Tag Archives: Future

We Handed Them the Market

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Related video: Range Anxiety — The Unreal Reality

I’ve been involved with EV power and propulsion for much of the last 30 years. My latest stint was at Wolfspeed, developing SiC power modules for EVs and fast chargers. When the EV market stalled and the company went into Chapter 11, I was among the people who lost their jobs.

I still think EVs are the right direction. I don’t own one. That’s not a contradiction, it’s the actual story, and the video above is where I work through it.

The short version: range anxiety was always overblown for most drivers, and the auto makers never built the product mix that met the needs of the broad market. Now the industry is driving hard away from EVs, especially in the US, and that’s just wrong-headed. The video closes on that but doesn’t dig into why. This post does.

The Part That Stings

While the US was arguing about mandates and turning the issue into clickbait, China was engineering.

BYD is selling comfortable, adequate-range EVs in the $15–20K range. That’s the vehicle that moves the majority of buyers. Not the Cybertruck, not the F-150 Lightning, not the Rivian. A practical car at a price most people can actually consider.

We handed them that market. Not through malice or conspiracy, but through a combination of policy that optimized for the wrong things and an industry that focused on protecting its margins.

The policy pushed hard for EV adoption with mandates, subsidies, timelines. Some of that pressure was probably warranted. The market would have gotten there on its own, but the question of when and at whose expense was real. The intervention accelerated some things. What it didn’t do was direct the industry toward the product that would actually move the needle for most buyers.

The industry copied Tesla’s playbook; premium vehicles, long range, performance, high price points. That was the wrong lesson. Tesla used that model to fund the manufacturing and infrastructure investment that actually mattered. Everyone else just took the margin and stopped there.

The charger network made the same error I described in a previous video: build for the metric that looks good in the grant report, not the outcome that matters to the driver. 97% uptime. 71% charging success rate. Two different measurements, only one of which tells you whether the thing worked.

Why Big Auto Isn’t Saving Itself

I always loathed the heavy-handed government push on EVs and what I read as gaslighting on the rationale. Mandates handed down by people who had never looked at a cost model. Timelines written by committees that had no idea what it actually takes to retool a supply chain or build an infrastructure.

At the same time, I think some intervention was warranted. Not because the market was wrong about EVs, but because the market was optimizing for the next quarter. And the externalities of the status quo were landing on people who weren’t in the pricing model.

Intervention at scale creates dependencies. The industry made bets premised on the government backstop continuing. When the political environment shifted, those bets didn’t just look bad, they collapsed. And the response has been to drive hard back toward gasoline, as if that solves anything.

US old-line auto companies have been struggling for decades, and the reasons are structural. They’re trapped by regulatory capture and built-in costs that make adaptation nearly impossible.

Start at the sales end. Their dealer networks are regulated state by state, which makes wholesale change all but impossible. Safety regulations run through a system where insurers push regulators to require improvements that the industry develops partly because those improvements push up vehicle margins. Manufacturing plants are at their core decades old, and the capital they represent sits on the books, write it down and you impair the balance sheet. Design is path dependent by habit and incentive: most changes are incremental tweaks to last year’s platform because that’s easy, cheap, and legible to accounting.

And the margin structure makes it worse. Bill-of-material cost for a vehicle increases slowly with size and content. Market value is largely bling-dependent. So the incentive always points toward large, well-fitted vehicles where the spread is widest, and away from the small practical vehicle where there’s almost none.

Meanwhile, the manufacturing model has already been cracked. A new generation of EV makers proved you can build at scale in the US, turn a profit, and drive down the cost curve without the legacy overhead strangling the old players. Big Auto is watching that happen and still can’t follow, because the legacy network isn’t just a cost problem, it’s a constraint on every decision they make.

Moving back to gasoline doesn’t fix any of this. It may help sales volume near-term, but fewer and fewer buyers are willing to pay up for big iron, and as the recent spike in gas prices reminded everyone, the cost of operating a gas vehicle is not as predictable as it felt a few years ago.

The wholesale abandonment of EVs is as wrong-headed as the mandates-first push that preceded it. You’re walking away from the future as it’s getting its feet under it, and you’re not fixing your actual problems in the process.

Different direction, same failure mode: optimizing for the political moment rather than the real problem.

What I Expect to Happen

The market will keep sorting this out despite the policy environment, not because of it.

Amazon is sponsoring the Slate, a small electric truck aimed squarely at the price point where the volume is. Ford is talking about smaller, value-forward platforms. The product mix gaps are starting to fill in, and the players doing it understand they have to meet buyers where they are, which is around $20K for a vehicle that’s good enough and built around what EVs actually do well.

BYD is a harder question. It was built on the back of Chinese state support and practices that wouldn’t survive scrutiny elsewhere, but that doesn’t change what it demonstrates: a level of technical maturity across product fit, design, and manufacturing that very few other automakers can match. Tariffs and regulatory barriers will slow it down. They won’t hold permanently. Some form of that capability will find its way into the US market, and when it does it will accelerate the shakeout that’s already coming for Big Auto.

