[sf-lug] ARES, too

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> The device does not have to be on a hillside.  Elevators could be used
> in place of the train car and multi-story power stacks could be
> erected in flatter neighborhoods,  They might look like larger taller
> grain silos.

If you guesstimate the math, I think you can see that this would be
massively uneconomical.  Such a building structure would need to be some
combination of very tall and very wide, and would need to support
enormous moving weights, surviving orders of magnitude more stress than
(say) even big industrial elevator supports do.

For comparison, consider the four aircraft elevators on the USS George
Washington (CVN-73, Nimitz-class).  Each has 360 square meters of floor
space, and designed to carry a pair of fighter jets up from the hangar
deck to the flight deck, or back down again.  Each elevator can carry
99 (metric) tonnes.  The standard ARES concrete block is, if memory
serves, about 300 tonnes.  In the ARES design, instead of having to
build the world's strongest building, they are able to rely on bedrock
that is already there and needn't be paid for, and over a bit under km
of track travel climb or descend over half a kilometer.  The Empire
State Building is just over 1/3 km, and of course is nowhere near strong
enough to support a hypothetical ARES elevator shaft (assuming the
operators could afford the rent for 102 stories of shaft space, which
they wouldn't be able to).

And mentioning rent brings up the other point:  Square footage in 
barren hills 100km outside a city can be acquired for dirt cheap.
Square footage inside the city or its suburbs, not so much.

And having energy storage _that_ close in would also be a waste of
money:  At the distance the ARES deployment is between Pahrump, Nevada
(just east of Death Valley) and downtown Los Angeles, about 200 km, the
transmission-line loss along the way is only about 0.5% to 1.1%.  And
some of the main long-distance transmission lines go right by there
which, along with land cost, is probably why they're building it in
Pahrump.

See map of the main transmission-lines:
http://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=8930


> But these are interesting notes on an article I posted by accident to
> this list.  Maybe I should post more of the stuff I send to TA/ml to
> this list as well?  Or maybe some of the stuff I send to CUCUG as part
> of a Linux news column?

Sounds interesting!

>     Has anyone else heard yet of BURG the new bootloader?

I gather that it's a fork of GRUB2 whose value proposition is
prettifying booting (themes).  https://launchpad.net/burg

>     Brandnew Unified bootloadeR from Grub:

Well, not from GRUB.  It's from Dutch coder Koen Glotzbach, and is a
code fork from the other project.

>     How about the Razer "Project Valerie" concept triple-screen laptop?

Which, FYI, is a concept demo unit put together for the CES.
http://www.polygon.com/2017/1/5/14176248/ces-razer-three-monitor-laptop

>     Or the latest pixel madness the 10K screen.from the HDMI 2.1?
> <http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/10k-video-object-based-sound-and-more-whats-new-in-hdmi-2-1/>

Kids these days.  ;->