In 2006, Daniel Rutter wrote about the "genset" option for the t/zero vaporware electric car. The basic idea was this: A plug-in hybrid, but with the gasoline engine on a trailer. If you're taking a short trip, then you don't take the genset with you, because you don't need the weight. If you're going on a long trip, then you hook up the trailer, and enjoy the long range and fast refueling that a gasoline engine gives you. (Note that this scheme means you'll have a fairly large genset sitting around at home, which spends most of its time not being used.) This is part one.

Part two: Heat engines have a surprisingly low maximum theoretical efficiency. The endoreversible heat engine efficiency equation is thus: (units are absolute degrees, Kelvin or Rankine)

The problem is that the Earth just isn't cold enough. Room temperature is 300 Kelvin! You're not going to want T_h to go much above 830K, or else you'll be producing nitrogen oxides in the exhaust. This gives a final endoreversible efficiency of 0.40. That's the maximum thermodynamic efficiency, and there ain't no way to beat thermodynamics.

You can bend the rules a little, though. It's impossible to extract any more mechanical work from the waste heat, but it's still heat, you can use it for things that don't need low-entropy heat sources. Like, say keeping a house warm, or heating water.

This is called Cogeneration, and depending on how you do it, you can get up to 90% total thermal efficiency. A popular home cogeneration system is the MicroCHP furnace, a natural gas turbine that provides hot water and forced-air heating from its waste heat outflow. It can also run as a backup generator during power outages, in which case it vents waste heat outside.

The synthesis of these ideas is obvious: Make a plug-in hybrid whose engine is a cogenerating furnace built around a multi-fuel gas turbine.

A brilliant idea! There are some problems.

1.) MicroCHP turbines are designed to run on natural gas only. The "multi-fuel" version would be a second generation product. The first gen would have problems: the natural gas fueling infrastructure in the United States is a lot more sparse than the liquid-fuels infrastructure.

2.) The turbine is going to want a lot of cooling. Does a trailer get enough airflow?

3.) How well does the turbine tolerate road vibration?

4.) There's a user design problem: for a cogenerating furnace to work well, you want it at the center of your house, where all the waste heat goes to keeping you warm. This essentially means that every user of this car has to have an insulated, attached garage, or else they'll be losing some efficiency.

5.) There's a user interface problem: You can drive out of the garage with the trailer attached easily enough, but you'll then have to back into the garage, trailer first, and then reattach all the connections. Manually. Every time you want to use it.

6.) There's a use-case problem: Every time you drive away with the turbine, you drive away with the house's sole source of heat and hot water. Fine with a single-occupancy home, might be a problem for a family.

7.) It is certain that in the near future, cripplingly heavy taxes will be applied to fossil-fueled vehicles. Will this count as one? Maybe?

8.) This idea isn't terribly original. There's a lot of prior art here. Getting a patent will be an uphill battle.

So, there. Eight reasons why I'm talking about this idea in a blog post, rather than a room of serious men in suits.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/03/06/not_to_mention_road_salts_going_to_kill_it_after_a_decade/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/03/06/not_to_mention_road_salts_going_to_kill_it_after_a_decade/ 2012-03-06T20:27:23-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Engineering So CarTalk recently featured a question from a guy who wanted a diesel car that would last 60 years, and 500,000 miles. (804,000 kilometres) The Tappet Brothers said he was crazy, that it was a dumb idea, but didn't actually answer the question.

Now, it is a dumb question, but I'd like to try a stab at it.

First of all, forget diesel. In fact, forget anything fueled by hydrocarbons. If you've glanced at the television in the last decade, you'd know that fossil fuels are a real bad long-term bet.

This means going electric, and (in 2012), paying a fairly steep price premium. Electric cars are also a mixture of good and bad news, from a maintenance standpoint.

The good: Many, many fewer moving parts. An internal combustion engine is an unholy pile of camshafts, crankshafts, pistons, gears, and fans; many of which run at high speeds, close tolerances, and very high temperatures. Maintenance is ongoing, and nontrivial.

In comparison, an induction motor has one moving part: the rotor. Over the course of 804,000 kilometres, you'll be going through a bunch of shaft bearings, but that's more or less it, for the motor. Plus, the extremely wide torque bands of electric motors mean that the gearboxes only need one or two gears, and if you use hub motors, and are willing to sacrifice high speed, you can run direct drive. This means the only consumable items on an electric car are the tires, the windshield wipers, and:

The bad: The battery.

We've been trying to figure out a good way to store electricity for the last century, and so far, haven't made a whole lot of progress. The best of the best, lithium-ion, is both heavier, and more expensive, per joule than gasoline. They're prone to bursting into extremely vigorous lithium-metal fires when abused, slowly discharge themselves when left alone, and have surprisingly short lifetimes when heavily used. (Say, in a car) Deep discharges also burn battery lifetime, say, if you bought an electric car that advertised a hundred kilometre range, and tried to actually drive a hundred kilometres.

