It burned 330mAh/mile to carry the required batteries & food.

How did we end up with old fashioned stainless steel as the ideal material for making spaceships? Most of us older than millenials have lifted pieces of steel. It's very very heavy. Lions 1st encountered stainless steel on boats in the 1970's. Stainless steel became widely available in the 1930's.


Steel represents the reality of how materials engineering experiences 100 year breakthroughs followed by decades of small steps. For interplanetary colonization, we're still limited to the steam boiler technology our ancestors created. The last 100 years of carbon composites created small improvements but just weren't the generational advancement required. Old timers wondered what advancements happened since the X-33 to enable large carbon fiber tanks now & the answer was not really enough. Steel isn't ideal but it's all we have.

Boring side wheels (0 min 10 sec)

The lion kingdom gathered individuals weren't allowed to photograph their demo rides through the boring tunnel. The sled idea gave way to retrofitting existing cars with side wheels in front. It sounded rather bumpy, since the side wheels on a monorail are pneumatic, with their own suspension systems. The only video of a real trip was on CBS & like any supposedly autonomous car, it was actually being driven by a hipster who was always kept just out of frame. It was implied that the demo would be some fully automated vision of the future, but reality was more smoke & mirrors.

The side wheels do have some compliance. On the one paw, they avoided the complexity of distributing sleds to all the tunnels. On the other paw, it wouldn't have taken a massive sled to do what the side wheels are doing.

For the 1st time, an ESC blew up from getting wet. All 3 PFETs blew up. They had been flown in rain, flown from wet fields, but never blew up before. Dunking in puddles finally got one wet enough to do the job. Potted it in aquarium sealer. It's not reworkable anymore.

To make the miles more interesting, the decision was made. Originally wanted to discard the ears & just use the antlers, but didn't have the stomach to tear it all apart, despite being $1. The intact antlers are easier to break down. The nose was an LED light bulb with a red LED replacing the white LEDs. The red LED needed a diffusing cover in the form of translucent heat shrink which is no longer made.