My first technic lego set was a bunch of gears and a motor with one of the models being a multi-speed gearbox. Had no idea what it was until my dad explained it.

Not that it paid off later but building it and adapting it into other awesome models was the most interesting thing I got out of my first 6 years of education other than basic literacy.

You would like formula off-road, Icelandic off road racing. Those cars have no electronics, just 800 HP motors, industrial gearboxes, and military axles tied together with steel tubing. The things they can do with that minimalism are astonishing.

This is all fine, why not. IMHO Formula 1 is basically approaching this from the other shore most of the time.

Racing cars used to be about adrenalin, taming a beast, surviving unlikely odds and so on, an adventure for gentlemen.

In the last 40 years it has become a competition in pushing buttons, mostly.

If racing cars can have ABS, automatic gearboxes, power steering and all, why not an electric motor?

I still think it is sad and I am glad I saw F1 in the 70s.

It has a fan driven by the main gearbox. It's pretty rare for those to fail, but does spin like it lost control of yaw though. My first thought was since it's landing so close to the edge of that cliff, if the wind is moving from the right to left, there is going to be a big updraft coming over the cliff.

Watching it again, it looks like the pilot is having to fight some wind and seems to be having trouble keeping it down. Between 40-45 seconds, it looks like the wind changes as the helicopter appears to lift up and weather-vane into the wind just before losing control.

I found this video which is in German. If the Google auto-translate isn't too off, it says the cause is still unknown, but whoever they're interviewing at the end speculates that the helicopter was too heavy for the altitude it was operating at.

The behind the scenes movie was just posted to Jalopnik with more details about that $2 million Ferrari (that they broke the suspension and gearbox, and almost crashed into a tree).

http://www.redbull.com/jp/ja/motorsports/stories/1331788598091/f40-behind-the-scene

Yes they did.

Found a press release.
http://www.renovomotors.com/marty-press-release/

"MARTY was built in collaboration with Renovo Motors, an automotive start-up based in Silicon Valley that specializes in building advanced electric vehicle technology. Working closely together gave the Stanford team early access to a brand new platform derived from Renovo’s electric supercar that delivers 4,000 pound-feet from on-motor gearboxes to the rear wheels in a fraction of a second – allowing precise control of the forces required to drift."

The sequential gearbox "flappypaddles" is an option that almost doubles the price of the car, but it IS an option.

Well, they've been doing that for years.

But I don't see this as a reboot. It's a very respectful coat of polish on the original. There's a 37 minute gameplay demo, and one of the artists even talks about resisting the urge to play George Lucas.

Also mod support!

Frankly, Gearbox are doing a lot of things right here and earning a tonne of goodwill from me.

No gearbox FTW!

The prop, yes.
The gearbox....there ISN"T ONE!!! These motors are usually direct drive to the flywheel, no gearbox at all. It's a motor with a shaft welded/bolted directly to the flywheel and a prop on the end of the shaft. You take it out of 'gear' by lifting the prop out of the water. (no reverse)

Maybe it DOES eventually wreck the blade and gearbox...

how.. how does it do that without totaly wrecking the blade and the gearbox?

The Thai have a lot of practice with these. They start with car or motorcycle engine, mount on a boat and then weld a rod with a prop to where the gearbox would normally go.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-tail_boat

Well... My mom filled out a raffle ticket on my name when i was two, we won a SAAB 96 and traded it for this model, 99. Almost the same color (metallic paint was for US export model...). My family kept it for 25 years, it served us really well. I learned to drive with it and that thing handles like a dream (it has heavy steering but is is so stable and responsive, just wonderful, plus ours had aftermarket short gearbox from police unit and bored cylinders, small tweaks to oomph the torque for caravan use. Finnish police used SAAB for a loong time, it accelerated like a rocket..).

Seeing the inside of that just brings me memories. Mom, Dad, my big brother and me and a full sized double bass, all inside (you can't transport it outside when it's freezing, the thing can explode..). It meant that i had to ride shotgun, seat fully front and back against the front door, head on dashboard. Backseat folded and mom and bro at the back, equally cramped. We used to say that first comes the bass, then the family if they fit in and there is always room in the boot (joke.. ). The day he started to play cello was a blessing and a curse. Have you ever had to live with a person that learns to play cello? It's horrible but i paid him back when i got full blown PA in my room, cabinets from floor to ceiling.. Musicians family is always a bit eccentric and weird..

My dad still has SAAB (fourth one) as they are just amazing to drive, handles winter conditions like nothing and are great for long roadtrips. I just hope i can get him the Citroen CX he has wanted from his teens...

Honor system mostly especially in wider open area environments. Smaller fields and indoor fields may have a match coordinator also serve as an "acting" ref.

From experience, the orange tip is a massive grey zone, with enforcement very arbitrary. That's probably why the owner was able to get by before, but suddenly not able to now. I used to keep an orange ribbon around so that any time law enforcement of any type showed up, I would wrap around the end of my barrels so it would "technically" comply, just in case.

As for the internals, to give an idea of how different they are, theres usually two "barrels" to the gun, the outer cosmetic barrel and the inner proper barrel. To say that airsoft weapons can be easily chambered to fire real bullets is like saying you can get them to fire out of a metal pipe. The upper and lower receiver internals are, for electric, a mechanical gearbox that has more in common with an RC car than a firearm. Gas is even more "different" as all its doing is pressing a button on the magazine to release the gas and launch the BB.

All of this doesn't even touch upon the fact that ATF defines the firearm portion of a real weapon to be the lower receiver and not the upper receiver. Thats where generally the firearm bits that do most of the real work are. So to say that an airsoft gun could be converted from the shell of an airsoft rifle would conflict with that lower receiver policy.

By the way, in the airsoft community, "any kid, any parent, any adult going out of the house with this..." would usually get you kicked off the establishment for doing something that stupid. Gunbags, fucking gunbags.