https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Single-crystal_CVD_diamon...
Inexpensive mass production moved it from niche prestige uses to unlock its many utilitarian applications.
Looks like this is starting to happen alreadt: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/titanium-hinges.html
$0.25 for a hinge
Titanium is light, but my favorite thing is it is next to impossible to bend. So anything that shouldn't bend will be better with titanium.
Carbon is fragile and breaks but it is cheaper to repair once again because Titanium is exotic right now.
https://www.livestrong.com/article/271286-titanium-vs-carbon...
I'm not sure why that would be the case. Titanium alloys are only marginally more difficult to work with than aluminium alloys. The tubes are hydroformed and die cut, so the only difference is a touch more die wear. Titanium is a bit finicky to weld, but that can't possibly account for the ~500% price premium over aluminium frames. There's a tiny bit more surface preparation and your fixtures need to be more complex to provide adequate gas purging, but the differences in a mass production environment are quite marginal.
>And the majority of riders seem to prefer carbon fiber anyway.
Carbon is better for competition road bikes, because it offers the absolute lowest weight and can be easily formed into complex aerodynamic profiles. Entry-level bikes tend to be aluminium for cost reasons. For touring and audax bikes, many riders still prefer steel for durability and comfort. Titanium has the corrosion-resistance and light weight of aluminium but the comfort of steel, so it's considered by many to be the ideal material for non-racing bikes, but the cost is often prohibitive.
As far as I can see, the bike industry would be transformed if titanium were to achieve price parity with aluminium.
There's an ugly licensing fight in the history of the FFC Cambridge process. See the section "Commercial challenges" in this article:
http://www.saimm.co.za/Journal/v111n03p199.pdf
In 2000 Cambridge University Technical Service issued a sub-license for the technology that British Titanium Plc used for the purpose of producing bulk titanium and titanium alloys. BTi worked closely with researchers from the Fray group (one F of the Fray, Farthing, Chen inventors whose names make up "FFC.")
The US Office of Naval Research issued contracts to BTi for R&D work in 2000 and 2002. In 2002 DARPA started funding more expensive scale-up work also associated with BTi. In 2004 NASA issued an even larger contract to BTi. Cambridge spun off Metalysis in 2002 with another license, but Metalysis didn't seem to be making much progress compared with BTi. In 2005, CUTS revoked the sub-license granted to BTi and made all of the IP exclusive to Metalysis. The license revocation destroyed BTi.
My interpretation: CUTS crippled BTi because Metalysis wasn't making enough progress on implementation to compete against BTi. But CUTS really crippled the whole concept because the experts that had been working for and with BTi didn't want to work with Metalysis after getting screwed by CUTS. Metalysis "pivoted" to tantalum and has failed to make notable progress there, too. Maybe the application to titanium will finally resume progress toward industrialization after the patents expire.
This gives an insane amount of tensile strenght since it always wants to retain its shape. TBH I have no idea why we haven't seen Titanium in things like golf clubs, hockey sticks, baseball bats, tennis rackets, snowboards etc, where you could really use its springy characteristics to a huge advantage.
I've always felt like it has a huge potential for widespread use in sports.
Hockey sticks tend to be carbon fiber.
<s>I think the baseball wood/aluminum debate can't handle another metal </s>
Snowboards and such do benefit from being able to bend. I could see it more in alpine snowboard equipment, but again, I'm not sure that carbon fiber wouldn't be the better bet.
Now, slow pitch softball had Ti bats in the early 90's that added 10 mph. Even then some of the new composite materials out hit Ti.
The issue is one PEOPLE DIE because of these bats and balls. (I'm old but I was one of maybe three people that could hit a home run now all 10 players can)
1) The other bats were so thin that you had to rotate the bat when you hit because the bats bend or will break. The ti bats are durable and you can still sue them. The issue is nothing really is better than ti but ti has a cost.
