Cars have a wide operating band, which is why hybrids make sense. Fundamentally, hybrid cars want to run the engine at a narrow set of operating points that are most efficient, and use a reservoir to do time arbitrage on the energy generated during driving. It's more than just regen to recover energy already spent -- the motor also lets you navigate the engine map to pick your point of operation. Ideally, the engine and the wheels are fully decoupled, at which point the engine rpm would just be constant. The battery and motor just move energy around.
Planes aren't really like this, they're actually a lot closer to boats. They move from fixed operating point to fixed operating point, and the engine is optimized around this. There's a lot less fat to trim, because the engines already have a narrow operating band.
That's not to say that this won't work; Pratt obviously knows what they're doing. But it's probably not an accident they've gone for smaller turboprops. I actually think the biggest opportunity for hybrid propulsion is in smaller drones where you want high performance piston engines, because tip clearance becomes an issue for gas turbines. A turboprop might suffer similar performance challenges that would make a hybrid configuration make sense.
Edit: just saw a post below on the relevant patents. Looks like they're using hybridization to decouple the two shafts. Without the motors, they're coupled via the gas path. With the motors, you can navigate the maps of the two shafts independently. I'm guessing this lets them pick a combination of shaft states that saves fuel. Most of that is pretty uncontroversial, but I'm surprised the claimed fuel savings are that high. As I mentioned above, it's probably because it's a turboprop on a small aircraft.
This is mostly correct. The Prius is actually a series-parallel hybrid, as it maintains a direct mechanical link between the engine and the wheels (and the engine is capable of adding power to the wheels) but it also uses two electric motors to isolate the two degrees of freedom (engine rpm and wheel speed). This second part is the series bit: the wheels and the engine are, in principle, fully independent, because the motors can absorb or add power to the crankshaft and the driveshaft to hit a target rpm without changing the rpm of the other shaft. In practice, the Prius doesn't run at a constant rpm due to sizing constraints of the motors, as the mechanical linkage means that one motor has to be able to absorb the engine power and torque of the other motor, which is impossible across all conditions.
Most hybrids are actually parallel or series-parallel. Series hybrids are comparatively rare because the traction motor has to be sized for the full operational range of the vehicle. Their primary advantages are mechanical simplicity and packaging; even though the power electronics and motors are bigger, the lack of mechanical coupling means you can put them wherever is convenient.
This is a shame, and hopefully it reverts soon. I switched from Claude to Codex just before the Fable release because Claude doesn't follow instructions and goes off the ranch too frequently. I really don't want to have to switch back to what I consider to be a fundamentally worse model.
This is my experience with Claude as well, and the reason I switched to codex. Codex just seems far more efficient, despite the smaller context window, and it actually follows instructions.
This. German really isn't that difficult for an English speaker. And if someone really wants to make a home and build a life in a foreign country, why would they expect that they don't need to learn the native language? That seems stunningly entitled to me.
No, because the thread is about preventing crimes before they happen, and asserting that this is unquestionably good and an unambiguous moral position. It isn't, even if we accept that widespread enforcement of the law is generally something that we want.
1) The only difference between a just law and an unjust law is time. I have family members who needed to wear dog tags to drink in certain pubs because of the colour of their skin, and I'm not old. And yet such laws were widely supported (for various reasons) for a long time.
2) lazy governments often apply sweeping blanket bans and fall back to police discretion. Carrying a hammer? Technically illegal in my home country, and the police can stop you. Whether or not they have have reasonable cause to charge you is a different matter. If you look like a tradesman you probably won't be bothered, but if you don't, you're breaking the law.
3) Laws can be mutually contradictory until legally tested and a precedent is set. If you're unlucky, you could be the one who has to test it. Regulations are notorious for this.
I'm not saying that we don't want to enforce laws, because generally we do. But when and how laws are enforced requires nuance. And certainly the idea that always enforcing them is a net good is very, very far from the historical reality.
It's definitely not. The law is not, and never has been, a moral bar. A healthy legal system requires laws to be able to change over time to reflect society, and sometimes this requires that people be able to break the law.
It would depend on what the data says. By the time putting such systems into civil airframes is even a conversation, there will be an enormous amount of data generated by unmanned systems and military vehicles. If the data shows that a given system is acceptable, I don't see any reason it wouldn't be allowed.
That's not the same as saying that current architectures are acceptable, because clearly they aren't. But both neural net and stochastic controllers have been tested in aircraft since at least the 1990s. Probably earlier, but that's as far back as my knowledge goes, anyway. I don't know of any neural nets doing active control type tasks, but I don't see any intrinsic reason they couldn't be used as long as you can show that they're good enough.
When I last looked into it (admittedly a number of years ago now) this was true for remotely piloted aircraft, but there wasn't enough data on systems that pilot themselves with humans doing the navigating.