Replacement costs are ball-punchingly steep: most of the cost of an electric car is in the battery pack, so replacing it is like buying most of a brand new car. If you drive it very, very gently, and never let it get below 50% charge, you'll probably be buying a new battery every 150,000 kilometres. At ~US$30,000 a pop, that adds up.

There's a degree of amortization here: over time, battery technology will get better, but it's anybody's guess as to how much better it will get.

In the article, Tom and Ray list off about a dozen features in today's cars that didn't exist 60 years ago. Power/ABS brakes, fuel injection, modern suspension technologies, etc etc. This is a bit disingenuous: there's very little room left for improvement, the gasoline car of 2012 is about as good as gasoline cars will ever be, except for one thing.

Autonomous cars.

The self driving car has been a staple of science fiction for the last, well, 60 years, but we're getting close. Real close. My wild-ass guess is that between DARPA and Google, the technology for driverless cars will be ready for prime time in five years.

The wildcard here is the legal side. We could have cars that drive themselves flawlessly, but without laws that let them operate on the street, they'll be useless.

Assuming we leap that hurdle, the big driver (ah ha ha) for autonomous car adoption will be insurance companies. And after driverless vehicles become common, we'll see laws that ban manual operation of vehicles anyplace where an out-of-control car could injure someone else.

So, no, buying a car today that would be useful for 60 years is not going to be easy.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/02/24/the_pinnacle_of_evolution/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/02/24/the_pinnacle_of_evolution/ 2012-02-24T21:43:44-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen important, Engineering, nerdery (Attention conservation notice: Nothing said here is at all novel.)

So Maciej Cegłowski has updated his blog for the first time in four months. Upon encountering the novel task of "actually generating HTML", his gimcrack blogging software sprayed a couple random posts across his RSS feed, one of which was the venerable 2010 essay on scurvy in Antarctic exploration. Which, combined with some other things I've read recently, got me to thinking.

Vitamin C is just C₆H₈0₆. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. All the atoms are there in glucose, just in a slightly different pattern. You could drink sugar water all day and never get scurvy, if we could synthesize it ourselves.

Except we can't, because ten million years ago a primate species discovered that they ingest enough vitamin C in the natural environment to get by without making it themselves.

A regular sideshow on my other blog is finding terrible Tumblr themes, then picking apart their CSS. I've learned a lot about CSS in the process, in the "gaze upon this disaster, young one, and learn well its lessons" sense. But even the most incompetently written theme isn't as poorly designed as vasopressin, which, among other things, controls:

1. Water permeability of distal tubule and collecting duct cells in the kidney.
2. Increasing permeability of the inner medullary portion of the collecting duct to urea by regulating the cell surface expression of urea transporters.
3. Memory formation.
4. Peripheral vasoconstriction as a response to blood loss from serious injury.
5. Pair bonding.

The same hormone that controls your blood pressure also determines if you can form a relationship.

From "Arginine vasopressin receptor 1A":

Homozygosity in allele 334 of RS3 is associated in men (but not women) with problems with pair-bonding behavior, measured by traits such as partner bonding, perceived marital problems, marital status, as well as spousal perception of marital quality.[19]

In a study of 203 male and female university students, participants with short (308-325 bp) vs. long (327-342) versions of RS3 were less generous, as measured by lower scores on both money allocations in the dictator game, as well as by self-report with the Bardi-Schwartz Universalism and Benevolence Value-expressive Behavior Scales; although the precise functional significance of longer AVPR1A RS3 repeats is not known, they are associated with higher AVPR1A postmortem hippocampal mRNA levels.[5]

Who the fuck designed this? The answer is, of course, "nobody". The blind idiot god of evolution cares not at all for separation of concerns, or design elegance, it just cares about how many offspring are produced. For evolution, the person who died at the age of 29, with six children, and the person who lived for two hundred years and won six dozen Nobel prizes, but never had children, it considers the latter person to have failed.

It's even a mistake to think of evolution as an "entity" with "intent" or "purpose": evolution is the simple historical fact that the genes of the organisms which produce more offspring are more frequent in the general population. And so we have white blood cells that trigger diabetes when they don't have parasites to combat, or the thousand and one autoimmune diseases of an environment that is too clean: the blind flailing of an immune system fighting a battle that's already won.

The human body is the ultimate tangle of dependencies, nobody sat down with a clean sheet of paper and said, "Alright, I'll design this anthropomorphic replicator so that bacteria outnumber the endogenous cells 10 to 1." No, of course not! But bacteria were endemic in the ancestral environment, and so they colonized the human body, just as they've colonized every square millimetre on the entire planet.

