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Comment by state_less | Hacker News Reader

As neat as this sounds, in a Rube Goldberg sort of way, batteries seem more reliable without the moving parts. The new Lithium Titanium batteries are amazing. 10k cycle before loss of ~20% capacity and fast charge/discharge cycle of 6 min. Since they last a long time, less e-waste. And lithium is supposed to be relatively recyclable when the time comes.

We used to think building heliostats made more sense, but it turns out cheaper cells won out to complexity. I suspect this will be repeated in the energy storage market.

https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=LTO+cel...

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I would like to point out that moving parts are what keep our civilization running. Intricate moving parts.

To feed the intuition:There are machines that have run with minimal maintenance for hundred years, such as the original newcomen engines used to pump water away from mines.

Each time an assault rifle is fired lots of small parts work together in a delicately timed dance. Now, take an AK-47 - due to it's massive parts and loose fitting it can be filled with dirt and sand and happily continue operation.

And, it's quite hard for me to imagine the turbines in electric plants and all the "piping" around them are any less "rude goldbergish" than the Ares system would be.

Machines are quite durable if they are designed that way.

> Now, take an AK-47 - due to it's massive parts and loose fitting it can be filled with dirt and sand and happily continue operation.

Not quite. It is statistically more reliable in such conditions in a sense that it will have a higher mean rounds to failure number compared to most everything else. But MRTF won't be infinite. In fact, it'll still be low enough that you will definitely notice.

Then there's the reason why. Loose fitting and massive parts, yes - but that also requires overgassing to move those massive parts (and then it also moves them faster than they actually need to be moving to cycle). So you're basically sacrificing energy efficiency for the sake of some extra oomph to clear problem. On any cycle that doesn't actually have a problem to clear, the sacrificed energy is wasted.

Then there's the normal metal stress and fatigue when running something 24/7 non-stop. Here's what happens when you do it to an AK - the guy is running a full auto rental range in Vegas for tourists, and shared his experiences about how soon guns fail, their failure modes etc: http://www.ar15.com/forums/t_4_64/159106_AK_abuse__update_on...

Good points. I doubt any rifle can be fired continuously for hundred years :). A boring combustion engine would have been a better example of mechanical robustness all together.

It's fun to read about a guy who's clients pay for him to shoot an AK-47. Where I'm from a male goes to jail (or other service) if he refuses to train for it (well, a local copy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rk_62). Another man's hobby is another man's burden :)

Based on what the guy said, his clientele is mostly young men who play video games like Battlefield or Call of Duty, and want to see how the same guns there work in real life. So they literally come asking for "that gun that was in CoD", hence why he mainly stocks things that are trending in games and movies.

Apparently, it's also popular with foreign tourists; especially from Asian countries, with more extensive civilian gun control than in Europe, where many wouldn't even see a military (or military-looking) firearm outside of service. It got to the point where some ranges added signage in Chinese and hired Chinese-speaking instructors to cater to the new audience:

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2015-04/17/content_20457...

I would tend to agree that solid state is better than moving parts for reliability, but we have been building trains for like 150 years and the parts here that move seem to be just really big weights. We also don't have batteries that can do city scale storage economically, but a series of trains seems intuitively do-able. This is just intuition so could be wrong, but trains seem so simple.

Trains are not reducing in price like lithium batteries are. Lithium battery prices are coming down yearly. If it continues at this rate, I think we'll have a story like this about energy storage in 5-10 years where the price makes renewable storage the goto choice for general energy needs. That would be awesome, planet earth could use some good news like that.

South America produces most of it recycling may be clean but production seems dirty.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/23/battery-l...

I've just read through the article: what do you see as 'dirty' about the salars? The fact that workers wear masks?

Like any mining operation you have to move a lot of earth use a lot of energy and dig up large regions.

The processing of the slurry to get the lithium after it's mined. All that water needed in a very arid region.

It was in contrast to lithium being easily recyclable compared to the vast scale of mining it.

It is a bummer though that, from what little I know, the process to manufacture batteries is not good for the environment. That said, probably the process to manufacture all the parts of ARES is not either. And, probably, both of those issues pale at the moment in comparison to the need to shift to renewable sources of electricity.

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