Charging infrastructure will improve in the corridors where the economics support it and stay thin everywhere else, and that’s how it should work. Where it’s thin, the economics will eventually pull in local investors, the same way any other service infrastructure fills in. It won’t be fast, but it will happen.

The transition will come, just slower and more expensively than it had to be. The destination is probably the same. The cost of getting there is substantially higher, and much of the value being created will go to manufacturers who aren’t American. That’s the envelope effect of all the intervention and counter-intervention stacked on top of each other.

The engineers mostly knew it was going to be complicated. Technical change at a social scale always is. The complicated part is rarely the technology.

Mark Harris is a systems and mechanical engineer, recovering from a career in EV power electronics, and the author of Stranded in the Stars (Book One, The Sea of Suns Trilogy). He writes about engineering, technology, and the creative life at This World and Others. The Unretired Engineer is on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@Scifiengineer-09

Andy Weir’s Genius in Project Hail Mary

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Andy Weir has a rare gift: he writes ordinary people — genuinely, recognizably ordinary — who have a skill that is also recognizable, and then puts them in situations where their one extraordinary competence is the only thing standing between them and death (in the case of Project Hail Mary, the extinction of the Human race.) The heroism is quiet and technical and you could almost believe that you could do that in the right circumstances.

You believe it because he’s made you believe in the person first. I saw the movie. I read the book years ago. Both are excellent, and the movie is one of the most faithful book-to-screen adaptations in recent memory.

Like The Martian before it, the film sticks closely to the book in both thesis and spirit. That fidelity matters: both stories rely on the reader/viewer trusting that the protagonist’s problem-solving is real, not movie-magic. Break that contract and the whole thing collapses. Weir earns it on the page; the filmmakers preserved it on screen.

The one genuine gap between novel and film is interior monologue. Novels handle internal states naturally; movies almost cannot. But Weir constructs scenes that externalize internal conflict visually — and those translate superbly.

A couple of minor side arcs from the book are absent, and I think those were wise cuts. They deepened the protagonist on the page but would have felt excessive at feature length.

One thread that bothered me in the book and still bugs me in the movie: Ryland Grace is pulled into the program because in his post-doctoral research he had proposed that alien life does not require water and carbon — and had defended that position to a career-ending degree. When the AstroPhage is first discovered it appears very alien, so Grace is brought in for initial analysis. He then finds it’s made of the same materials as Earth life — which undercuts his entire reason for being there and threatens to sideline him. That it doesn’t is a good twist; go see the movie or read the book for how it resolves.

Here’s where my engineering brain creates further friction. The AstroPhage’s energy density is extraordinary, and the novel acknowledges this and hand-waves it away. I cannot see how any life form built on biology similar to our own could handle those energy levels — it feels bolted in, even if it probably wasn’t. Similarly, Rocky — the alien Grace meets at the target sun — turns out to be exactly what Grace originally proposed: a non-water/carbon life form, which feels a little convenient in vindicating him.

There are complaints about Rocky delivering a specific thematic point about first contact and communication. My view is the opposite (other than the niggle above) that whole piece is brilliantly on point and there would not have been much of a story without it.

None of that diminishes what Weir achieves. He takes relatable people with very human quirks and puts them in situations where they have to fight to survive — and we root for them completely. And here i put the very alien Rocky in the bucket of people…he is about the best alien I have seen in a move ever. I wish I were half the author he is, and I say that as someone who is trying. Project Hail Mary is the rare book where you finish it and immediately want someone else to read it so you can talk about it. The movie earns the same feeling. Go see it.

The Physics Produced the Ship

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The Dagger Design

Most fictional spacecraft are designed backwards. The writer decides what the ship needs to do dramatically, then invents a reason it can do that. The result is technology that serves the plot. Which is fine, until you need it to do something different in book three, at which point you quietly bend the rules and hope no one notices.

Engineers don’t do that. Not because we’re more disciplined — because we can’t. You don’t change the spec because the schedule is tight. You re-examine the architecture or you live with the constraint.

That instinct, applied to fiction, produces something different.

The principal auxiliary warship in the Sea of Suns universe is called a Dagger. Here’s how it got its name — and it wasn’t because I thought “dagger” sounded good.

The Transit system — the FTL drive in this universe — works through a rail. The rail is a linear gravity generator that manipulates quantum foam to open a wormhole large enough for the ship to pass through. The rail controls volume you can push through: the more mass you want to move between stars, the more rails you need. Compute controls speed: the transit step is a calculation, and the faster you want to step, the more computing capacity you need.

That trade-off isn’t decoration. It’s the architecture.

An auxiliary warship needs to be fast. In this universe, fast means compute capacity. Compute capacity takes up volume inside the vessel. So a fast warship is, almost by definition, a ship that has traded its interior for processors. Twin rails — enough to move a meaningful crew and weapons load — with almost every remaining cubic metre given over to compute. Crew of two to five on a thousand-foot vessel. Not much else aboard.