It's almost amusing to watch the naturists try to spin this, as if it's a good thing that fully 30% of fecal mass is bacteria! You had to eat that food, yet it's being wasted on making bacteria. A prime example of local maxima. You could imagine a mutant human with stomach enzymes that could digest oligosaccharides itself, without needing bacteria-- but the bacteria are already there. There's no fitness advantage, all paths lead down from there, and evolution has no foresight. You need two unlikely mutations to occur in the same individual at the same time (oligosaccharidease and an immune response to whatever oligosaccharide bacteria we already use) to acquire a fitness advantage, and that coincidence will be vanishingly rare.

A pretty safe bet is that two hundred years from now, the idea of "vitamins" will be a quaint anachronism. Having to consume minerals is going to be with us for a while, barring really surprising breakthroughs in nuclear reactor miniaturization; but the need to periodically ingest acorbic acid is a bug, which will be patched sooner rather than later.

EDIT: There were about a dozen comments calling out how terrible this post looked on mobile browsers. Sorry, guys! Fixed.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/02/16/more_repping_rapping/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2012/02/16/more_repping_rapping/ 2012-02-16T07:07:12-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen Engineering (Previously, previously, previously.)

Hey, the ORD bot is available for preorder, now with a standard 210mm^3 (Mendel-sized) build volume. It's just the mechatronics, you still need an electronics package, (skip the stepper motors) as well as an extruder.

(Note: the major cost of 3d printer filament is, interestingly enough, materials handing costs. Plastic is cheap, but machines to extrude it at millimeter thicknesses is expensive, esp. when you have to monopolize it for a hour just to extrude a handful of kilograms. 1.75mm filament is rather more than twice as expensive per kilogram as 3mm filament, since it takes longer to extrude an equal amount of mass. It is debatable if the slight improvement in build quality is worth the price.)

A video of it printing at a studly 160mm/s:

Pho, as they say, war. Lesser printers top out at 40mm/s, at best.

The basic idea of the RepRap project is to build a self REPlicating RAPid prototyping machine, in the vein of the von Neumann universal fabricator. This is, of course, very very hard to do; and the RepRap project is nowhere near achieving full closure, there are still a great many "vitamins", components needed for self replication that the printer can't make itself. (Exactly analogous to vitamins in the conventional sense: biomolecules required for life, which the body can't synthesize itself.)

I've been following RepRap for six years, and for the first five of those years, it hasn't been a very good bet.

A FDM 3D printer is exactly like a 2D inkjet printer, except with a Z axis, and with a hot glue gun instead of an ink printhead.

Those of you who are familiar with motion control hardware and plastics extrusion are currently feeling faint chills of foreboding, and indeed, this is a Hard Problem. The printer hot end needs to be able to extrude thousands of metres of filament without requiring maintenance, while still being made out of common materials, as well as being as light, (print speed is limited by how fast the printer can move the extruder around) and as cheap as possible. The X and Y axis have to be accurate, precise, and as cheap as possible. The print surface turns out to be another big problem: the RepRap machine can't use a heated build envelope, for power consumption reasons, (The plan is to eventually have 1 RepRap per 1 human person) so you need something that sticks very well to hot filament, but not at all to cold filament, and also doesn't require replacement after only being printed on six or seven times.

Subscribing to the RepRap blog for these last six years has been a front row seat to watching lots of very smart people beat their heads against a very hard problem. It's always been possible to make a RepRap, if you wanted to spend a great deal of money in return for a machine that was not enormously reliable.

It occurs to me that 3D printers have described a familiar arc of technological development, roughly paralleling that of general purpose computers. In The Beginning, there were commercial printers made by big names such as Stratasys, which resembled mainframe computers with their thrillingly large price tags, obligatory service contracts, price gouging on spare parts; and physically, being large steel boxes.

Then came the first few generations of RepRap, which were essentially the Altair 8800 to Stratasys' PDP-10. A 3D printer that fits on your desk, and doesn't cost $20,000! Wow! Amazing! Sure, you have to input programs by flipping toggles on the front panel, but it's a desktop computer. Would a mere mortal human want to buy one? Well, uh...

What we really need is an Apple 2.

I think I've found one. Well, one and a half.

The RepRapPro Huxley is a kit of the latest RepRap design, with the sixth generation electronics, the fancy new Bowden extruder, and really stellar print quality. The kit's $727, shipped, to North America. This is the easy option.

(Full disclosure: I'd buy the cheaper parts kit, without RP parts, since I live near Metrix Create Space, and could print them myself.)

Of course, I can't do anything the easy way.

