I’m by no means an anti vaxxer, but they have one point I can’t disagree with. Manufacturers should not have a blanket immunity from liability. Actually, no one should have a blanket immunity from liability (I’m looking at you, guys with badges).

Isn’t it going to “reprogram” itself back into its flat state as soon as someone puts something moderately heavy on it?

Not enough blue lights. Everyone knows that in the future all other colors will be outlawed. Seriously, I saw some grey on the interior. Needs more blow lights.

I tried looking up umpa loompa 3d printers, but came up with nothing. Can I have another clue?

You are talking about pretty large parts. About a year ago, I had 14 pins printed, about 1/4” dia, 2” long (with some hard to machine details), out of steel. The charge was about $1,000 for the lot.

Really? Where?

I think metal 3d printers are getting as low as $250k. Manageable with a business loan, if you think you can sell what you print with a descent markup.

It’s much slower than casting, even with single cavity tool. However, if you consider the time it takes to design and make the tool, and your production run is pretty small, then printing can come out ahead.

Funny, I hate that car, but like the commercial.

None of these cars transcend class. They are for people who want to replace the current class system with a different one, where you aren’t upper class based on your income but rather by how much of a snob you are. Cars don’t make snobs, and they aren’t going to get rid of them, but lets not pretend that one kind…

You see a great deal of this in soviet design, and not just in aircraft. With famously bad build quality and non existent maintenance, the design has to be extremely rugged and reliable to succeed. The BMW model would not work under those conditions.

So what is more expensive, training a pilot, or building him an aircraft to fly in?

All metals burn if the fire is hot enough, or if there is plentiful oxygen. Burning metal produces metal oxide, which can be turned into dust that is spread out by the force of the flames and explosions. If the metal in question is radioactive, the resulting oxide will be radioactive too, so you have a bunch of…

Oy! Words matter. If an electric motor is said to have one moving part, then it should have one moving part. If there are more than one, then it doesn’t have one moving part. That’s not to deny that electric motors are much simpler, mechanically, than an internal combustion engine, but lets not make them out to be…

If you don’t need a traditional transmission, designing a sufficiently strong power train should not be that difficult, as long as you don’t need to make it a front wheel drive. All you need is bigger, stronger gears. Trying to pass that much force thru a CV joint on the other hand, would be tricky.

Right, but an electric motor is still outputting 0 power at 0 rpm.

I don’t see much of anything to disagree with, aside from electric motor efficiency not being perfectly linear with speed, but that is pretty minor stuff in the grand scheme of things.

A transmission becomes a necessity if the shorter gearing results in an unacceptable top speed.
After all, an electric motor not only has an absolute limit of how fast it can spin, but also starts to loose power as it approaches that limit (torque is dropping faster than the rpm are gaining).

Electric motors have a power curve that is broadly similar to the power curve of an ICE (in that is starts at 0, climbs up, flattens out, then drops), because there is no getting around physics. Power = torque@rpm*rpm. However, the torque curve of electric motors is quiet different from typical ICE torque curve. It…

Are you sure the European numbers are computed using the same gallons?