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Elon Musk: New Tesla Roadster will use Thrusters to Float Above the Ground

posted by martyb on Saturday January 12 2019, @09:42AM   
from the how-is-Moller's-Skycar-doing? dept.

MrPlow writes:

Submitted via IRC for AndyTheAbsurd

Elon Musk has a knack for tweeting out some real eyebrow-raisers. On Wednesday afternoon, he delivered, once again:

The new Roadster will actually do something like this https://t.co/fIsTAYa4x8

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 9, 2019

So, is Musk just joking around?

“I’m not,” Musk replied on Twitter TWTR, -0.66% to the delight of his fan base. “Will use SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultrahigh pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats.”

Can't help but think Musk is full of crap here - even with the "removal of the rear seats" idea, I doubt that a tank of that size using cold gas only could hover a car for more than a handful of seconds.

Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/elon-musk-new-tesla-roadster-will-use-thrusters-to-float-above-the-ground-2019-01-10

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Original Submission

• Re:Not only that Re:Not only that (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:01PM (3 children)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @02:01PM (#785501)

  You think he won't have the tank insulated? Dealing with cold isn't exactly rocket science, which Musk also does, BTW ;)

  My guess is he is just going to have a Roadster converted in to a form of hovercraft, which if Musk is tweeting about it should at least be feasible, though I doubt the practicality of it.

  Parent

• Re:Not only that (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:53PM

  by HiThere (866) on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:53PM (#785571) Journal

  My guess is that it only *would* work for seconds at a time, but that the engine would re-pressurize the system fairly quickly. There are times when "seconds" would suffice, and, as was noted above, while the car is "flying" there's no propulsion (unless the gas stream is angled, and then it's not very controllable).

  --
  Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.

  Parent

• Re:Not only that (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:57PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 12 2019, @04:57PM (#785573)

  Musk has other people do the rocket science for him. Considering that he can't figure out how to assemble the cars in a cost effective manner and the so-called autopilot feature will happily run cars into stationary objects, I'm sure as hell not going to trust these tanks to be appropriately engineered.

  Parent

• Insulating the tank isn't the entire problem (Score: 3, Interesting) by fyngyrz on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:42PM

  by fyngyrz (6567) on Saturday January 12 2019, @08:42PM (#785664) Journal

  You think he won't have the tank insulated?

  When you compress air, it heats up. Leave it alone long enough, and that heat will leak away.

  Now let it out — when the air expands, it will get cold — very cold if it was highly compressed.

  That is the problem. FYI...

  Compression:

  When compressed, gas molecules are brought close to each other and ultimately they start colliding with other air molecules. Due to this collision they get heated up to higher temperature. Therefore, compression leads to an increase in temperature of the gas.

  Expansion:

  The frequency of atomic collisions decrease as gas expands, therefore the gas gets cooler. Temperature is just the average heat of a substance. That is, if you take the kinetic energy (heat) of all the particles in a given volume, and divide by the volume you get the energy density, which we call temperature.

  --
  I think I'll slip into something more comfortable.
  Like a coma.

  Parent