I'm not convinced that humans are particularly effective in emergency situations, especially when they're expected to go from monitoring systems that work 99.99% of the time, to suddenly aviating with alarms going off everywhere. I guess there's not really much of an alternative as it currently stands, but seeing how effective agentic AI is at chewing through data and analyzing systems makes me think that eventually, such systems will be used if they ever get to the necessary level of reliability.
It's unlikely; the energy density just isn't there, even for a hybrid system. Because of the way flight profiles work, you're still talking about enough battery to provide meaningful power for half a flight, which probably isn't feasible in the near term.
And it's not like the industry has missed this possibility. I've seen papers on systems as exotic as combining high temperature fuel cells (SOFCs, PCFCs) with the Brayton cycle to achieve a hybrid powerplant. The bar for novel propulsion systems in aerospace is extraordinarily high, higher (imo) than it is for automotive. The exception is unmanned systems, which are new enough and varied enough that there's been an explosion of activity, which has been exciting to see.
Aerospace as a discipline has tried just about every propulsion system under the sun. What you're proposing has already been flight tested on an unmanned vehicle, albeit with many smaller props for a larger effective prop disk than the two you're proposing. This is actually better, because electric motors want to use rpm control, so you need to keep the moment of inertia of the propellers low. The efficiency penalty of smaller props is overcome by having many of them arranged closely together to create a large effective prop disk.
For a hybrid system to be worth it, you need to claw back more efficiency than you lose in going from mechanical energy to electrical energy, and then back again. For cars, this is generally the case, because they're always accelerating and decelerating. Their wide operating band means that the engine will always be a game of compromises, which is why sticking a motor and battery in the loop and decoupling the engine from the wheels is beneficial. But planes aren't like that; they go from setpoint to setpoint, and they stay in a given configuration for long periods of time. They have very narrow, highly optimized operating bands, so hybridization just isn't as effective.
The philosophy in aerospace is more to build a better engine rather than to have more engines, and this extends to every aspect of aircraft design. Engines are already built to contain catastrophic failure, and the planes themselves remain functional for all but the most extreme situations. We're at the point where essentially every lost aircraft is a compound failure, with significant human factors contributing to the event. It's likely that we're on the pareto front of what engineering can reasonably accomplish, and the only gains in safety either barely nudge the needle of what we would notice (better materials, say), or difficult for the market to accept (removing pilots altogether).
Aerospace RND has been looking into hybrid propulsion systems for a long time. If there's one thing they aren't shy about pushing, it's the ability to go higher, faster, more efficiently. Such systems aren't used because they aren't yet good enough.
The economy is human-serving and human-legible because humans naturally create economies. Even in the most fanciful pie-in-the-sky projections of AI, human economies will still continue to exist and function, even if it's in the form of bartering or using side currencies the way US dollars are used in many developing countries today. You can't stop people from exchanging goods and services, and the need for that will exist until the end of time.
What's more likely to happen is that the economy might split. Organizations that have no need for human labor or input are essentially islands unto themselves. The only remaining economic link is the substrate -- the land we all inhabit -- is shared.
I'm not sure how that works out (and indeed, that's the worrying part), but what I do know is that human economies will continue. It's even possible that a split might be a good thing, because right now, our currencies span such vast scales of value that it's almost impossible to reconcile them all. Governments use economic health to both drive and act as a signal for the effectiveness of their policies policies, but what happens if the value created by organizations that only employ a handful of people vastly outstrips everything else? You could lose famines, plagues and homelessness in the noise, because the people economy no longer matters. And it's arguable that this is already happening in many countries, which is why so many voters feel like they're not actually being represented, i.e. they're not, because they already don't matter.
I have a few black wattle rounds that have been sitting around for years. I have a go at them whenever I feel like I need to be humbled. There's also a fallen tree at the bottom of our property that blunts chainsaws. It's been there for years and nothing seems to eat it. I harvest what I can from it, and a good sized chunk will burn through the night.
Planes aren't really like this, they're actually a lot closer to boats. They move from fixed operating point to fixed operating point, and the engine is optimized around this. There's a lot less fat to trim, because the engines already have a narrow operating band.
That's not to say that this won't work; Pratt obviously knows what they're doing. But it's probably not an accident they've gone for smaller turboprops. I actually think the biggest opportunity for hybrid propulsion is in smaller drones where you want high performance piston engines, because tip clearance becomes an issue for gas turbines. A turboprop might suffer similar performance challenges that would make a hybrid configuration make sense.
Edit: just saw a post below on the relevant patents. Looks like they're using hybridization to decouple the two shafts. Without the motors, they're coupled via the gas path. With the motors, you can navigate the maps of the two shafts independently. I'm guessing this lets them pick a combination of shaft states that saves fuel. Most of that is pretty uncontroversial, but I'm surprised the claimed fuel savings are that high. As I mentioned above, it's probably because it's a turboprop on a small aircraft.