alt Hacker NewsIn the video they claim the air is supersonic at exit, and point out the mach diamonds -- and I think they said 60 kilonewtons of thrust max, which is really a lot. So I think the volume of air would decrease roughly 60% from your estimate? I'm not a physicist.
I'm imagining this in two phases: phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air. Phase two - you use that compressed air which takes very little additional power, so you get to double up on force. I guess likely a 'running mode' where it's using some power to keep suction on.
I'm curious how much time you get at full blast vs 'just' enough to keep the car pinned to a wall, e.g. 1 vs 2 g.
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The "pin to a wall" part uses fans, not the cold gas thrusters. It can probably stay there until the battery runs out. The gas thrusters are only needed if you want to go 0-60 in .8s (with the Thrust version), or if you want to fly (with the Rocket version). Probably those only last a few seconds before the air tanks need to recharge.
Mach diamonds in a compressed air jet aren’t surprising. You can get them from a canned compressed air duster: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/18/canned-air-is-unexpectedly-s...
> phase one - you drive around, and excess energy goes to compressing air.
It's an electric car - unless you've got an incredibly long charging cable, there is no "excess energy" when you're driving around.
So let’s double the speed - 1.2 Ma. You need half the mass now - 25kg/sec. If you want to have 10 seconds worth of hover - that’s 250kg of gas. Plus the weight of the storage tank. Plus - this is the amounts for hover. Not for any extra force on top of that.
It still doesn’t make much sense to me. And that’s before considering what happens when you get rocket stream hitting a tarmac road. Never mind public roads, this sounds like a major hazard anywhere. Plus the quantity of compressed gas son board (if that’s how it works)… not a pretty crash. At these numbers, imagine 10MJ released all of a sudden - apparently that’s about 2.5kg of TNT.
Surely I’m missing something… as I say, I can’t make sense of it.