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I agree that the mods have the last word. No need to keep nagging about it, because it just bears the risk of making people angry, as the process goes on and on. Let's keep it cool and civil :cool: . Focus Fusion is sound science, as peer review of the work done shows. However, it is also clear...

$QUIK is looking good :D .

Those dinosaurs have giant inertia. Lots of engineers doing the same thing over and over again, for 40 years. In my company, they recognized the fact that stubborn or outright mentally lazy old personnel is hindering progress in many places. So, lots of hiring of fresh blood going on. Go...

Thanks for the link. Alas, only a couple seconds into the article, I spotted a serious factual mistake: "[..] Given atmospheric friction, the outside surface of the heat shield will be as hot as the surface of the sun (1,447 degrees Celsius, or 2,637 degrees Fahrenheit), [..]" . Ah, no, the...

For the better or worse, depending on which side one stands, we can already catch a glimpse of a future in which people don't need 10 years of mental and physical training and multiple academic degrees, just to be able to go visit a now decaying space station somewhere in LEO (as great a project...

Thanks for the link. Although Mr. Hadfield says a couple commonsense things, he thoroughly struck me as being part of the old "spaceflight". I guess it's natural, if one has devoted one's whole life to an existing system and was fond of it. But how does the saying go: You can't teach an old...

In my eyes, that's the whole point of the effort: Space travel has to become so reliable and easy, so that average Joe would be capable of doing it. How many people would drive a car if you had to train for 5 years just to not explode the car when you switch it on ;D .

In my understanding, it becomes exponentially easier to land on bodies, the less gravitational potential a planet has. So, if SpaceX manages to land that thing on Earth, then Mars should be a piece of cake. For the rest, let me paraphrase it like that: You better get your s**t together, if you...

Once the Dragon V2 has proven the first couple safe controlled pinpoint landings, I don't see why landing on Mars would be that different. There's not much of an atmosphere on Mars to brake the craft down, but gravity is only around 38% of Earth's gravity. When the technology exists, there is no...

Great to hear you donated, Dutchie. I strongly believe that the whole Tesla community working together can easily make this happen in a snap.

One aspect in space travel is to overcome the limitations of solar cells. They are only usable up to about Jupiter's orbit around the sun. Also, not having to take care of radioactive waste, produced by ordinary fission reactions in fission power plants, greatly helps. During operation, the DPF...

ITER and DPF are structurally very different. ITER is an infrastructure project, due to its enormous requirements. As an infrastructure project, there are many stakeholders involved. Many companies earning their fair share of money (actually, tax payer money). As with practically all tax payer...

Well explained. One other thing is that in a prototype reactor, the X-rays carry a lot of the fusion energy with them. For a real reactor to produce the advertised electrical output and to function at all as a net energy source, these X-rays have to be converted into electrical energy by means...

By the way, there is a big difference in power levels between the planned Polywell reactor and the Dense Plasma Focus (DPF) reactor. The Polywell is intended for the 100MW regime, while the DPF is planned for the 5MW regime. It is a lot smaller than the Polywell and does not have to be cooled as...

I've been looking into LPP for more than a year now. What Eric Lerner and team are doing, is good science. They systematically apply since long proven physics, collect a ton of experimental data and identify root causes for unexpected behavior like underperformance for a given set of parameters...

I guess this depends. Guys who are long TSLA and got in late are pretty screwed if it goes below the 70s and stays there for months (maybe even years). On the other hand, the ones who want in would prefer the lowest possible price. Since I did not have any money to invest when the stock...

Well, cancer is surely not going away soon. If NAVB stays ahead of the game and becomes definitive market leader, it's gonna be huge. I rather see the current low as a very good chance to buy than anything else.

No worries, I happen to like rockets! Wonder though when SpaceX could do an IPO.. ;) .

I think it's pretty straightforward to see that with each additional car manufactured and roaming the streets, the absolute number of possible bad news (like crashes, fires etc) increases proportionally. There's just no way around it, no matter how well-made the cars are. The established car...

That was a huge surprise.. to put it mildly. I know this is a good company, but it still takes some serious Zen meditation not to flip, seeing that development today ;) .

That stock is not for the faint-hearted. I think that the $1.11 mark today would've been a great price to buy ;) . Considering the consensus 1y-target is still $6 and that NAVB has great product(s), the current price is IMHO a bargain. I went in at $2.04 (d'oh) but am still positive that the...

.. if e.g. we TSLA people spent 10% of our time for politics instead of 100% in busily finding ways to enrich ourselves, we'd all be experts in (current) politics in no time :tongue: . But it's true, not everyone can be equally good at all things.

