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Comment by RyEgswuCsn | Hacker News Reader

Petrol is just "better" coal. Except that you can't make flight with steam engines.

When room-temperature SC becomes possible, previously unthinkable applications suddenly become viable.

Just to be the pedantic one… I did some searching and found one single example of a steam-powered aircraft that actually flew. A bunch of other attempts are listed on wiki, all unsuccessful.

https://books.google.com/books?id=AygDAAAAMBAJ&dq=Popular+Sc...

And thanks, now I am researching small steam boilers that I could install in a Pietenpol homebuilt aircraft that a friend and I have been talking about building for a few years now. All I need is 30 kilowatts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietenpol_Air_Camper

I knew it!

Yeah, I really meant coal-powered steam engines.

If you built a coal gasifier, or maybe used a powdered/pelletized form of coal, I could see it being plausible. (but still dumb)

Having just returned from a week at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s yearly gathering, I’m kind of interested in using up some of my employer’s time to see if I can make it work, at least on paper. Luckily I even have a budget line available for silly studies like this.

Sweet! I found a video clip at https://archive.org/details/turner_video_11514 at timestamp 54:47 for about 20 seconds.

(Found that reference via https://web.archive.org/web/20030203103015/http://www.flyste... which I found via https://archive.org/details/australian_model_engineering-iss... )

But not visiting Andromeda, the next star system. Which would be the only such application I can think of now.

Maybe, but the same was already said when cuprate SC appeared in the late eighties with their relatively high critical T°, but they haven't really fulfilled their promise…

Iirc the LHC experiment would not be possible without those superconductors. That’s a pretty big deal.

Are they really the same though? I mean we are talking about room temperature, not the"(relatively) high temperature", a term that is arguably misleading to a layperson.

I'd imagine most people who are informed of the difference would recognize that cuprate SC is nowhere near as useful.

Every article older than a couple weeks talking about superconductors goes on and on about how useful they are, except for the logistics of keeping them cold

Example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnetic_ene...

Superconductors suporting high current are incredibly useful, but that's a big caveat. There's a reason MRI scans still use the super tedious helium-cooling instead of a much simpler nitrogen cooking allowed by cuprates: the cuprates SC aren't good enough for MRI.

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