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Alternate Tech

Alternate Tech

Alternate Technology

By: Dale R. Cozort





 

What if Columbus Hadn't Made it Back?

Neanderthal England?

What if France Had Fought On From North Africa? Part II

Scenario Seeds

Review: Ruled Britannia

Review: Creek Country

Best of the Comment Section

Alternate Technology






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Somebody commented in POD a few years ago that no bad alternate history would be complete without at least one dirigible.  Some technologies just seem to fit into alternate history: Dirigibles, trolleys, solar cells, flying cars, private space flight, Orion-type Spaceships, and steam powered cars all come to mind.  I’ve come across a lot of articles on the Internet on alternate technology lately.  Here are some excerpts along with the web addresses, and some brief comments.

New Solar Powered Airship: Apparently the federal government is planning to build a “High Altitude Airship (HAA)".  If it happens, this thing is going to be huge.  This from RocketmanBlog.com:

 “the HAA is going to be 25 times larger the Goodyear Blimp.
The prototype airship will be about 500 feet long, 160 feet in diameter and have a volume of 5.2 million cubic feet.

That is the length of 1 2/3 footballs fields, or almost 1/10 of a mile and a volume of almost 39 million gallons. In short, these things are going to be enormous. The reason they are going to be so big is because their mission is pretty demanding.
[S]ustained operations for one month at 65,000 feet while providing 10 kilowatts of power to a 4,000-pound payload. Additionally, the HAA prototype will demonstrate station-keeping and autonomous flight control capabilities.”

The production models will be even bigger, and powered by solar cells.  From the same source:

"The production HAA’s will probably be designed to fly at 100,000 ft and operate autonomously for a year over both the United States and hot spots like Iraq. The current plan is for them to compliment both satellite and airplane surveillance and an initial order of at least 22 units is currently projected. The upper surface of the envelope will be coated with flexible solar cells to charge the lead-acid batteries during the day, and the airship will remain stationary over the target using electric fans. Unlike a Zeppelin, the HAA’s envelope will not be rigid but will be made out of a flexible proprietary laminate material, however it will still use helium to generate lift. It will carry a 4,000 lb payload which will primarily consist of electronic and/or video surveillance equipment, but if the HAA proves successful, the telecommunications industry will probably be very interested in using them”


There is more on the website.  The RocketMan of RocketManBlog is apparently in the aerospace industry and his company may be doing ancillary work on the HAA.  Fair warning, this guy is pretty conservative and very vocal about it.  

This is still very much a ‘paper ship” so far.  Apparently feasibility studies have been going on since 1998, and in September of 2003, Lockheed Martin Naval Electronics & Surveillance Systems of Akron Ohio received a contract for Phase 2, which is detailed design for a prototype.  That’s scheduled to be done by June 2004, and it will hopefully be followed by actually building a prototype in Phase 3, which would run from June 2004 to July 2006.  Will that actually happen?  I don’t know.  I hope so.  Sounds like cool technology.

The X-Prize:
The X-Prize is a ten million dollar prize to be awarded to the first private group to get a human being to space (not orbit, but a suborbital trajectory that goes 65 miles up).  Burt Rutan’s Spaceship One seems to be a odds on favorite to win the prize sometime in the first half of 2004, but there are 22 reasonably serious entries, of which up to half-a-dozen may have a shot at the prize if Rutan is delayed until 2004.  RocketmanBlog.com has quite a bit of info on the prize, including details on how to claim the prize and evaluations of several of the contestants:

[The X-Prize is] a $10 Million cash prize for the first team that -

  • Privately finances, builds & launches a spaceship, able to carry three people to 100 kilometers (62.5 miles)
  • Returns safely to Earth
  • Repeats the launch with the same ship within 2 weeks”

“Even though I work on rockets, I love the idea of the X Prize because large corporations and the government are too risk averse to effectively develop novel new solutions for reducing launch costs. Just witness the public outrage over the recent loss of the Columbia. The government also does not seem to be very interested in vehicles that are not capable of making it all the way into Earth orbit, even though there is a market for sub-orbital vehicles, most notably space tourism.”