Actually, I'm interested in working conditions and environment at Tesla. For instance, how good or bad is it in relative terms to, let's say, Foxconn ? :biggrin: Would be interesting to get some real info on that. I mean, no-one ever talks about that, or do they?

Actually, when I was in Boise, ID in August, I had to evade a really big sleeping bag plus lots of other stuff lying in the middle of a highway. I barely made it going 75mph.. that was "fun". I agree.. so be prepared for anything at anytime :) .

I see a lot of room below $160 . Depends on how sh...y the next days / weeks are with political power plays and whatnot. This is not only about a singular fire in some electric vehicle. It's a lot of factors converging to bring the stocks down in general and to destroy trust. Oh yeah, and some...

Truth is, things like that are bound to happen. The more S are on the road, the more incidents are going to happen, it's simple math. I think that tanking down to $100 is not out of the question at all. This success story so far is, frankly, too good to be true, so incidents like that bring the...

If the "limit" is getting an ongoing increase, it is logically no limit. This implies a coming state bankruptcy, too. It's just hidden in uncertainty of the point in time. One interesting question would be about what happened if the guys decided to eventually do away with the Debt Limit one day.

This development is silly :frown:.

@CapitalistOppressor What, in your personal opinion, is the worst scenario that could happen and how badly could TSLA be affected by it?

Maybe these are the first ripples of what I simply know what's going to happen - defects show up after some time. Not all is as shiny as during the first months/years(s) . TESLA is a company as every other company, only their products are special. They'll start to suffer bit by bit from...

@Shortslaver: Good thing I got in at $29 then, hehe ;) .

Looks like my estimation about SCTY bottoming out at ~$29 was dead on. And some profit was taken (I'm still learning the game, though ;) ).

I think that around $29 is a reasonable and realistic basis for the current SolarCity, now that the hot air has been released. I believe the company's prospects are good and that we'll soon see the stock rising again. What are your thoughts, guys?

I'm interested in how easy it will be to spoof the swapper. Stealing batteries and leaving worthless chunks of metal instead could become a sport. I hope TM has thought about how to prevent this ;) .

What, if the barcode on your battery is scraped or damaged, and the battery can't be identified? Screwed much? :p

Barcode is so yesterday ;) .

It's all fine and dandy then :) .

The $64000 question is: How do you as simple customer identify your battery pack. Do you doodle funny pictures on it, or what can you do. I bet the battery com is encrypted to avoid easy tampering with the pack. So, how do you identify your original pack? My guess: you can't. It's basically...

The most reasonable approach would IMHO be to also display the expected battery exchange cost next to the super charger icon, in case you want to keep a battery after swapping. Which raises another question: Why in the hell do they make it so complicated? Shouldn't the average battery exchange...

In think the whole "babying the battery" is 100% wishful thinking, right from the start. The battery management system (BMS) autonomously keeps track of and, well, manages the battery as perfectly as technologically possible. We can well assume that the BMS and the car always keeps the battery...

Couldn't have said it better (><) .

Surprising for many, sure. I did some rough design sketches for a possible swapping/storing/charging mechanism for fun. It was, in the end, not very complex and it certainly looked like it was possible to swap a battery pack in a car that was designed for it already in under one minute. It's...

To get the most seamless EV-experience, customers should never ever have to concern themselves with technical details of a product IMHO. You want a car because you want to drive with it, right? Why should any customer care about messy hardware details?

Exactly. I bet this can even be done faster some time from now.

@johnnydop: Who is "all" :D ?

I think the swapping infrastructure and the included automatic quality management of batteries could even help with refurbishing batteries. Let's say that Tesla detects at a swapping station that the battery you just had in your car has reached the threshold where it can't reliably provide the...

To (almost) cite Sigmund Freud: "Sometimes a battery swap is just a battery swap" ;D . I suspect the physical swap will be so simple and fast that you won't believe it happening. The concept of unifying distributed grid storage, renewable energy and EVs in this way is genius. I really couldn't...

That, and making the orbits littered with 10s of 1000s of satellites, making space travel a nigh impossible task ;) .

2500V is about the breakdown voltage across a distance of 1 millimeter at normal atmospheric conditions. Also, in the off-state the charging cable only has a minimal voltage to sense a plugging process. After that, the "juice" gets activated and the electric field is guided through the cable...

I wouldn't mind a 1-digit stock for a while :smile: , even if it's a 2-minute fluke.