... You don't necessarily need high power, modern silicon is now up to gigahertz speeds anyway, this bit is if anything getting easier. Some designs just stick...
... True. Spectral purity seems to rule out ordinary Klystrons. Silicon devices are much less efficient than tubes, AFAIK. Traveling wave tube (TWT) amplifiers...
... Well, notably the E-M physics is identical to that of laser power beaming, so if you really don't think this will work, your laser space elevator climbing...
... The SE laser beaming is expected to have not much better than 1% overall efficiency (yes, 99% losses), which is what makes it (sort of) realistic. Even so,...
... No, that's a different problem completely. I actually tried to design a laser beaming system for a rocket. It seemed to work great, but the rocket was...
... I have made another attempt to dig up evidence on useful wireless power transmission. What keeps cropping up is these lines from Wikipedia: Wireless Power...
A point that's been mentioned but not emphasized is that end-to-end efficiency isn't the be-all and end-all of the analysis here. DIE SONNENLICHT SIND FREI up...
... True. But there is plenty of free sunlight on the ground, too. Any chance of economic viability vanishes when transmission losses cancel the insolation...
... year old ... I was trying to make the point that building an efficient WPT system requires a little more than doing the maths. People like Brown have tried...
... That's simply a total mischaracterisation of the technology, and an insult to Brown, he was in no way at all unsuccessful. He was flying helicopters, and...
... I don't know if your design included adaptive optics, but it is quite clear for the reasons you mention that AO is a must when beaming from the ground....
... Browns experiments were great and very successful. But neither he not anyone else succeeded in transmitting power over more than a few meters at more than...
... The short range transmitters show that the transmitters can be reasonably efficient, and the long distance transmission shows that the receivers are...
... reasonably efficient, and the long distance transmission shows that the receivers are efficient. Everything in between is standard beam physics. ... Both...
... "Plenty of incentive for decades" -- please elaborate. What was the incentive in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s? ... http://www.eagle.ca/~gcowan...
... I'm just glad we have you here to tell us what is hard and what is not. DIffraction limited microwave transmission is considered to be hard? That's news to...
... The ability to efficiently transmit power without wires has plenty of applications. In particular, supplying energy to inaccessible areas. All the research...
... Are you seriously saying that we don't need to build a functioning system because our computer models tell us it is trivial? Why, then, would Brown and...
... You know, I've always considered it to be a really, really bad idea. However it would solve most of the windshear problems if you put a large balloon at...
... go horizontal in low winds; which otherwise has no solution that I'm aware of. Make the bottom 30 km of the SE circular in cross-section rather than thin...
... That would be one massive, *massive* elevator. For a 1cm diameter, with useful working strength of 65 GPa CNT, the payload carrying capacity would be over...
... Whoops, meant to say "pencil LEAD." And admittedly, I didn't give any consideration to accuracy, was just trying to convey the impression "thin." ... I'd...
From http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/09/advance-in-separating-carbon- nanotubes.html Carbon nanotubes are very strong and light and can be 100 times stronger...
... You want a high ballistic coefficient, not a low ballistic coefficient. Thin is bad because it has a low sectional density. Cylindrical shapes aren't very...
... I'm not, but these guys pretty much are (>96,000 ft): http://www.jpaerospace.com/pongsat/away25.html ... Yeah, right. ... -- -Ian Woollard We live in an...