“The backers of the X Prize hope that private companies and individuals will be able to succeed where government and large corporations have failed to even try. There are currently 24 teams vying for the X Prize, and the amount of money they will spend collectively is much greater than the $10 million prize that is offered. There are not many situations where you get more research done than what you pay for, so in that respect alone, the X Prize can already be considered a success.”


The X-Prize doesn’t require an orbital flight.  It is actually quite a ways from getting into orbit, as RockmanBlog.com points out.  “...you actually need 25 times more energy to reach orbit than to reach the edge of the atmosphere.”

As I mentioned earlier, Burt Rutan and his Spaceship One appear to be the odds-on favorites to win the X-Prize, probably sometime in the first half of 2004.  Spaceship One is in some ways kind of a dead end, because it uses hybrid rocket motors that are not powerful enough for it to reach orbit.

Solar Cells: We’re long overdue for our solar future.  I seem to remember a time back in the early 1980s when oil was going to run out in ten years or so, but we didn’t have to worry because the price of solar cells was going to fall drastically, and they were going to be competitive with fossil fuels by about 1986, falling quickly from over $6 per watt to around fifty cents, and showing up on suburban rooftops. 

Well, almost twenty-five years later oil is still around and probably will be for at least another thirty to forty years.  Solar cells cost roughly $4 per watt these days.  I’m not sure what that is in 1980 dollars—at a rough guess maybe $2 per watt, better but not fifty cents.  Also, unfortunately for solar cells, fossil fuel costs haven't kept up with the overall inflation rate.

While solar cells have found a lot of valuable niches around the world and the solar cell industry has grown by about 25% a year for the last three or four years, they still haven’t made it to very many suburban rooftops.  Here are a couple of unusual niches they do show up in though: Solar sidewalk lighting, and solar powered jackets (I kid you not).  There we’re definitely getting into alternate technology.

Solarbuz.com carries the story.  (http://www.solarbuzz.com/News/NewsNAPT54.htm)

January 6, 2004 

“ICP Solar Technologies Inc. (ICP), a developer of solar products for consumers, and SCOTTeVEST LLC (SeV), a leading Technology Enabled Clothing® (TEC) company, will unveil the first solar power jacket prototypes designed to allow wearers to carry, connect and charge their portable digital devices, at the 2004 International CES, January 8-11, Las Vegas.”

“The ICP Global Solar division is integrating ICP’s flexible thin-film photovoltaic technologies (CIGS) in three models of SCOTTeVEST® jackets. These jackets will allow wearers to carry, connect and charge their portable digital devices in one convenient and fully integrated package. Strategically mounted CIGS panels are pre-wired, providing solar power to individual devices for power storage (charging) or immediate consumption.”

They have ambitious plans for solar powered clothing:

“Through its wholly-owned division, Technology Enabled Clothing® (TEC), SCOTTeVEST LLC will assist ICP in showcasing the potential of integrating solar technology into clothing. TEC owns the intellectual property rights associated with the incorporation of third-party wires into clothing through a series of internal, hidden conduits referred to as a Personal Area Network (P.A.N.). In addition to incorporating the solar panels in SCOTTeVEST products, TEC expects to assist ICP in bringing solar technology into other mainstream outerwear clothing products using its patent-pending P.A.N. design.

"We are constantly seeking solutions to build state-of-the-art wearable technology. We believe that this project represents the next logical step in consumer wearable computers. No longer will you have to rely on traditional power sources to recharge your mobile electronic devices. We expect solar panels together with the P.A.N. to be incorporated into approximately 30% of all outerwear in the next three to five years.”, said Scott Jordan, Chairman and CEO of SCOTTeVEST LLC.


More Solar Gadgets

If you've ever bought and been disappointed by one of those solar path lights, here is an (extremely expensive) alternative: A solar powered paving tile.  From: http://www.dansdata.com/ledlights10.htm <with a big snip of LED flashlight reviews at beginning>
LED light roundup #10
Review date: 7 October 2002.
 

