sneakeypete

Its not a cheap method, when you consider all of the medical costs associated with it.

Having played around with Cities in Motion 2 quite a lot I learned that the main thing to do is to avoid bottlenecks, its not so much about the width of the road but the amount of waiting at lights which kills things. An ideal way to fix the above, for example, would be to get the next door tile and build another freeway offramp from the main route straight to the industry zone, meaning you now have two intersections to cram all that traffic through instead of one, for example.

If you use a 3 lane highway for the last segment before the 4 lane intersection you should end up with a straight though, left, and right option.

How Fiddly is it upgrading streets, eg non tree lined to tree lined?

While at first you might think AWD will only have an effect when "drive" is applied to the car, you need to remember that it works both ways: engine braking will be applied to the drive-train in a much different way than a typical RWD or FWD car, and this will change the dynamics of the car during cornering and braking.

I think you may be slightly underestimating the amount of effort that is required for this cars. We're talking centimeter accurate mapping of the surrounds. To do this for the whole country, and then to somehow get governments to actually tell you where all the road works are (good luck) is certainly possible but will take a whole heap of resources. Hence my earlier point about it probably being a gradual transition, some of the self driving highway stuff doesn't need that as all it needs to do is follow a line. I do love how with this (and other new tech, say like 3d printing) whenever someone brings up a major problem with it "oh but don't forget technology advances so fast i'm sure someone will figure it out *real* soon!" the issue is that the majority of work conducted by people so far has been in refining the Laser based systems. However due to the way they interact with light, there is zero way that you can get them to work in rain. Its not a matter of refining them as I understand it, it just won't work, so they'll have to start from scratch with another sensing system presumably. At least all of the control systems can be continuously updated however.

Duke summed it up well. Its probably also important to note that companies like Google may not be the actual way that the technology is adopted over the coming decades. Despite your thoughts, the big car companies don't really have a problem with this (after all, they still sell the cars) and it will probably be them who, slowly and surely, add more and more autonomous features to cars. I'm pretty sure, for example, Mercedes is working on technology that can drive your car on highways in clear weather, of course you still have to be behind the wheel etc, but it will be gradual things like that that will bring around truly self driving cars, but it will take time.

The thing to remember about AWD (and 4WD) is that the D stands for Drive. If you don't have your foot planted, it doesn't actually do anything. It can however be very useful when driving in conditions that would break traction with just a single pair of wheels driving, eg wet conditions or acceleration under cornering. Having a rear biased (power is only sent to the front when the rears start to slip) system in my car is interesting, particularly coming from the RWD only model. I have to avoid the instinct to counter steer if i'm in a corner and it starts to let go, because now the front wheels are driving also and counter steering would make them pull me off the corner. However, when it does kick in its an amazing feeling. It feels as if the impossible is happening, or as to put it the way many others have talking about the car "its breaking the laws of physics".

The new Subaru WRX will be priced sub 50K brand new here, which is probably Sub 40K in the American market i would assume. Quite a bit of bang for buck

That's pretty much correct. You do get some advantages with E85 due to its higher octane rating allowing you to get more power at the wheels per unit of energy burned , but that's probably in the order of 1-5% at a guess, but in general the price of E85 isn't low enough to make it economical compared to straight petrol. If i wasn't looking for a cheap power upgrade I wouldn't be looking at it.

We (mostly) make it from the byproduct of producing sugar from sugar cane, though a small proportion was made using wheat in Australia. edit: and Soghum, a new plant using mainly that opened up here a year or two ago, only 40km from where i'm based on site currently actually. That also explains why they're growing so much dam Soghum here!.

I'll be getting my car Retuned to run on E85 later in the year, its nothing to do with being green, as i'll probably be seeing a 40+ Hp gain from doing so with identical components

I'll be getting my car Retuned to run on E85 later in the year, its nothing to do with being green, as i'll probably be seeing a 40+ Hp gain from doing so with identical components

For those playing in the USA, the 1989 R32 skyline models will be 25 years old this year, so allowable for import into the USA under the 25 year old rule (eg, not needing crash tests, smog tests and the like). Rumour has it that people are stockpiling the cars to sent to the states, though take that with a grain of salt, but if you did want one you can now (soon) get one in the USA.

That's subjective! And i suppose its obvious which way i'd lean. As far as speed goes, my car's making 360hp at the wheels currently, and hopefully 400+ once i get it on E85, so its got stuff covered there.

Mitsubishi just started selling a plug in Hybrid SUV here with a 50km electric range, though it does need a special socket for charging. (15A 240V). I've recently upgraded my car... for a 2 year newer one. This ones only a 20 year old Nissan! Would like to see most American cars run rings around it, particularly any from the era...