The Quantum ORD bot (build log thread) is based on the Printrbot design, which has become thumpingly unpopular in the RepRap community for various boring reasons; and has been reverse-pirated as the Wallace model.

The problem with the mainstream RepRap model is that each axis has three components: the structural members, (Threaded rod) bearing surfaces, (Smooth steel drilling rod) and motion control elements. (Timing belt in the XY axes, more threaded rod in the Z axis) Since the structural members and the bearing surfaces are both static, you can just combine the two, and eliminate a lot of vitamins from the design.

So good so far. Except that the Printrbot is a bit of a toy: its design goal was to be as cheap as physically possible, which results in tradeoffs regarding frame stiffness, printing speed, build volume and mechanical reliability. (As Jamie Hyneman said, there is no free lunch with machines. Any money you save on mechanical quality, results in more time spent trying to keep the damn thing functional) Wallace is a better design, but it's barely a month old, and there are no commercial suppliers for it at all, and only one operational example of the design in the field.

Enter Makerslide.

(Ignore the ad copy on that page: Barton's a bit slow to update it. The Kickstarter's finished, you can buy it now, right now, at this very moment.)

Makerslide is just structural aluminum extrusion, as used in the venerable 5bears CNC mill, but with bearing surfaces molded into its surface. Which makes it a prime candidate to replace the drill rod in the Printrbot design, and get a vastly stiffer machine frame in the bargain; which also lets you scale up the build volume. With a R2C2 kit, it should be pretty easy to build a fast, reliable, FDM machine!

Oh wait, I don't have any money.]]> http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/10/11/would_the_lhc_blow_up_your_hand_i_do_the_math/ http://bbot.org/blog/archives/2010/10/11/would_the_lhc_blow_up_your_hand_i_do_the_math/ 2010-10-11T05:36:49-04:00 Samuel Bierwagen Engineering, nerdery Recently I found myself in the unenviable position of having to do some math. After crying at some length on the impossible difficulty of multiplying numbers together, I braced myself, buckled down... and had Google do all the work for me.

The question at hand was a Hacker News article on what would happen if you stuck your hand into the Large Hadron Collider. As those who have followed the link will have found out, the result is a youtube video of several physicists being asked a somewhat complicated technical question, and prevaricating wildly in the manner of scientists being unexpectedly presented with a hard question, and expected to provide a nontechnical answer.

I found the question interesting. I have some experience in guessing at questions like these, and immediately set about multiplying some truly colossal numbers by other gigantic numbers.

First, let's assume the LHC is operating at its design limits, for a full 7 teraelectronvolts per proton. That's 1.12 microjoules, which is not a lot for a macroscopic object, but a really alarmingly colossal amount for an elementary particle.

Each beam has 2,808 pulses. Each pulse contains 1.15*10^11 protons. A hundred and fifteen billion protons. Now let's do the math.

(1.12*10^-6)*2*2808*(1.15*10^11) = 352,235,520 joules.

That there's a lot of energy. But let's translate that into a more useful form than "very large number". A stick of dynamite, weighing .25 kilograms, releases 2.1 megajoules of energy when it explodes. 352/2.1 = 168 sticks of dynamite, or 42 kilograms total.

Thus, the naive answer to "what would happen if you stick your hand into the LHC?," is, "your hand would explode, and you would die." However, there's more going on with a beam of hyperenergetic protons, and assuming that all the energy of the beam would just instantly turn into heat in your hand is optimistic.

Well, not optimistic. You know what I mean.

A 7 TeV proton is very, very energetic. A lesser proton, when accelerated into human flesh, would caroom off assorted carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms, until it came to rest, thereby transferring all of its energy to the target.

But a 7 TeV proton would be so fast, and so massive[1], that it might easily shrug off the paltry electric fields of the massed atoms making up the hand, and pass through the hand without damaging it at all. However, it is moving very, very fast, and will traverse the entire 27 kilometer ring once every 100 microseconds. The odds are good it will eventually strike hand.

But once it does, it would be nothing like the thermal impact of a less energetic proton. When it hit, it would fly apart, shatter violently, and spew subatomic shrapnel in a wide cone from the point of impact. Some of this debris would strike other hand-atoms, provoking other, secondary reactions, but most would waste their energy outside the hand. More's the pity. How much energy would end up in the hand, as thermal energy? I don't know.

But direct impacts, and the secondary impacts, yea, unto the fifth generations; are not the whole story.

Energetic particles emit photons when deflected by magnetic fields. When they're deflected by other particles, it's called bremsstrahlung radiation, and when it's a macroscopic magnetic field, as produced by, say, the superconducting containment magnets on the LHC, it's called synchrotron radiation. Both bremsstrahlung and synchrotron radiation tend to be quite energetic, in the X-ray range[2] and would contribute to the total heat load without ever striking a hand atom. How much? I don't know.

