in a series/parallel manner rather than his serial model.

[Aeronaut]

Henning wrote:

Ah, I see this subject has already been discussed in a previous thread, “New Anode Cooling ‘Limits’ Likely”, so I’ll stop being redundant with my 2 cents. Glad to see you all have been thinking about material impacts.

Actually the “New Anode Cooling ‘Limits’ Likely” thread is about the construction and cooling of the electrodes. But the x-ray capturing onion needs cooling too, and it’s not going to work with rapid prototyping, one needs the laminating technique presented here. So keep on thinking about it.

Now I’m confused, Henning. Are you ruling out CVD machines as well? Making foils this thin, coiling them, shipping the coils, and other factory type operations make me highly skeptical about building onions in volume by hand.

[Aeronaut]

KeithPickering wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOyuZSzkWRU
I usually don’t believe in ZPE or magnetic machines, but the demo seems to be pretty well done. I wonder what is happening there?

There’s a lot of room to hide a battery in there. I’d want to put a tach on the motor and measure its rpm change over a 12 hour period. That would either kill the hoax or win the Nobel prize. Any bets that Muammar is going to run that test?

I’m impressed. YT mag motor and PM vids never show a walk around or enough of the demo room to dispel doubts about outside power sources. This looks like an exception, especially with the tear down.

Like Keith said, I’d like to see a long term demo. Say 6 to 12 months or more. My understanding of PM motors is that entropy will gradually degrade the magnets’ fields and thus the motor’s performance.

I’m also curious about how they throttle it, and how it made it that far without a fan guard and any safety stickers. OSHA would not approve.

[Aeronaut]

QuantumDot wrote: How did the density affect the pinch? since i understand that the team didn’t expect it pinch since the density was so high, do you think that it will work even better or is it retarding the pinch?

The reason it wasn’t expected this soon is that 40 torr is expected to be the norm at 45kV. :coolsmile:

[Aeronaut]

Hope you’re not over-interpreting, because that’s how it looks to me. I just added it to the FB page, saving the simulation stuff for a slow day closer to the weekend crunch.

[Aeronaut]

Brian H wrote:

Let’s take this from another angle. Suppose each of several thousand Community Science Co-op Inc. labs were to do contract science and prototyping. The main point is that with no ownership issues, I don’t see exposure to SEC regulations unless a lab wanted to sell stock in itself. This is what I was referring to with the barn raising example.

I think, that, amongst other things, you will simply be overtaken by events. If FF proceeds as fast as I anticipate, it will be impacting the economy and world in a big way before you’ve gotten to first or second base with these initiatives. Barring near miraculous uptake, these things take lotsa time and effort.

I agree that they always have, not that they always will. Open sourcing research is how you prevent mushrooming interest from consuming all of the oxygen like a flash fire. One for all, and all for one. 🙂

[Aeronaut]

Let’s take this from another angle. Suppose each of several thousand Community Science Co-op Inc. labs were to do contract science and prototyping. The main point is that with no ownership issues, I don’t see exposure to SEC regulations unless a lab wanted to sell stock in itself. This is what I was referring to with the barn raising example.

[Aeronaut]

What gets swept under the rug is that solar and wind work best at the 12volt dc level, lose some kick in the translation to 120v ac, and do not scale gracefully beyond the single house level. Furthermore, it takes both types of solar (heat and electricity) plus wind to make a serious attempt at making a few bucks from net metering.

[Aeronaut]

Brian, 10 to 20 years from now refers to today’s toddlers. Guess what could happen when today’s high school and college students begin to realize HOW they can make a difference in technology and politics. If the bar isn’t set high to begin with, you have nobody but yourself to blame for lackluster results.

Rezwan, although I envisioned this network to tackle a number of the people challenges I see coming for FF, I left room in the definition for other projects that any community feels is important enough to self-fund using the same network.

Back in high school we sold dollar stocks in my Junior Achievement company, but that was only a short term company. Maybe if the “PDC” were to hold science raffles or crap shoots. Except in this lottery you know precisely where the money went, and the intangible gains that you’re helping fund. 🙂

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