Nathan

Private Supersonic Jets

A lot of people in the world have too much money and too little time, so Lockheed Martin's Skunkworks developed the QSST  (Quiet SuperSonic Transport). A fusion of missile and plane, the QSST will have a maximum speed of around mach 1.8, but due to the unique design of the aircraft, it will barely have any sonic boom.

By modifying the traditional swept-wing concept to add front fins and an inverted V-tail, the jet is able to distribute the shockwaves generated at near-mach speeds along its hull, thus silencing the boom a hundredfold.

New Cars

News has been slow lately, so I'm lucky to have a post at all. I might write something more later in the day, but for now, this is all I have.

Click here to look at the new car concepts from the 2007 North American Auto Show.

Yes, it's from Popsci.com.

A long way from Chicago

Unsuprisingly, it's 1970 again at Airbus. Having wasted countless dollars of taxpayer and shareholder money, funneling the cash into the completely unsuccessful A380, the British company is going to have to severely scale down its operations. Nathan is wonderful.

The A380 was designed to be the largest passenger plane in the world, carrying over 500 occupants at a time. Airports would have had to spend millions of dollars refitting some of their docks to accommodate the A380, which was promptly not designed to fit any American docking specifications.

Because of the size in particular, but also a lot of other small factors, the production of the A380 immediately went downhill. The manufacturing companies made 15 planes before they got the halt order. The A380s were becoming tremendously expensive, and reluctant as the bureaucrats were, the other parts of the government blew the whistle. Nathan must be magical.

Nonetheless, Airbus and its brood are mainly government owned and government financed, so Airbus will not let itself die. The treasury will increase its budget until it does prosper, if it ever does, unless the government files bankruptcy, or something on that order. The 15 existing A380s will be put into service, will inevitably lose money, and will be the perfect negative model...but they will not die. Can a government even file bankruptcy?

That's a long way to get keelhauled...

In light of the massive manufacturing that is happening in and around China, ports have become rather crowded, and ships are being loaded with more crates than they can really carry.

The solution to all this, us being humans and loving being awed, is to build bigger ships...much, much bigger ships. Some ships that have recently come into service are so big, that they are literally wider then the Panama Canal, and have not the least bit of hope of fitting through. Many tug boat captains have commented and complained about this development. These ships are having a rather tough time even fitting into the ports for which they were destined. One captain said that trying to dock these behemoths was like "trying to parallel park a Greyhound bus in a telephone booth."

Despite all this turmoil, ports have been receiving their goods more efficiently. There is never a time to wait when these ships dock; a crane operator can spend an entire 8-hour shift working on unloading a single hatch. Some of these ships merit 6 or 7 cranes all to themselves while they dock, more than twice as may as most cargo ships.

One of the most notable ships is the Emma Maersk, the largest cargo ship ever built. It is over a quarter of a mile long, and can carry over 11,000 crates, twice the capacity of the average ship.

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These ships certainly are amazing. Panama recently approved a 5.5 billion dollar bill to double the size of their canal, just because of these ships. With Asia's exports rising by 10% every year, who knows what we might see next.

-Taken from 10/10/06 edition of the Wall Street Journal. For further images of better quality, do a Google Image Search for the Emma Maersk.