One thing, now that I think about it, we’d change the basic layout of car vehicles. Front wheel drive no doubt would be more common in smaller cars, while in larger cars (which tend to “torque steer” if they’re front wheel drive), the transmission would probably be around the rear axle, which would make weight balancing easier. I also think that if we’d have known that there would be significant advantages to radical streamlining, we’d have gone with “flat” engines instead of Vee shaped ones, as these would allow for a lower profile front end.
If a language borrows words, it doesn’t have to borrow the syntax with them. We borrowed the word “satay” from Indonesian, but more than one of them is “satays”, consistent with how plurals are formed in English, not “satay-satay” as it would be in Indonesian.
I disagree. 4 cylinder engines are already inline, and the reason bigger engines use a Vee is to keep engine vibration down. 360 degrees divided by eight cylinders times two cycles per power stroke gives 90 degrees, while in a six cylinder engine 60 degrees is used (360/6) You can do a flat or inline 6 or 12, but anything else will require a complicated balancing shaft.
Eh?
There were plenty of flat- and straight-layout engines back in the day; they didn’t work out, for the most part.
Boxer-style flats are noisy and need big flywheels, and conventional flat engines need two crankshafts. Inline engines are fine to a point, and once you reach that point you find that the engine block is poking out of the front of the engine bay.
In any case, the most popular configuration of all is still the inline four.
Actually, straight 8 engines are said to be extremely smooth in operation, and the reason we went to the Vee shape for them is that it enabled a much shorter engine block. I admit that getting the kinks worked out of a flat engine would have been tricky, but not impossible. It was Walter P. Chrysler who figured out that by slightly angling the V-6, it enabled you to have a very smooth running engine. He was so impressed with it that he drove to Henry Ford’s house (this is when they were fierce competitors) and demonstrated it to Ford. Ford, however, wasn’t impressed and thought it was a bad idea. (He also turned down the VW factory after WWII.)
An inline-4 sticks up, unlike a flat engine, so it doesn’t have the low-profile advantage of a flat engine. (And 6 cylinder flat engines can run very smoothly, it’s what Tucker used, and nobody’s ever complained about the performance of the Franklin engine’s performance.) GM wants to use what they call a “pallet design” in their fuel cell cars (if they can ever get the fuel cell costs cheap enough), which would have everything basically in the floor of the vehicle, thus allowing you to use the same basic platform for a wide variety of vehicles. You could do this with conventionally powered vehicles, but the costs of switching over production lines are way too expensive.
In almost all such cases, a very easy way to design for future compatibility is to have a single encoding that means “Unspecified, for future use” and, when it gets to that point, to add on extra data. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that all the old code will work magically, but it does mean that future additions can really be additions; they won’t change the way all the earlier encodings work, and by the time you get there, the hardware to handle larger data values will be cheap.
Most compact cars built today are front-wheel drive; however, this has been the result of a long evolution of suspension and transmission systems to permit the front wheels to both steer and drive, which requires both very complex design and mechanical components that can withstand millions of cycles without wear. Just understanding the advantages of FWD doesn’t mean you’d be able to implement it without a similar evolution of technology.
The advantage in placing the transmission adjacent to the engine is that it keeps the mass closer to center (reducing its influence on the rotational inertia) and reduces the length of the powershaft between the engine and transmission, thus reducing torque losses and vibration between the engine and tranny. Having a long shaft from engine to tranny will result in shaft torsion and feedback into the engine, which could be significant if you get near some kind of resonance in engine dynamics. Also, if there is a significant coupled load path between the engine and the transmission that is transferred through the frame or body it could result in NVH issues; hence, why the engine and tranny are typically mounted on isolators to the lower frame (on box frame or body-on-frame vehicles) or on the reinforced engine bay structure (monocoque bodies). Separating the engine and transmission by the length of the wheelbase typically creates more issues than it solves.
Flat (horizontally opposed) engines have been made by a variety of manufacturers, but have their own issues. While the flatness of the engine does permit a low center of gravity, vibration issues can be a significant problem, as owners of boxer-4 powered Alfa Romeos can attest. Proper design and use of a balancing flywheels can counter this, and the flat-4 engine can probably be ranked as one of the most produced engines in the world–but only by a few car manufacturers (VW, Porsche, Citroën, Subaru) have used them in volume, and fewer still is the use of the more balanced flat-6. I don’t know of any flat-8 automotive engines, and flat-12s have only been used in racing and high performance cars. Subaru has built their main platforms using a flat-4 or flat-6 powertrain primarily because it allows for easy design of 4WD/AWD transmissions, and have worked around the width problems by careful design of forward suspension/steering components. Most flat-engine cars are mid-engine (Chevy Corvair, Porsche Boxter) or rear engine (Porsche 911 family, Ferrari Berlinetta Boxer) because of the problem of fitting the engine in a front engine bay. In general, flat engines have been a niche application, whereas the overall compactness and light weight of V-engines, along with their ability to be balanced in a variety of configurations, has made them favored where inline designs are too long or heavy, despite the additional cost and complexity.
