The Mr. Fusion only powered the time travel circuits. It replaced the atomic reactor that originally powered the flux capacitor. That’s the whole reason they had to have the train push the car. Doc had to have a conventional fuel source to power the DeLorean’s internal combustion engine or find an alternative source of propulsion, like the locomotive.
BTTF III script:
Marty: Casually. Oh Doc, I tore a hole in the gas tank. We’ll have to
patch it up and get gas.
Doc: Frozen in place, expression changes. You mean we’re out of gas?
Marty: Still unaware of what’s wrong. Yeah, no big deal, we got Mr.
Fusion, right?
Doc: Mr. Fusion powers the time circuits and the flux capacitor. But
the internal combustion engine runs on ordinary gasoline; it always
has. There’s not going to be a gas station around here until some time
in the next century. Without gasoline, we can’t get the DeLorean up to
88 miles per hour.
A couple of days ago, I saw a BTTF-rigged DeLorean at the Montreal Comic-Con. For $20, you could sit in it. I declined, mostly because the thing looked too damn small to hold me without bending.
Oh I know about that whole part. My point is that none of thst matters if you have a working Mr Fusion. If a few bananak peels can generate 1.21 GW, then you can surely siphon off a few tens of thousand watts to run an electric motor to get you up to 88 mph.so rip out that shitty Renault motor and built and install an electric motor.
Also, it is far from trivial to build an electric motor that will get a car up to the required speed, or to connect it to the drive train once you’ve got it. Trust me on that; I have experience in these matters. Specifically, I have a DeLorean disassembled in my garage, awaiting just such a motor and conversion. Even in modern times, it’s not an easy task. If I had all the parts right now–massive motor, complex control circuitry, custom-fabricated mounting hardware and adapters–I couldn’t have it moving under power by Monday. In the Old West, building the motor from scratch with local resources and the tools in a smithy? It’s unlikely you could make it work at all, and if you did, it would take a very long time.
And an electric motor would be way easier than refining petroleum (in my vast experience in winding copper vs distilling…anything(for values of vast=minimal ) ) Doc already had much copper wire for his model train.
This statement can only be made in complete ignorance of the extraordinary effort it would take to wind a motor sufficient to drive a 3000 lbm car at 88 mph, notwithstanding that the only drawn wire available would be ~16 gauge telegraph wire which would result in huge, inefficient windings.
Here’s what I never understood: Doc careens up to Marty and his girlfriend, knocking over trashcans. He says in effect, “Marty, you have to come with me- your future kids are fucked up!” What was the damn hurry- he had a time machine. Go back in time now, or go back in time a week from now.
Nikola Tesla had been in the United States for a year at that point. What if he received a telegram asking him to work on a mysterious project in Hill Valley, California?
I didn’t bother to re-read the thread, but did anyone offer up the idea of siphoning out the gasoline from the DeLorean Doc sealed in the cave (since there’d be two DeLoreans there at the same time)?
Of course, once the Doc blows the manifold on the first or second day of trials, this becomes moot. Or maybe the sealed DeLorean was already too low on gas, but I doubt that. The gas would still be okay, since the Doc had only been there nine months.
The plan was already set to go when Marty took down Tannen. They didn’t have another plan in mind, and this was their best opportunity to execute the one they had, so they stuck with it.
Stranger On A Train has covered the difficulty of making such a motor. Modern motors that are up to the task cost in the neighborhood of $10,000; the price of a Tesla is not all about the battery pack. These motors are not easy to make, even now. Even if you could build a motor of equivalent power with 1885 materials, it probably wouldn’t fit in the car. As an electrical engineer who is currently doing exactly what you describe, only with modern resources, I’m confident in saying that it is not a viable solution to the problem in the movie.
Doc would have drained the tank for storage, because even if the gas was stable enough to be usable after 9 months, after 70 years, it would be a tank full of sticky muck at best. Once he did that, he had no reason to store it indefinitely; he didn’t expect to ever see a car again. He probably used it for something else, or even sold it to help acquire starting capital.
Also, the DeLorean in the movie was a touchy beast. It had already conked out or failed to crank a couple of times in ways that suggested problems with the fuel system. Even if they’d still had the gas, and it hadn’t broken down much, the car might well have choked on it.
none of you are thinking 4th dimensionally enough! Sure, the doc would have had to mount the Delorean on rail for it to smoothly accelerate to 88mph. But rather then try risky spirits to power the engine or restore to the “borrowing” of a high value asset like a train the doc could have made a simple rocket engine. Or rather several small rocket engines.
Fireworks and solid rocket fuel had been around for centuries and with mining nearby you can bet that explosives were available. Steel tubing wouldn’t be hard for a blacksmith to find considering its use for oil drilling/pipelines. Make several solid rocket boosters and ignite them sequentially until speed is >88mph. Such a system could have been built with a car battery and a series of copper wires. Timing would be spotty but a pocket watch and a crazy wild-eyed old man who claims to be a scientist in the passengers seat could probably get the sequence right. If the mythbusters can do it the doc can do it.
As an added irony the doc actually talks about rockets when hes gushing to his new love - which clearly affects his ability to answer the question “whats the right thing to do, as a scientist” - at which point he should have amended the train plan to avoid outright theft and destruction of property. Rocket motors would allow for plenty of testing and more than one attempt at time travel (since you could always make more motors and try again at a later date.)
More importantly: how the hell did doc get away with stealing and blowing up a train? The conductor they hijacked was the same one who talked to doc and Marty a mere week earlier to settle a bet they had about how fast it could go. Doc is clearly a unique looking guy and even with a bandana across his face that engineer would be able to describe some identifying features. Heck, the response the conductor gets to his question “is this a hijacking” from doc, “Its a science experiment,” is surely the kind of memorable reply that 99% of those town people will attribute to the eccentric blacksmith later that day when word has spread.
I always thought that Clara lied and said doc was with her during the incident, but Clara was on the very train that was stolen until she conveniently stopped the train and ran off into the wilderness. Not to mention all of the town saw doc and Marty rush off together after the duel so he obviously wasn’t with her all day. Just how did doc not get convicted given the obvious evidence against him?
Did the simple townspeople assumed a delusional Clint Eastwood stole it to win his bet that if, tarnation, son, you are in that big of a hurry that a train could do 90mph? And unaware of the incomplete bridge he accidentally ran it off a cliff to his death? The precedence was set in the prime timeline that you can only change the name of a ravine if someone dies in it (and we see it is called Eastwood ravine in the future so they must have assumed he died there.)
Doc and Clara must have fled to San Francisco via hoverboard immediately after departing the train. At 85mph with zero friction they may have been able to coast there right?
(Read some but not all of this long bumped thread, so I don’t know if this has been covered.)
They could have pulled a Bill and Ted: Marty says “when I get back to the future, I’ll come back again and hide a can of gasoline behind that bush.” Then he walks over and recovers the can of gasoline from behind the bush.