Here we are, some 600 words later, and I still don't have any hard answers. A full answer would most likely require actual work, as well as some modelling that doesn't much resemble the kind of cocktail napkin math I am so fond of.

But while losing your life is in question, you would most definitely lose the hand.

[1]: Relativistic effects become very, very apparent at these scales. Mass-energy equivalence is not an abstract concept for a subatomic particle traveling very close to the speed of light. The faster it moves, the heavier it gets. A 7 TeV proton is about 7100 times more massive than a proton at rest.

[2]: Amusing science fact: X-rays and gamma rays are the same thing, that is, high-energy photons. The difference between the two are how they are produced. Gamma rays are made by nuclear reactions, and X-rays are made by particle accelerators, such as the LHC, cathode ray tubes,[*] and X-ray tubes. This is, of course, because they were discovered using different methods; and only later discovered to be the same damn thing, after everything had been named.

[*]: Why yes, cathode ray tubes produce X-rays. Why did you think they were made of leaded glass?

Shit was nerdy.

Jigsaw is conviently located right next to a elevated highway, and on the wrong side of the tracks, in what can be described as the "gritty" part of town. It's perfect!

The nerds are nerdy!

The desks are poorly lit!

The wiring is dangerously substandard! And the downstairs shop is entirely undocumented, since I completely forgot to take pictures of it!

For those of you who are not hip to the jive, or who didn't follow the wikipedia link in the first sentence, hacker spaces are essentially communes, but with machine tools. By becoming a member, I can build stuff I otherwise couldn't, especially now that I lack a garage.

It's pretty neat. I'll be posting about it more in the future.

(Unrelated: I wrote a script that automatically scales and uploads images, because I got tired of doing it manually. It's here, and is pretty neat, if I do say so myself.)

Edit:

I went back and got some pictures of the shop. Behold:

Beauty!

This is a ybox2. It makes a pretty lousy alarm clock.

Of course, being a weird kinda guy, I have some weird requirements for an alarm clock.

The first problem is that my uncorrected eyesight is so terrible that I can't read 5 centimeter tall numerals from a distance of thirty centimeters. Once you move out of the nightstand form factor, things start getting Expensive. So I bought a couple of awesomely beefy LED numerals, which sat on my bench, unused, since I didn't have a power supply that could supply enough volts to light them.

Sparkfun makes a wall clock controller, which is great, except that at the time it was expensive, was designed to run DIY 7-segment numerals, and used GPS as a time source, which is inconvenient for an indoor clock.

Today, however, it's a hundred dollars cheaper, would work great with regular LED 7-segment numerals, but now runs on an internal time source, which still isn't ideal because I refuse spend money on yet another clock that I have to manually set, and correct for daylight savings time. I hate daylight savings time, the pointless garbage that it is, and if I have to manually adjust yet another clock for it I'm going to have to start murdering.

As for setting the time, well, I'm just lazy.

Now, clocks for people too lazy to set them is a mature market, well served by clocks that can receive NIST time signals or more expensive ones that can receive GPS time. But the problem here is that both of these are government services. Using these for time-keeping assumes that: the government will fund these for perpetuity, the government will always believe that it is in its best interests for its citizens to have accurate time, and that the government will exist.

Rather than depend on that dubious series of assertions, I would rather provide my own time standard, with the option of using another. Unfortunately for my wallet, these requirements are so narrow and oddly shaped that only NTP fulfills them. NTP is pretty damn lightweight, but it still requires a full PC to run.

Embedded-formfactor computers with real linux support are esoteric, and therefore expensive. But I've got full-size computers all over the place, which only my sense of aesthetics preventing me from using one to run a clock.

There is also the ybox2. It's based around an eight core (!) microprocessor, uses any television with a composite video input as a display, and the default widget is a clock, which suggestively "gets its time from a Navy timeserver". But can a microprocessor run a full implementation of the NTP client?

That's an excellent question, one I answered by purchasing it.

The ybox2, like the ybox before it, is designed around the Parallax Propeller, an 8 cored, 80mhz microprocessor, like a mini-Cell processor. That's the good news. The bad news is that it has a phat 32 kilobytes of ram, making it more of a crippled Cell processor. Parallax makes great hay about the Propeller being a 32-bit processor, which is curious, since 32-bit architectures are mostly used for their ability to easily access larger amounts of ram.

In addition, the ybox2 is designed to fit in an Altoids tin. That's cool, I'm down with the curiously strong mint, except the Propeller and the ethernet driver are both DIP chips, and are thus long and skinny. In order to get everything to fit, the cables attach at either end of the device, a profoundly awkward form factor for a set top box.

