Can we get a complete video walkthrough of an entire launch procedure, with the actual “variable screw pitch” segments faithfully rendered as well? Also can we get a better and more refined understanding of the magnetic arms themselves? Wouldn’t a single set of small rotatable magnet engagement clasps be simpler than a series of repositioning articulated arms? That seems like a major drawback for complexity and cost.
I need to get more involved in this. I have some ideas on optimizing the cost of the tethered ring potentially and I guess I need to get them out there to secure me a ownership of a few meters of the ring.
If you would like to go to project-atlantis.com and signup (with a good introductory message - there are lots of bots selling web services that also sign up), then we can start exchanging ideas by email. I'd love to hear your ideas!
@@spaceinfrastructure3238 I'll do that I think. Although I believe I called out a while back on RU-vid comments that vacuum tubes for transport are a bad choice and now the plan has hydrogen filled tubes instead (though my suggestion was "justdeal with the drag" I think). So maybe RU-vid comments aren't a bad way either :-D So to preempt- this, the biggest cost saving I'll propose is to get rid of that sheath you're planning for deployment. I think just one small electric propeller could take place of those 3 actuators.
First and foremost: I am a huge fan of infrastructure and public works, I honestly think that there is no civilization that isn't build around infrastructure, so thank you for the talk. Second : the audio isn't the best in RU-vid , this could be helped by just the usage of a better 🎤, maybe there are already AIs that help to fix the audio , pls , keep your work , and If you could point to other people that are doing similar work, pls point to us, I want to hear their ideas too
Thanks! I actually did have a lav mike clipped to the lectern and plugged into my phone which was supposed to be the Plan A for capturing the audio, but that recording was terrible. I think the phone app tried to use the phone's microphone instead of the lav mike. So, the end result was that the best audio I had was from the camera's microphone. I do agree with you though - I really do need to put more effort into making higher quality recordings of these presentations. I'll try to find an AI-based audio clean-up tool (as you suggested) too.
So I edited and uploaded the English subtitles. If you have those on, and read them while listening, it becomes a lot easier to understand what myself, and other people in the audience, are saying.
All good ideas. The problem is the huge gravity well we're in. Once we start colonizing moons and minor planets economical space launch infrastructures can take off.
Would you be able to link the paper or Github for the mass driver? I'm not sure where to have a better technical discussion than RU-vid comments. You mention that the cost goes up due to the increased switching speed. That's only partially true. The rotor/sled speed gives a higher back-EMF at higher speeds and so (holding everything else constant) you need more voltage to overcome it with speed. I agree that a screw with alternating polarity PMs would get you an equivalent very high voltage / fast changing field (this is a magnetic gear). However, on the straight power electronics side, I don't see the cost going up considerably due to increased switching speed. As a con for the screw, this design replaces a cheap mass-producable coil and transistor with a much physically larger precision-balanced piece of equipment covered in rare earth magnets. The capital cost would seemingly be much higher but I don't see that it could do anything the electronics could not. Not trying to be negative, just offer constructive feedback. This technology looks to be pretty similar to a magnetic gear (either PM or switched reluctance, I can't tell) vs linear (Induction, PM, or Reluctance) motor and should have some well known body of research and engineering implementation available to compare both options.
Thanks for your feedback! To clarify a bit, the screws do not need alternating polarity PMs along their flights. They also do not need to be covered in rare earth magnets. From the sled's point of view, it's electromagnetically coupling to a mechanical wave, not surfing an electromagnetic wave. The math I did on the electromagnetic launchers assumes that power electronics cost is proportional to peak power. With that assumption, I was able to work out that power electronics cost scales with the cube of the exit velocity. Let me know if you think that's a reasonable assumption. BTW, you can find my email at the end of some of the presentations and there's a contact form on the website www.project-atlantis.com/contact/.
Links to Papers can be found on the project-atlantis.com website, and there's a video on this channel about the digital twin which will lead you to the GitHub site.
@@spaceinfrastructure3238 Thanks! I have a lot to learn reading up on this. Thanks for getting back to me and I appreciate everything you're doing to advance humanity forward. Looking forward to watching it and reading up more on your work. There's a few break-points at roughly 70% of the device rating for (1,200V, 1700V, and 10 kV) devices relevant to your power levels. So ~[850V, 1200V, and 7kV]. Those 10 kV devices are at the state of the art and scaling in voltage past that is going to have a huge trade-off in cost and/or switching speed. Otherwise, yes I would agree that cost scales roughly linearly with Si/SiC surface area and therefore power. One interesting optimization is that the transient loading can go up A LOT if you have pulses that are short and don't reach thermal equilibrium. Assuming the limit is the switches, you can get factors of 1k or more for pulses 10 us or so (roughly the thermal time constant of the dies), so linear with power is a great assumption for the majority of the track, but it might fall off to a constant ceiling later. I.e. a single converter/coil design might be able to provide 1 kW continuously, 100 kW for 1 second, or 1 MW for 10 us with similar levels of component stress.
I'm concerned about the wear we're (apparently) putting on the magnetosphere with all the re-entries and de orbiting we're doing. this seems to alleviate that issue. (which we should definitely study further) it would be a modern wonder of the world.
Coincidentally, @MarySpender just released a video (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-r7YJDZTfeVE.html&ab_channel=MarySpender) that provides some terrific additional info on loud sounds.
The only way this could be profitable is if once built the ones who built it use it to build an orbital ring. If someone else buys up all the launch time to build an orbital ring; your impressive megastructure will be obsolete before it can turn a profit. Make no mistake, I really REALLY love this idea but building it makes it obsolescence almost immediate. Also with all the testing that you'll need to do Starship will probably be fully operational. Which could conceivably build an Orbital Ring in forty years with one launch a day.
It's really disappointing, perhaps even disqualifying, to hear the discussion of the square-cube law. There's a linear term in the wall thickness of a pressure vessel that cancels the square-cube law, making it a cube-cube law. In other words, you have linearly less surface area per volume contained, but that material is exactly linearly thicker. This is a fundamental truth to pressure vessels, and a truly amateur mistake to make in this presentation (around 10:10).
I'd 100% agree with you if cryogenic rocket propellant vessels were like more traditional kinds of pressure vessels that are required to keep a gas contained under pressure. In that case, the wall thickness would need to scale as you described. However, rocket propellants are liquified, gasses are allowed to boil off, and the interior pressure is chosen to be just enough to stiffen the walls. So these vessels do not scale the same way as other kinds of pressure vessels. But, I think the truth probably does lie somewhere between the square-cube law and the cube-cube law. Thanks for your comment!
