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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

There's not much point to a 750,000 mile engine, as the rest of the car is worn out and rusted out at 200,000 miles.

> if we can have 80, 100, 150, perhaps even 200 mile-per-gallon combustion engines

Well, we can't.

Internal combustion engines have steadily gotten better, not stagnated.

In the 1970s, I heard all about oil companies buying 200 mpg carburetors to keep them off the market. My dad laughed at that, saying the military would never let patent law keep them from making 200 mpg tanks and stuff. Gas is a gigantic logistical problem for a mechanized military.

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>> There's not much point to a 750,000 mile engine, as the rest of the car is worn out and rusted out at 200,000 miles.

I've seen plenty cars get 300,000 miles here in Texas without a spot of rust on them. Do you live in Michigan or something? The salty states have only known rust and salt lol

300,000 is a long way from 750,000. Rust is only one of the decays that set in. I grew up in Arizona, where the sun would destroy interiors and paint. Cars also simply accumulate damage that is uneconomic to repair.

It takes a lot of work to keep an older car running. My truck is 35 years old, and the window rollup mechanism has disintegrated. The seals around the doors and windows have rotted away. Knobs are missing. The door latch bushings disintegrated and I can't find new ones. The trim, which was glued on at the factory, simply fell off. The paint is about as shiny as an asphalt shingle.

The engine runs fine, though :-)

> In the 1970s, I heard all about oil companies buying 200 mpg carburetors to keep them off the market. My dad laughed at that, saying the military would never let patent law keep them from making 200 mpg tanks and stuff.

I know nothing about that story, but the military is budgeted by Congress and commanded by the President, and thus subject to political influence. Plenty of the what the military does is inefficient economically and militarily.

Battles are won and lost based on gasoline. In the Battle of the Bulge, the German offensive failed when they ran out of gas. The Allied offensive in Europe was also limited by gas supplies.

Do you think any military is going to allow itself to be crippled by patents?

In WW1, the American aviation industry was crippled by patent lawsuits. The government put a stop to that nonsense and forced them to form a patent pool, so advanced military airplanes could be built.

During a war amongst peers? No.

Outside of that? Sure. Particularly if the crippling allows for an element of surprise and keeps that tech out of other peoples hands. Even without that though every country that isn’t spending the most it can on its military is choosing to ‘cripple’ it in favour of other things.

Do you think your enemy could possibly care less about respecting your patent?

Why is the US military sending them the designs and saying please don’t copy these?

We're talking about the US military and US patents.

Patents require the invention to be disclosed. Now the Atomic Energy Commission had some special classified patents that were exempt from that rule, but that is very much an exception. The whole societal bargain behind patents is limited time monopoly in exchange for disclosure.

> Do you think any military is going to allow itself to be crippled by patents?

That might make sense in theory, but the history of war profiteering, etc. is otherwise. Militaries are 'crippled' by poor materials (though 'crippled' is an extreme case) - especially at the beginnings of wars.

For example, many think most US airplanes are ineffective against serious foes, including the A-10, F-35 (not my opinion, but many think it), and all the older planes (including the new-old planes they recently signed to buy). That also applies to aircraft carriers. However, there are many vested interests in those weapons programs and they resist tooth and nail. Change requires aligning people within the national security community, the easy part, and then Congress and the President. Uniformed and civilian officials in the Department of Defense can be just as political and corrupt; many of both sorts go through revolving doors to industry and have careers invested in one thing or another, or simply, like many incumbents in many fields (such as IT), bury their heads in sand about change.

> allow itself

They have limited power to make these decisions, at least in democracies.

Minor aside to that; the US army just awarded a contract to Cummins to complete development of their new 2 stroke opposed piston engines.

https://www.cummins.com/news/releases/2021/07/30/us-army-awa...

Cummins and Achates Power was supposed to have delivered two working prototype engines to the US Army's TARDEC to be installed into a Bradley for evaluations in 2019. I'm assuming that they testing went well enough to prove that the engines are viable enough for further development.

Uncertain if the technology will ever meander it's way to regular car market, but interesting to see ICE development continue on.

Old 2 stroke diesels can start running backwards eg. If you nearly stall it. Blows the air filter off and starts sucking in air thru the exhaust.

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