The pseudo-NTP alarm clock widget, alarmclock.spin, the reason I bought the ybox2, manages to fit a networking stack, a HTTP client, a HTTP server, the actual clock code, and a twinkly little LED throbber all in 32 kilobytes of ram, a miracle of efficient coding. It also features the most egregiously ugly hack I've ever seen in a piece of commercial software.

You see, alarmclock.spin doesn't use NTP to set its clock. That's disappointing, since that's its reason for existence, but NTP isn't really meant for embedded hardware like the ybox2. Unfortunately, it doesn't implement Simple NTP either, which is meant for embedded hardware like the ybox2. It doesn't implement TIME or DAYTIME, either.

Well just how does it set its clock, then?

Good thing you asked, italics man! You see, first it sends a HTTP 1.0 request to tycho.usno.navy.mil. Not HTTP 1.1, since the ybox2 doesn't implement all of TCP. Well, actually, it sends that request to 199.211.133.239, which is hard-coded in alarmclock.spin, since it doesn't support DNS either.

The file it requests from 199.211.133.239 is /cgi-bin/timer.pl, which alarmclock.spin then screenscrapes for the UTC time, which it applies the time zone offset to.

Wow.

Wow indeed, italics man. Let's list the ways this could break.

1. Tycho could change its IP address.
2. Tycho could stop accepting HTTP 1.0 connections.
3. Tycho could stop accepting connections from clients with ybox2's user agent
4. Tycho could move timer.pl, or delete it entirely.
5. Timer.pl could display its timestamp in such a way that alarmclock.spin couldn't extract it anymore.
6. Someone could execute alarmclock.spin's author for crimes against software engineering, resulting in,
7. The ybox being eradicated from the timestream through retroactive causation.

So, the ybox ain't a NTP clock, and never will be one, without porting NTP to it entirely, which sounds like Work.

The search continues!

(It's set in outer space.)

That is, the game is not bad. The title, Shattered Horizon, is balderdash. A horizon is the line between the sky and the ground. Like a rainbow, it is non-physical, but the result of physical objects. There is no meaningful way a horizon could be "shattered".

Boo. Boooooooo.

They could have invested a modicum of meaning in the title,* since the game takes place in space, and there is no horizon, just like in your mind, man; but they didn't.

*: Speaking of Significant Titles, Rainbows End by world class hard science fiction writing bad ass motherfucker Vernor Vinge. Looks like a typo, isn't! You should buy it, right now, from that link.

Horizon is, of course, made by Futuremark. Erudite, but not au courant, nerds will now be going "Huh".

You see, Futuremark, for the last ten years, has been making a series of 3D graphics benchmark suites, starting with the venerable 3Dmark99. Since this essentially entails building video games that don't have controls, and is inherently hard to make money doing, as there are a limited number of hardware review sites to sell enterprise versions to, the natural next step is to make actual, functioning, games.

If you subscribe to the odious practice of describing video games in terms of "like x, crossed with y", then you would probably go on to call Horizon "like Descent, crossed with TF2". You're a guy with a gun, fighting over control points, in a team of identical guys, but you fly in three dimensions, and don't have voice chat.

That's right, Futuremark's complete lack of experience shows in the many little things they get wrong. There's no voice chat, no voice binds, and no chat history. There are, in fact, two different global chat dialogs, one during the pre-mission briefing which occurs in a unmovable dialog box that covers up part of the briefing screen, and one during the game proper. Hilariously, the in-game chat dialog is a single >, which is all that appears to notify you that the game has stolen input focus, resulting in a lot of lines consisting entirely of "wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwsdasdwadddd".

Futuremark, flaunting their experience with making graphical demos, is really over-fond of fiddly UI bits. Little bitmap greebles, and boy are they annoying. Everything is very fancy looking, and not very usable.

The escape menu, for instance, is presented as a screen on your left wrist, and when you hit escape, your avatar brings it up to look at it, which takes maybe 300 milliseconds. This is mildly annoying, but also improves immersion, so we'll call it a wash.

But most of the time you want to adjust settings, you're already dead, in spectator, and thus have no wrist! When you're spectating, it's a completely different, conventional menu, that pops up instantly.

Contradictory UI elements! Yeah! I fucking love those!

Horizon also has interesting demographics. I was playing Moonrise with three other people, and sucking hard, since I kept stopping every five minutes to take notes. When they weren't mocking my ineptitude, the topic of age came up. The ages of those on the server? 49, 41, 40, and 21. Yeah, I'm a rebel. But definitely not your usual Xbox Live crowd.

Speaking of noise, Horizon almost gets sound in space right. Almost. Explosions are noisy, but they employ the standard dodge that these noises are generated by a situational awareness system, and then lets you shut it off to run silently, and not show up on the IFF system, just like in Mechwarrior 2.

Yes!