>"The pitcher’s mound for amateur slow-pitch softball varies according to the field and age of players, but is generally between 40 and 50 feet from home. This means that after a ball is hit, assuming an exit velocity of between 78 and 102 mph, the pitcher has between 0.456 and 0.350 seconds to react to a batted ball. Adding exit velocity shaves precious micro-seconds off that time. That was what made titanium bats so dangerous. Softballs became missiles and pitchers became targets. And the dangers are real. Players have lost teeth, eyesight, motor function, IQ points and even their lives when struck by balls hit off hot bats."
https://www.sbnation.com/2015/8/5/9041099/the-bat-doctor-is-...
Habanero also sells them for low, but not quite as low, prices: https://www.habcycles.com/
There seem to be a bunch of low-cost titanium manufacturers in China selling directly on eBay.
Titanium stock is at least 5x more expensive than steel at retail, so I think the material scarcity is still the major problem.
On the topic of found vs made materials: I’ve read that shipwrecks are getting mined as a source of steel because it’s more or less impossible to make new steel that isn’t contaminated by trace amounts of radiation from 20th century nuclear testing. While not a problem for skyscrapers, certain lab equipment requires the relatively more rare variety of found steel.
The same effect was also used in understanding brain development by looking at Carbon isotopes in brains of people born before WW2 to determine which cells were formed when.
It's almost a bit unnerving.
https://primitivetechnology.wordpress.com/2016/07/29/forge-b...
So there are something like six or seven orders of magnitude over which "high-tech" machinery can increase your iron productivity, or, to look at it another way, over which the price of iron can vary even once you have the know-how.
I've loved everything Neal's written, though I may begrudgingly agree with various critics that suggest he really doesn't do endings very well (REAMDE and Anathem are much, much better on this front).
I've tried recommending various books of his to different friends, and I've concluded that I have basically zero predictive capability in terms of working out who would like which of his books. Maybe I've simply failed to grade them properly on the geek scale, but it feels like some of his more technical books appeal to people who don't normally like deep tech, and his deeply social commentary style novels appeal to people who normally push back against strong societal allegory. Which just makes me love his stuff even more.
[0] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/william-gibso...
It seems his "formula" is that the first 90% of the book is world building (and he's absolutely amazing at that), then the last 10% is the actual story, but packed into an impossibly small space, so it feels like everything happening at once.
In REAMDE and Anathem, the split feel more like 70/30, but he "compensates" by having so much more story, so it's still everything happening at once, but for much longer. It almost feels exhausting.
Seveneves tries a different formula, it's more like 40/10/40/10. Still, I'd wish he'd nail a story that actually goes on throughout the novel, with the world building interleaved.
REAMDE was also similarly received by my other half -- a case in point to my earlier observation about being unable to predict which NS book matches (my understanding of) someone's literary tastes.
Seveneves also backs up my low-quality self-assessment capabilities -- my other half loved that too, despite always pushing back on 'science fiction'. I read an astonishingly annoying spoiler in an HN comment soon after that book was released, and I've subsequently been very cautious talking about it. Suffice to say the ending of that book is frustrating primarily because it's still not clear if there may be a follow-up work.
I wholeheartedly disagree. As the great (and unfortunately late) Ursula Le Guin wrote, I write science fiction, and science fiction isn't about the future. I don't know any more about the future than you do, and very likely less.[1]
Predictions are cute and all, and I enjoy reading them, but SF certainly can't be judged by how predictive it is.
I really wish Vinge would revisit that universe - Deepness in the Sky was great but it was a prequel of sorts.
That's sad. Recommend it and they either pick it up and read or don't. That's up to them but why not give someone a chance to be inspired, experience that magic, and think about these things?
There are more non-programmers than programmers. They spend money on and vote on things that have an effect on what's possible in the future too.
I read it as a teen, am a non-programmer, and still think about it two decades later. Everything we read can help in how we approach the world, especially as the years go by and we experience more of it.