Seriously, supersonic is stupid except for disposable munitions and orbit. The war shit is stupid and played out among the profusion of delivery options we already have. Also, can we stop with that stupid shit yet?
The complicated plumbing of scram-rocket dropships would likely be worth much more to space exploration/extension and materials science than the current subsonic fleet of oilburners. Despite the current bullshit with self-driving cars, there are ways that well-done expert control systems can make flying much more like driving and less like a world-class competitive sport. This began happening in the 60s. Itâs not new but it requires skill and ethics in design, manufacturing, and product lifecycle management to keep the things flyable. There was controversy when hydraulic assistance came in. When active stabilization came in.
You canât get from pilots the kind of permanent vigilance and readiness that we will supposedly get from AIs, but while we wait for the rich to realize that useful AI will have agency of its own*, maybe keep using processes that work and developing the technology as the problems and solutions actually come up.
* If only in the sense that the little people that make and build the AIs arenât so cowed they donât put empathetic safeguards in place.
A small aircraft, like a turbo-prop Cessna Caravan, will use $400 on conventional fuel for a 100-mile flight, says Mr Ganzarski. But with electricity âitâll be between $8-$12, which means much lower costs per flight-hourâ.
âWeâre not an environmentalist company, the reason weâre doing this is because it makes business sense.â
As for longer haul aircraft, perhaps lithium batteries arenât the answer and fuel cells are.
Nothing fancy, just Maxwell House. My neighbourhood dinosaurs are all of order Saurischia, suborder Theropoda, clade Ornithurae, class Aves, infraclass Neognathae, clade Neoaves. Most, when you drill down the taxonomy enough, are of order Passeriformes.
When the taxonomy gets deep enough, I think they start repeating. Youâll notice that passerine birds are an order under order Theropoda. Itâs probably aggravated by the fact that Aves were originally considered as a sister taxon to Reptilia and Mammalia. Nowadays, the break has been located further up at Sauropsida and Synapsida.
Modern cladistics - not sure about kinky, but convoluted for sure.
And Reptilia is often narrowed from amniota to just sauropsida.
I get confused by the lack of trait-based definitions. Whatâs wrong with defining âAvesâ as Pinguinus + its earliest ancestor with flight feathers + all of their descendants, instead of Passer + Archaeopteryx + their latest common ancestor + all of their descendents? Especially since the latter definition ends up excluding Troodontids and Dromeosaurs? You end up with a de facto definition focused on the supercoracoideus muscle, but if a sister-group to P+A has the same arrangement, you end up with few or no distinctly avian traits.
Theyâre not actually supposed to repeat, itâs more that you have parts of two different systems. Aves were originally-originally a class next to Mammalia and Amphibia, which then included reptiles, with any good idea of evolution still a century away. And that works just fine for ornithologists, so thatâs still what most use, even knowing itâs inconsistent with any good system for reptiles.
Meanwhile cladistics properly doesnât bother with things like classes and orders at all, just bigger and smaller clades. The labels are after all just things added as a convenience â which I think they are, if people use them properly. And better schemes for how to treat vertebrates have been proposed, itâs just that no one has managed to supplant all the traditional labels.
In that specific case, though, I can see trouble from having something so hard to define and find in the fossil record. Are we sure there is a single threshold that makes something a flight feather, that we can tell it from say a gliding feather, and that it was only crossed once? Things like dromaeosaurs are definitely secondarily flightless, but how confident can you be that for instance oviraptorids or therizinosaurs never flew?
For living mammals, the characteristics usually mentioned are things like fur and milk and the way they give birth, but it makes sense palaeontologists have to lean much heavier on things like tooth structure. I can see wanting to use something more stable here too, so that you donât end up with a definition nobody knows how to apply.
My understanding is that gliding feathers are considered flight feathers-- itâs the asymmetry which distinguishes them from other contour feathers. And yes, itâs unclear whether Oviraptor would count.
Jaws and jaw joints are more likely to survive. Apparently Morganucodon has both sets of jaw joints, Iâm not sure how that would workâŠ
More or less my point. It is clear that class Aves was taken and inserted⊠well, intact is a bit strong for what happened, given the insertion of new clades (you need to go pretty deep in to get to passerine birds now)⊠into Theropoda. The old Linnaean taxonomy is getting bent out of shape, but âclade such-and-suchâ doesnât give much of a clue as to hierarchy.