When running silently, your HUD is disabled, and all you hear is the beating of your heart. Most notably, you don't hear the clanking of your boots when you're attached to a surface, the sound of the suit's ventilation system, the sound of your Orbital Manovering System jets, or the report of your gun.

...No!

Guys! All these things are bolted to your suit, which, in turn, is surrounded by a perfect insulator. They are going to not only be audible, but positively noisy. I love the subversion of this ancient trope, but you took it too far!

You could make a case for your rifle not being as loud, but there is no plausible explanation for the lack of fan and OMS noise.

The silent running mode also exposes some inconstancy in game design. While in silent running mode, you can, of course, still maneuver, since it would be pretty useless otherwise. This can be handwaved by saying that the OMS system has physical controls, and is not fly-by-wire.

But while the suit is booting up right after respawn, and while incapacitated by an EMP grenade, OMS and Attitude Control Systems are impaired, and function erratically. So which one is it? Are they controlled by computer or not?

Even better, while silent running, your OMS jets don't give off light, as they do when the computer's on. This is probably supposed to make it easier to sneak up on people, but it doesn't make any fucking sense.

Even worse, recoil from the assault rifle doesn't produce an equal and opposite force! Man! That would have been so neat, you guys.

(Seriously, outer space. Rocket ships and everything.)

Horizon also limits player velocity. This is because physics is inconvenient, and I've given up hope on it being depicted realistically in anything but a straight up simulator.

The problem is that any thruster that accelerates quickly enough to not feel annoyingly slow and unresponsive will, thanks to v=at, result in very high velocities, very quickly. This is amusing, but tends to result in players, used to friction, zooming off the playable map, and being killed by the border. Not fun.

The way Horizon implements its speed limit is annoyingly incorrect. You can accelerate up to the speed limit, then coast (correct) but thrusting any more doesn't do anything. (wrong) If you're trying to handwave the speed limit as a safety measure imposed by the suit's computer, then it would shut off the thrusters when the speed limit was reached.

More annoying is the implementation of "sprinting". Like every other FPS in the last decade, you can sprint for a limited time, denoted by your "boost" meter, and like those FPSes, your avatar holds his gun at port arms while sprinting.

Except, he isn't doing anything. It's the suit's OMS system thrusting, there's no reason you couldn't continue to fire.

And, of course, when you run out of "boost", you slow back down to the normal speed limit.

No. Wrong.

It would be possible to handwave the speed limit creatively. Say, you're assaulting the enemy base, and your side's hackers have disabled the defenses, but didn't notice how they tie into the asteroid detection system, so the guns will vaporize anything above a certain speed. When behind cover, you can exceed the speed limit, but moving out of cover will then get you killed.

See? That's how you justify a technical limitation.

Let's take a short break here, and talk about motherfuckers.

The reason for this digression into profanity is that, halfway through through writing this post, I lost internet access. As you may already know, I recently switched ISPs. Worldlink, the new ISP, is actually a common carrier provider. They lease the telephone lines from Verizon, the local baby bell, and resell it to consumers. This is actually win-win, since Verizon gets less of my money, and I get to sign up for DSL service by walking into the Worldlink office and talking to Rick Kunekel, a p. cool guy who doesn't afraid of anyone; even if he does use MSIE, for shame.

The downside of this arrangement is that when there is a problem with the equipment, it has to be communicated to Verizon, through Worldlink. This is... slow.

During the eternity I was without internet access, I was also without access to my collection of PC games. This is because I have, ever so foolishly, placed my trust in Steam. Steam, as it turns out, really wants an internet connection. The "go offline" button is a ruse, designed to entrap the unwary, and in actual fact, does nothing at all.

Valve, I would really have liked to be able to use the hundreds of dollars of software I have bought from you, while I was offline. That would have been so great. It would have been just awesome.

Instead your piece of shit DRM-infested malware informed me that going offline was an operation that required an internet connection.

Wow. That's some great design.

When the problem was finally communicated to Verizon, and the great slumbering beast of its bureaucracy was roused into action, it was determined that line conditions were such that they could not support the speeds that I was using. A curious conclusion, as I had been using those speed for six months now, without complaint. In any event, I was to be moving soon, and any internet access is better than no internet access.

He said, confidently, before he actually used the slowed internet connection in question. Slowed, from 8/768, to 2/128. 128 kilobits per second! Yeah! It's 2002, all over again!

What was I talking about? Oh yes, dem vidya gaems.

Horizon has regenerating health, like all my favorite games. This is.... reasonable, considering the setting, but I wish there had been more done with the damage model. There is positional damage, with faceplace and tank hits being instant kills, but no progressive impairment, (get shot in a RCS cluster, and you can no longer turn right) which is unfortunate.