Stranger
Yeah. It would be a different story if human tongues could ejaculate. 
Decimalising the currency was the first step, in 1968 (IIRC). Once people realised that having Decimal Currency made a hell of a lot more sense than the £/s/d system they’d previously been using, it was a lot easier to persuade them to ditch inches, feet, gallons, and miles et al in favour of their metric counterparts…
You guys in the US have had decimal currency since kick-off, AIUI, and so your lack of commitment to Sparkle Motion- err, The Metric System- is somewhat mystifying, IMHO…
i think the main reason we dont want to go metric is because it costs money…alot of money. i mean our system is fine. my work is about 7 miles away from my house. how many feet is that? i have no clue. does it matter? no. being able to convert units of measurement doenst really matter all that much. i am about 145 pounds. how many ounces am i? no clue. does it matter? no. honestly i think metric countries get all to excited knowing they can just move a decimal point over to convert when outside certain professions there is no reason to in an everyday envoirment.
Clothing might be different. Without any preconceptions about what’s masculine or feminine, there’s no reason guys wouldn’t wear dresses, for example.
They already do, in some cultures. Traditional costume for Arab men is like a dress, while Arab women in harems wore pantaloons. Just the reverse of Europeans.
You do know that the first FWD vehicles were built in the 1920s, don’t you, and that one of the reasons for switching to FWD in small cars is the weight savings that come from not having a drive shaft?
Seemed to work pretty good for Chevy when they used it in the Corvette.
Alfa Romeos are pretty cars, but mechanically, no matter what engine they’ve got under the hood, they’re crap.
Yes, but a good deal of why they’re so limited in use can probably be traced to how expensive it is to do a radical change to a car. Retooling for cosmetic changes can cost around $1 billion, doing a radical change like scrapping how you’ve been building cars for decades can easily double the costs. Car makers also tend to be rather conservative when it comes to building cars. You’ll notice that they’ve had to be dragged kicking and screaming into making what are sensible changes, like improving fuel economy, lowering emissions and installing safety equipment.
I can name a number of relatively inexpensive items which could be added to cars that would either improve safety or performance, that are either not used or only in a few specialized applications.
Which, in a way, proves my point. The development of the Vee engine configuration was not easy at all, and owes as much to Henry Ford’s stubborness as it does to the engineers who developed it. Getting a flat engine to work can be done, but it takes someone willing to put the effort into it. Don’t forget that the only reason Mazda uses Wankel engines in it’s RX cars is because the president of the company when they were introduced was a protege of Wankel, and it’s kept in production out of loyalty to him, more than it is any technological advantage it might have.
Miles work just fine for the one conversion that really matters to most drivers- “how long is it going to take me to get there”. Freeway driving speed is around 60 mph, or one mile per minute. So if something is 75 miles away, and I can assume I’ll be going at freeway speed most of the way, I know immediately about how long I can expect the trip to take, no real calculation required.
It would be hard to figure out how many feet are in 75 miles, but I don’t care how many feet are in 75 miles. I care about stuff like how long it’s going to take me to drive to somewhere that is 75 miles away, and whether I should get off at this exit and find a bathroom if I see a sign saying “next services 50 miles”.
More than fifty years ago I read a short science fiction story about a mad scientist who builds the “perfect” woman. Since he was very logical, the result was rather odd. I don’t remember all the details, but for stability the body was cone-shaped and had three legs arranged like a three-legged stool, for safety the eyes were located in the middle of the body, etc. Not exactly a Playboy centerfold.
That wasn’t the issue on mainframes. Early code written for IBM mainframes used EBCDIC. Integer encoding in EBCDIC used 8 bits per decimal-integer digit as well as per alpha character. Back in the 60s and 70s memory and storage was tight and you didn’t “waste” two extra bytes to store the leading two digits. It was also hard to believe that code you were writing would last 30-40 years. I was a COBOL programmer in those days and am one of the clowns responsible for Y2K.
60mph is 100kmh. That’s just as easy to figure out if something is 125km away.
Dymaxion houses! Dymaxion everything!
Buckminster Fuller did have a habit of starting without baggage, but none of his ideas seem to have caught on. His Dymaxion house doesn’t have to look strange. It can be built to outwardly resemble a normal house.
His Dymaxion bathroom (link already provided by Tuckerfan) had the advantage of a faucet that faced away from you- eliminating splashing on your pants. His shower used less water.
I want a Dymaxion world damn it!
Not to mention the issue with having the sewage outlet right next to the recreational area.
As well as having the nutsack on the outside.