My mate is testing a few different 60 buck ones out, I'll be getting one once we settle on what is good bang for the buck.

By all accounts, Sochi is away from the more volatile regions. You have to remember that it is surrounded on one side by water, the other by mountains and the area on the other 2 sides is quite narrow, so presumably having some sort of major security screening zone on each end is much easier than most other places.

That would be equivalent to a brand new high-quality autobahn from Madrid, Spain to Sofia, Bulgaria, except instead of Madrid you have Slough (roughly Darwin's size in population). If you could travel the entire distance and maintain the current land speed record, it would take about two and a half hours. The same argument roughly holds for Adelaide-Perth. Darwin-Perth is pretty much Madrid to Moscow. To further that, for a road with that level of traffic, you really do only need: overtaking lanes at regular intervals or other terrain features (hills that will slow trucks down), good quality road and shoulders, and well designed intersections (no crossroads behind a crest). Most of the Darwin to Adelaide and Perth road has that from what I gather, bar perhaps adequate overtaking oppertunites. Even full grade separate dual carriage way from Brisbane to Townsville is probably not necessary or going to happen for half a century. What they are doing, however, is upgrading the bits where the road is on a terrible alignment, and putting in heaps of overtaking 3 lane sections.

Sunny old Queensland is reviewing the speed limits of a whole bunch of roads, from suburban arterials to outback highways. Rumours range from 130km/h limits on most good outback roads (eg, full size shoulder, no surface deficiencies, lots of overtaking lanes) to only upping the speed limit on the M1 (best bit of freeway in the state, built to the best standards possible really) to them lowering all of the speed limits . It is worth noting that the leader of our state government is a Civil engineer, so hopefully he's made sure that this is pragmatic approach and not a "aaaaaaaahhhh speed!" thing. Either way, should be interesting seeing what they do mid next year when the report is due out. I

The issue may be that even if the land was given away to agriculture for free, for example, it might not actually make any profit at all, or might require way to much capital to get to a point where it is.

Has anyone got any good maps on this? Level of vacant blocks vs city limits might help to explain things a little for some of us here. From what i'm understanding from all i've read, you've basically got a decently functioning downtown, a ring of vacant/abandoned blocks around it up to the city limits, and then a ring of decently functioning suburb cities around the outside of the city limits? Is that a semi accurate description on what's going on?

First rule of floods: don't drive into them. Though i guess stopping a train on a dime can be a bit harder.

Blame steam for that one. I think PC games are selling just fine, its just where they are being sold which is changing. Not to mention the explosion of indie games being made and sold these days, something which is much harder to do on other platforms. I don't think PC gaming is going anywhere anytime soon. In fact, i think PC gaming is about to explode, in that the next generation of "consoles" are just pre built PC's in custom cases with their own OS. The architecture being used on them, the PS4 is x86 based, from what I can gather.

Here's the thing. People look at a 3d printer on the internet that costs 500 bucks to print some plastics, then think that they'll be able to print an (entire) metal gun with it in a few years.Or decades. I'd even go as far to say you might not be able to do it affordably this century, but that's a little to much time to predict. Point is, its an entirely different level. The only viable Rapid Prototyping method that I can remember that could create ready to use metallic parts of quality good enough to be used in the working components of a gun (eg, barrel, slides, gas chambers) is Laser Sintering. Also called Direct Metal Laser Sintering, Selective Laser Sintering, etc. Basically, its a similar process to most 3d printing. Using your 3d model that is split into layers, a thin layer of metallic power is spread across the work surface, then a laser is used to heat up the powder in the desired areas to a temperature that it Sinters together, basically that it starts to melt a little which fuses the powder. Then you put down another thin layer, and repeat the process. The resulting solid isn't quite a solid (~10% porosity form what i remember), and as a result it isn't as strong as a well cast or forged object of the same material. The issue is that, according to the professor at a friends materials lecture, these machines cost around the 9 million euro+ mark, particularly because they need a very powerful laser (100watts, or so). There is also the issue that the metallic power used is an explosive when suspended in the air, and is very hard to produce. None of these things lend these machines to being part of the every day home's tool shed for a very long time. None the less, these machines are very important and useful for manufacturing. No tooling required, you can make impossible to make shapes, no wastage of material (very important for the aerospace material when dealing with titanium), and its possible to create materials with more alloying elements in them than you can actually dissolve when melting it, which in some cases can double material strength. The same Professor believes that 3D printers of this type will probably be used is almost all manufacturing eventually, for anything with lower volume production runs.