Another thing made conspicuous by its absence is a laser rifle.

Space is pretty much the only environment where laser weapons make sense, thanks to our accursed atmosphere, with some exceptions. The rifle can zoom in, but makes an utterly shitty sniper rifle, thanks to plenty of scope wobble, and recoil that's modeled as a permanent deflection from the aimpoint, rather than a transient one. They probably had a reason for doing it this way, rather than the standard sighting model, and boy, it better have been a good one.

A laser rifle would have unlimited range and hit instantly, but would cycle slowly, and be vulnerable to heat buildup. (Plus, frikken laser beams! Pew pew!)

Heat management would be another easy addition. Getting rid of waste heat in space is a big engineering problem, as any foole with a thermos knoe, a vacuum is a lousy conductor of heat. You do a lot of things that should produce a lot of heat in Horizon, such as conducting OMS burns, firing weapons, and floating around in direct sunlight.

A neat design tradeoff here would be to reduce cooldown while illuminated by the sun, and increase it when you're standing on a solid surface. (Radiators in the soles of the boots, being held in direct contact with the surface by the "align to surface" magnets, could dump a lot of heat via conduction) Silent running mode, would, of course, shut off the cooling system entirely, dramatically limiting how long you could stay silent, depending on how much heat you generate.

Wait a minute, here. Positional damage? Lasers? Heat management? This sounds like another Mechwarrior game.

Really? Gee, that's funny.

They also neglected to include suit leaks, mystifyingly. The whistle of a slow leak in your space suit, while you're trapped outside in the vacuum of space, is one of the most evocative situations in science fiction, and they didn't put it in their astronaut shooter. Man!

There is a general lack of connection to the suit. You can't hear its ventilation system, you fly through dust clouds without getting the faceplate dusty, there's no glare through the helmet, etc.

Horizon should feel like hairless monkeys piloting millions of dollars worth of fragile shell from rock to rock, and dying horribly when that shell is damaged in even the slightest way.

Instead, it's got the soul of a very generic FPS, set in an extraordinary location.

And that's terrible.

But it is not horrible. Horizon is a very good first step, rough and unpolished, but hinting at the overly stretched metaphorical staircase to come. The purely hypothetical sequel will be awesome, (Think of the possibilities. More than one gun! More maps! Classes! Vehicles! Deployables!) but as it stands now, Horizons is merely very good.

About a year ago, shortly before I quit my job at lowes, I bought an electric bike kit,[*] since I was, at the time, commuting to work by bicycle, and thought commuting to work by electric bicycle a splendid idea. Once unemployed, my enthusiasm for spending money to commute faster to a job I no longer had held little appeal, and the batteries disappeared into a box in the next move. They remained in that box for the next year, until it occured to me that I really shouldn't have left lead-acid batteries flat for so long, and embarked on a frantic search for them.

*: When I bought it, you could just buy the motor and controller by themselves, but apparently batteryspace has started bundling their battery packs with the motors. I couldn't recommend buying from them before, and I certainly can't now.

Sure enough, when I found them and hooked them up to the charger, it charged for a good five seconds before reporting that the pack was completely charged, which meant, either that the pack was sulfated and now had bugger all capacity, or that the charger was broken.

Fortunately I had a 8 ohm power resistor on hand. Since I=V/R, that means the resistor would draw 4.5 watts at 36 volts, well within the pack's discharge limit, but not so light that it takes forever to run down.

Unfortunately, the power resistor is only rated to 20 watts, and I'll be running 140-odd through it, which would be a problem if resistors went pop and stopped working as soon as you exceeded their power rating. Fortunately, resistors can handle substantially more power with heroic cooling.

Baby, I'm an overclocker.

(puts on sunglasses)

Heroic cooling is what I do.

The setup is the battery connected to the terminal strip through some Anderson Powerpole connectors, then to the power resistor, with the two 16 gauge wires connecting it to the multimeter.

The resistor itself is suspended in approximately 500 ml of water, which should have enough mass to keep from boiling over the half hour or so it'll take to discharge the pack, not that a mere 100C would damage the resistor.

Following the advice of Derek Lowe, I considered the very worst case scenario of my test setup. That would be a internal short and resultant lead metal fire. Thus, two fire extinguishers,

Unfortunately, I terminated the test at 10.55 cell voltage, having forgotten that the datasheet graph, at a equivalent discharge, ran the cells down to 9 volts.

This makes it impossible to calculate the real capacity of the battery with any precision, but a rough estimate puts it at 120 amp-hours, well above what would be considered "dead", and pretty close to its original capacity. Science!

The water heat sink got fairly warm (~45-50C) nucleated bubbles on the interior of the glass, and gently steamed, (which I utterly failed to photograph) but otherwise worked perfectly.