New answers tagged engineering
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
I think the thing people are forgetting is that a bridge's purpose is to make it easier to get from point A to point B. Looking at historical records is not going to give the full picture. In most non-...
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Super broad gauge railway vs double wide/multi track railway
How about the Breitspurbahn ? That proposal had a 3m track and double-height rolling stock.
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What is the highest level of accuracy in motion control a Victorian society could achieve?
Your thinking is essentially incorrect.
Think of gears. You can stack a nigh-arbitrary number of gears together to achieve essentially any input/output ratio.
As you suspected, the error will multiply ...
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Accepted
What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
Let's see what we can find from reality, both present and historical. For reference with the dates in this post, the Bronze age lasted from very roughly 5,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago, though both ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
The Chinese Woven Timber Bridge
The bridge can be made of shorter lengths of timber that lock together to form an arch
The longest timber arch covered bridge still existing is the Santan Bridge in ...
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Super broad gauge railway vs double wide/multi track railway
Let's think about the physics of rail gauges...
The wider the gauge, the shallower the turn radius. The distance between wheel trucks is involved here, but the simple reality is that the wider the ...
- 110k
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Super broad gauge railway vs double wide/multi track railway
So what do you think he should go with, super broad 2 track railroad, super broad 4 track railroad, or perhaps some combination of the 2 concepts?
Neither of the above, really.
The problem with any ...
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Super broad gauge railway vs double wide/multi track railway
If he uses a pair of existing standard gauge tracks as a four-rail single track, he's going to hit a lot of problems:
The most obvious is that the spacing between pairs of tracks has been managed for ...
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What could centipedal mechs do that tracked & wheeled vehicles couldn't do?
Segmentation of concerns
Each segment is responsible for a specific function of the mech.
Armour and Armament
You can hide the less armoured parts - vents, communication, huge engines, entry/exit ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
I think you could do at least 50 meters without any assistance from other side with BIG trunks
if you combine them like this
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
Okay, there are some good ideas with bows/arrows and kites, we might even get a boomerang suggestion. My solution involves the mountainous tribes just recently pacified who train and hunt with large ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
There's a related problem of how much overhang can be achieved stacking dominos or bricks or similar.
It's fairly obvious that you can build a bridge simply by building two such towers, one on each ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
Frame challenge: Via Ferrata down and up
Assuming the tiny pinpricks of light at the bottom of the crevasse are glow worms, and not dragon eyes or lava...
Then the solution at least initially isn't a ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
Frame Challenge: do the Distant People want a bridge? do they want to trade and communicate with the Emperor and the Near People? Possibly their immigration policy is similar to the folk on North ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
(Really a comment to JBH's answer but way too long)
You need to find a stout tree on the far side of the chasm. Build a kite (fabric on a wooden cross is enough), take two cords and fasten them to ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
Incas lived practically in bronze age and they built rope bridges using grass fibers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_rope_bridge
The greatest bridges of this kind were in the Apurímac Canyon ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
This is close to a duplicate of Building a bridge from one side. However, the limitation to the Bronze Age perhaps makes this a unique enough question. That question does make one point: somehow you ...
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What is the longest bridge that a Bronze Age society could build across a bottomless chasm?
I believe that ancient people could probably build an indefinitely long span if the cost/level-of-effort is relaxed. But only across shallow rivers. Stone arches require them to be able to boat to ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
No need for magic. You are just detonating nuclear bombs.
Starting, maintaining and stopping supercritical conditions is hard because nuclear reactions are very fast and very energetic and when you ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
So there is a real one of these. (no magic needed)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godiva_device
There is a proposed solution which works as a rocket.
The "Nuclear salt-water rocket" (NSWR)
...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
Given your other question, this is implausible. It's just way more difficult and complicated than your world has any need for.
In How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?, ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
There are a lot of drawbacks, and not much upside.
The "not much upside" is, if you could do it and control it, you have a small source of heat. You could do with that some of the things you ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
This is vaguely similar to traveling wave reactors, where a small part of the fuel is critical at any given time, breeding fissile material from fertile fuels such as U-238 or Th-232 in a wave that ...
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Can You Make A Tiny Nuclear Reactor By Employing Supercritical Conditions For Brief Periods Of Time?
Theoretically you could, but it seems rather pointless. Going supercritical makes your fuel degrade quickly and unevenly. It's like trying to make rocket engine working on hydrogen and oxygen "...
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How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?
I think the best option would be to have a transparent heat-transfer fluid run through a section of darkness, which would absorb all the heat radiated from every single atom of fluid that runs through ...
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How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?
This technology is incredibly useful as is, and the radiative-only limitation can be completely worked around using transparent aerogels
The Stefan-Boltzmann equation gives P = AeoT^4, where P = power ...
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How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?
First of all, I'm no expert on the equations of heat transfer, but you seem to be talking about two different things. The Wikipedia page on heat transfer mentions 4 main types of heat transfer. You ...
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Could You Use Artificial Volcanoes To Create Buildings?
Obsidian is basically glass. The chemical composition of Obsidian is anywhere from 65-80% Silicon Dioxide - glass. If you can mold your buildings out of glass, then you can mold them out of Obsidian. ...
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How Effectively Could You Use Magical Darkness As A Compact Heatsink?
Purely radiative heatsinks are somewhat inconvenient. Heat transfer into a convecting fluid (eg. air or water on a planet) is pretty effective... that's why heating elements in kettles are bar heaters ...
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Could You Use Artificial Volcanoes To Create Buildings?
Frame challenge: Lava 3D printer
Problems:
You have to build an oversized copy as a mold. This is a huge amount of resources, and lots of work to construct and deconstruct afterward.
This will not be ...
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Feasibility of Tiny Nuclear Engines
There are use-cases, but not as you've envisioned them
As other answers have pointed out, without magical neutron reflectors, you're stuck with requiring either heavy things (neutron reflectors) or ...
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Feasibility of Tiny Nuclear Engines
Note that the smallest fission reactors use neutron reflectors to decrease the mass of fissile material required to reach criticality. However, real neutron reflectors are lossy and produce a diffuse ...
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Feasibility of Tiny Nuclear Engines
No matter what you do - Time is always a finite resource. And to make something like a Turbine requires a lot of time and precision engineering.
The overall premise of there being small, portable ...
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