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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • To accelerate a vehicle we need to put kinetic energy into it and Power is the measure of how fast we can do that.

    From a technical capability standpoint, torque is a useless measure. With a motor of a given power you can always gear it up or down to whatever torque you need (assuming a lossless transmission system).

    If we take two identical trucks with 10k lb trailers on them and one’s a 800ft-lb diesel and one’s a 300ft-lb gas, both with 400hp, they sould realisticly accelerate and climb a hill at the same rate. The diference is the gas engine will be screaming at 6/7/8000 rpm and guzzling gas. (This also assumes no other factors like heat cone into play, the gas may not be able to maintain as much power due to cooling system designs or other factors).

    Torquey-er engines also tend to feel better from a driveability standpoint but that’s not representative of capability.

















  • I think that’s already the case in many situations.

    Thing is a given system is going to need a given number of sats in specific orbits. Sure you can add earth observation equipment (weather, sat imagery etc) to almost anything (albeit maybe not that useful in some orbits) but you can’t really combine Satellite TV and GPS.

    I’d also like to point out, every time Starlink launches, you get articles like these showing multiple streaks across some image from a telescope. Those images are 100% intentionally gathered. And Starlink is only that bright while maneuvering and very near sunset and sunrise. Once they are in their final location they dim down.