SolarCap Lighting is a Korean outfit that's positioned itself firmly at the top of the solar-powered-light market. SolarCap's products are not cheap. But they're arguably worth it.

Their Light Emitting Tile is a serious, industrial-strength, virtually indestructible light - well, OK, it's not bulletproof, but you can drive cars over it all day - for those situations where you want something of roughly night-light brightness <<snip>> that can be glued, bolted or even mortared in place, without wires, and will Just Work for a decade or more.


OK, you may occasionally need to hose some bird poo off. But that's it for maintenance.

<<snip>> The LET emits enough light that you can find your way around the house by it at night, but it's not really meant to be installed alone. Multiple LETs can be used to mark the edges of driveways and such, cast a pale coloured moonlight around an area, and also provide a rather decorative effect. <<snip>>

The LET gets its ten-year-plus life span by not using batteries for energy storage. Instead, it's got "pseudocapacitors". Pseudocaps, also known as double layer capacitors, supercapacitors, ultracapacitors and "GoldCaps", are like a hybrid between a capacitor and an electrochemical cell; they can't be charged and discharged as violently as a cap, but they don't wear out like a battery. A nickel cadmium or nickel metal hydride battery, even if it's really carefully charged and protected from complete discharge causing cell reversal (cheap solar garden lights aren't at all nice to their batteries) will only survive for some hundreds of charge cycles. An ultracapacitor can be expected to last for hundreds of thousands of cycles before losing significant capacity, and should still be useful for a lot more cycles.


<<snip>> The suggested retail price for the Light Emitting Tiles in green, blue or white (red, yellow and orange tiles are in the pipeline) is an imposing $US250 per unit.


By the way, Dan's Data has an enormous number of often very good reviews of gadgets and computer stuff.

Alternate Gadgets—Miscellaneous: 
If you’ve been around the computer and electronic industries as long as I have, you probably know that it has an incredible number of whatifs—computers and gadgets that could have been contenders if things had happened a little differently. 

  • If Apple had been a little more savvy in marketing the Mac in the early stages—
  • If the guy behind CP/M hadn’t blown off a meeting with IBM, which led to them turning to Micorsoft—
  • If Commodore hadn’t had the kind of marketing department that would have marketed the fountain of youth as a chance to get really old—

For all of those whatifs, and a lot more, there are groups of a few hundred or a few thousand or even a few million people who live their computers  lives as though they were in an alternate time-line where Microsoft never became the dominant operating system.  The smaller groups communicate, swap parts and software, and often write and sell new stuff via the Internet.  I recently stumbled across a site about one of those groups:

  
From: http://c64upgra.de/c-one/

"Commodore One Specifications

Here is a General Overview of the features of the Commodore One as of 12/22/2002. Some features may change slightly as development progresses.

What it is:
The C-One computer is a 2003 enhanced adaptation of the Commodore 64--the most sold of any computer model (Guiness book of World Records) While retaining almost all of the original's capabilities the C-One adds modern features, interfacing and capabilities and is a sorely needed fill for a gap in the hobbyist computer market.
The price is 269- EUR with 65816 CPU (including German sales tax of 16%).
(user will need to supply an ATX style case, ATX power supply, drive(s), PS/2 keyboard, mouse, memory and SVGA capable monitor.)

Features/Product Description
Physical Appearance
·        The CommodoreOne is a motherboard ready to mount into an ATX style computer case. Ports will match the holes of the case, except for the audio connectors, which do not fit without mechanical modification of the case (holes have to be drilled). "


So in other words, for $250-300 plus the cost of a computer case you can end up with a very fast C64-like machine.  I guess I can see the appeal to hobbyists and C64 die-hards. People who grew up programming at the bare metal level and still enjoy doing it would find this machine very interesting.

Comments are very welcome. 

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Copyright 2004 By Dale R. Cozort


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