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Re: ALF: why not DRSSTC?

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

At 02:35 PM 9/21/2005, you wrote:
Original poster: Mddeming@xxxxxxx
In a message dated 9/21/05 2:14:14 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, tesla@xxxxxxxxxx writes:

Sometimes investors want "high risk, high reward", and leave the
steady conservative advances to others.  Compare, for instance,
Rutan's approach to human space flight and NASA's.

Such investors are few and far between in today's litigious culture. In 1961 there were approximately 20,000 people in the US directly engaged at different levels in non-government supported rocket research. Today you can count them all without taking off your shoes.What makes "visionaries" newsworthy is that few financial types have the cojones to go for broke with large-scale temperamental technology. To most monetary backers, the forseeable difference in financial return between DRSSTC and OLTC at today's state-of-the-art is not commensurate with the risk of it bombing on first light, or having shaky operation.

Matt D.

And, this presumes that one builds ALF for monetary return. What if one decides to fund it because it might be fun? Paul Allen isn't going to get rich on the Allen Telescope Array. On the other hand, his $10M+ investment is probably chicken feed in his context. http://astron.berkeley.edu/ral/ata/ or http://www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179146

One can "invest" in something without expectation of a financial reward.

Unfortunately for Greg, ALF's budget is a bit beyond the MacArthur grant category, which is a shame, because it's probably more likely to get funded as a monument to creativity than as a practical test instrument.

The field of EMP immunity, in general, has other ways to test things (they like big TEM cells and such).
The lightning protection equipment (i.e. lightning rods, etc.) business, while big in a total dollars sense, isn't big on investments for developing better simulators. Partly this is because many products sold in that business are pure hokum ("static cats", "porcupine balls", and the like) and the last thing a seller of such a thing wants is proof that it does no good. Besides, the rest of the stuff they have now works well enough (i.e. the Franklin rod and conventional grounding).

Several scientists at ERICO (a big maker of lightning protection equipment.. CadWelds, air terminals, etc.) proposed building a large simulator that could accurately simulate the E field just before a stroke, and published some design data. This is different than the usual Marx type generators which simulate the stroke after it's rolling, with the classic 2/50 waveform, for instance. The latter is useful for designing and testing distribution equipment.

No joy for the scientists, who were really interested in finding out more about lightning attachment processes.