Seems like one more arrow in the toolkit. But the best testing looks at the sources and explores the cracks between the strata with edge cases, looks at limits, and where one method changes to another. (And hats off to Murphy, for waiting until after you ship...)
Oh yes, the insanity of the new F1 power units! The goal was 50/50 Electric/ICE split... but why go hybrid when the cars use fully synthetic fuel and have essentially no runtime carbon footprint? Well for car makers to signal their virtue of course! Did they worry about the mega tons of goods they ship around the globe to race in 24 different countries... or perhaps the armada of VIP private planes that follow... or the 1M fans that drive to each venue?
Ok, so hybrid... but where will the E energy come from? Clearly from the brakes, the rear brakes... the same ones that get only a fraction of the braking energy because all the forces move to the front under deceleration. Where is the energy stored, in the battery of course... which is so small it runs out halfway down a single straight. So you basically have a big complicated heavy car with half the power it should...
And naturally you have lots of software controlling "deployment" of your meager E reserves. It even guesses where you are on track based on time/speed, because GPS is illegal for that. Sigh...
To be clear... I am not arguing ICE is good or E is bad. Just that F1's current specs for the ICE/E mixture is horrible.
F1 is a constructors championship, and the constructors are interested in developing electric power trains. Nobody wants to spend 100 million to tweak the last 0.1% performance out of a turbo-charged V8.
Quite right, on the constructor part... that is very much the appeal for us techies. But they do spend 100 million tweaking the last 0.1% of aero advantage and tire-deg management. a) They could just homologate a common engine, like in F2 and concentrate on the chassis or b) make a properly designed hybrid PU. By (b) I mean have an E component that gets adequately charged... the MGU-H (E-Turbo) of the last generation seemed to work fine. The current specs is nuts, definitely NOT advancing technology.
Banning teams like Ferrari or Mercedes from competing with their own cars (including the engines) would be the end of F1. The current regulations are extremely ambitious such that constructors can get a significant advantage from developing better tech. And it's working, the Mercedes powertrain is clearly dominating, even though the Ford V8 is more powerful.
My understanding is that the switch to hybrid was to get rid of needing to refuel during a race, since that is dangerous. The 50/50 split is new this year, but they're already working on fixing that for next year. But even then, they had to reduced the number of laps because otherwise they would need to re-engineer the entire car to allow more fuel.
Because electric engines are more performant than gas ones so you can in theory have better driving perfomrance? I.e., high, flat and predictable torque curve, re-use braking energy (so it adds up to ICE), extremely high energy density of the engine unit.
All that, yes. But they don't work too well if the battery runs out halfway down the straight... and there is too little charging.
I wasn't politicizing E vs ICE... but commenting on the particular specifications these rules mandate for F1. Specifications that are not fit for purpose.
There's no reason the battery should run out on the straight, though. You can charge at any point while driving, not just during braking. Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
> Obviously you're taking torque from the engine to do so, but that's a strategic consideration.
but drivers dislike do not being in control the harvesting and deployment (which apparently would be too complex to be manual), while fans dislike cars clipping out on straights.
Regenerative brakes (maybe even on front wheels!) would be great, but they are not enough to charge the battery given the current split. MGU-H was also a great invention, but was phased out apparently for complexity.
Next year the power output split will be tweaked to make clipping less extreme, but won't solve allt he issues.
Regeneration happens directly on the crankshaft via the mgu-k, not the wheels. The mgu is essentially a governor, so you can set it to add or sink (absorb) torque however you like. If you're adding torque, you're draining the battery, and if you're sinking torque, you're charging the battery. Because everything is mechanically connected, sinking torque also wants to brake the car (i.e. regenerative braking).
In terms of power balance, on average, the draw needs to match generation for the system to work. Since this a race, the battery should be flat when you cross the finish line, because you don't want to leave power on the table. When cars are clipping out on the straights, they're trying to claw back some power for the battery so they can deploy it at a more impactful moment in the race. Maybe it's frustrating for viewers, but part of that is that the vehicle has a maximum sustained power, and a maximum total power, and those aren't the same thing.
The mgu-h was cool, but I believe the teams when they say that it was too difficult and too expensive to get right.
It’s not virtue signaling. It’s research. Pushing the limits of hybrids has downstream benefits for consumer cars, presumably.
I agree the current design is pretty dim-witted. But I think the high-level goals are sensible. It’s certainly more than just appealing to the green crowd, because that obviously is misplaced for this audience.
Probably nowhere on the radar really. Even today the US has oil shipments at around near pre-war levels and the discrepancy between the pre and current war levels are mostly just Iran not being able to ship oil. The blockade worked.
Now there is still a lot of danger. Iran’s strategy to attack regional countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and others is by funding violent militias and terrorist groups and it has the potential to actually create revolutions in some of those countries or just destabilize them enough so that Iran can colonize them as it is attempting to do now. One of the primary lessons that has been learned here is the failure and inability of the global community to enforce peace or protect innocent people and instead simply expects the United States to do it.
Alongside drones and other technologies, the advent of social media and excellent propaganda by Iran/Hamas and friends were seeing many of the policy choices and cultural characteristics of western nations come under attack from decentralized forces which can inflict asymmetric harm.
You only need one viral post from Hamas to convince a bunch of people to support a group that is opposed to western liberal values (anti-LGBT, anti religious liberty, etc.), only so many drones or missiles to block shipping, or just one maniac to try and take down an airliner (suicide bombers).
Future historians may look at this time period as one in which these technologies proved to be existential challenges for incumbent powers.
Fond memories of CMU in the 80's!! They had genuine academics who wanted to solve problems and advance human knowledge. Most cared about their students and wanted to teach. I am sure they are just as good 45 yrs later...
Too funny.... All I could literally think about while reading the article was the Goa'uld saying "Jaffa Kree!" Maybe I will give it another year of senility and watch it all over again... should have forgotten everything by then.
Time doesn't accelerate. You just have more things to compare to. If I'm 26, XP was the standard when I grew up. If I'm 90, 3/4 of my life was without ubiquitous computers and the whole thing seems like a fad relatively, but it's still lasted for-fucking-ever.
If you find time accelerates it means you are letting yourself repeat the same day over and over, creating no new memories.
Hopefully you can retire early and then work on software you do like!! All those glorious ideas you had... but didn't have the time for. But be careful on the retirement part, the numbers go out the window (Andersen not Microsoft) when inflation bites :-(
Do numbers go completely out the window due to inflation?
While the price of gas, real-estate, groceries doubled or tripled over the last 10-15 years (here in NL).
It also seems that Stocks/ETFs also did the same, right?
Some of the Tech/IT/AI (and hence to some extent also S&P500 that's heavy on those) increased even more. But even if we consider it an artificial bubble - loads of other more traditional industries/ETFs also grew similarly to inflation, didn't they?
You are right of course.... but one's risk tolerance diminishes with waning work income. So retired folks have less of their money in stocks/ETFs and are more exposed to the ravages of inflation.
So with hindsight, one can easily weather inflation... only hindsight is hard to come by (says the guy who cancelled his NVIDIA buy order a few years back)!
I wont be able to retire early with a measly 2.5k net wage in Germany. Still, job market is dead here. Its all Java and basically zero interesting projects. I appreciate the kind words though!
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