Now you have a ship that’s fast, carries almost no cargo, and spends all its operational time in real space. Real space means it’s detectable. A detectable warship needs stealth. The most effective passive stealth for a vessel in this universe is minimising cross-section — flat surfaces, minimal radar return. You sheath the hull in flat panels that force the profile into a long, slender blade shape.

The name isn’t metaphor. It’s a description of what the physics produced.

I didn’t design a cool warship and retrofit a justification. The constraints generated the vessel, and then the vessel generated scenes I hadn’t planned, because once you know what a Dagger can and can’t do, certain tactical situations become inevitable.

That’s the engineer’s advantage in hard SF, and it’s not what most people think it is.

It’s not technical accuracy. You’ve invented the technology — accuracy isn’t really the point. It’s that engineering training gives you a specific habit of mind: ask what the constraints produce, not what you need them to produce. Follow the logic. Let the system build itself.

When the system is honest, the world it generates is consistent without effort, because everything follows from the same rules. The Dagger’s tactical role, its crew size, its limitations, the scenarios it enables — none of that required invention. It came out of the trade-off.

The reader doesn’t need to understand the Transit physics to feel that the Dagger is real. They just need to encounter it behaving consistently with itself across the whole story. That consistency is what creates the texture that makes a fictional universe feel inhabited rather than constructed.

Thirty years of engineering taught me that coherent systems generate their own logic. Turns out that works in fiction too.

Why Engineers Write Better Hard SF is on The Unretired Engineer YouTube channel —

Stranded in the Stars, Book One of the Sea of Suns Trilogy, is available on Kindle. The Dagger appears early and often. https://www.amazon.com/Stranded-Stars-M-Harris-ebook/dp/B0GT123PLP

The Engineer’ Return to the Keyboard

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Optimization, Systems, and Storytelling: Why I’m Back

It has been a while—twenty years by some counts—since I first sat down to bridge the gap between “This World” of high-tech engineering and the “Others” I build in my fiction.

For four decades, my world was defined by electronic packaging, power electronics, and project engineering for EVs in both the commercial and defense sectors. I’ve spent my time in the trenches of “Dilbert’s world,” working the real details that make everything from electromagnetic guns to nuclear electric space probes real. But as any engineer knows, a system is only as good as its last optimization.

During those 40-plus years, I was an intermittent author of fiction and science fiction, though at times the projects I worked on felt like fiction as well.

At 68, I was “unretired.” (You can see the genesis of this in my YouTube video, EVs Ate My Job.) Through my channel, The Unretired Engineer, I explore how a lifetime of technical rigor applies to the modern world. Now, I am bringing that same focus back to this blog and my novels. Writing is, after all, the ultimate engineering challenge: building a world from scratch that doesn’t collapse under the weight of its own physics.

What to Expect Moving Forward:

Technical Deep Dives: The “how-to” behind the tech in my books, like the propulsion systems in The Sea of Suns.

The Editing Trench: Updates on my current copy-editing passes for The Sea of Suns and the structural work on Under Siege.

System Reflections: Thoughts on remote work, optimization theory, and the reality of a 40-year career.

World Reflections: Perspectives on technology, civilization, and war based on four decades of study.

The Workshop: Occasional updates on making with wood, resin, and whatever else I’m tinkering with.

I’m no longer just “tinkering.” I’m building. Whether you followed me here from YouTube or found my work on Smashwords, I’m glad you’re part of the system.

Let’s see what we can build next.

Russian Naval Renaissance

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Russian Navy Commissions 1st Project 20385 Corvette ‘Gremyashchy’
From NavalNews.Com

The Russian Navy has a peculiarly multi faced history and reputation. As a land power with huge boarders and vast empty sectors it would seem more than a little excess to needs. In imperial splendor it has burgeoned into one of the greatest navies in history, in troubled times it has rotted or rusted away. It has lost a whole fleet in battle at the far end of the world after a voyage that would have been hailed as incredible except for the ending. It has built ships, particularly submarines second to none in technological innovation, then had to let them rot. Always a technological arm the Navy has often attracted the best and the brightest and being world spanning it has attracted funding to grow hugely when the money was available….

So today Russia is as troubled as ever, but it does sit astride Eurasia and if you consider the polar region is near the Americas. It has intimate contact with the sea and it needs a Navy for reasons both local and global.

The cycles of growth and rot have shown that one should never count the Russian Navy out. While the end Soviet Era strategic Navy is rotting away the latest revival appears to be underway. The article above and others, point to the fact that after a period of grim news about over runs, decades long builds, etc the lates Corvette program and its predecessor appear successful even given quite sever supply chain issues of geopolitical nature.

While one can poo poo a Corvette as a ‘little ship’ the reality is that this firecracker could conceivably sink a fleet of ships boasting the best of 1980’s technology without a scratch. The US navy and others are rapidly rethinking the efficacy and rational for cruiser sized destroyers in this modern age of omnipresent satellite reconnaissance and hypersonic smart munitions.

But beyond this ship the Russians are once again showing their intellectual metal with A New “Universal Sea Complex” ‘Varan.’

Russia Designs A New Class Of Ship: Universal Sea Complex ‘Varan’

“It is a new approach in domestic and global shipbuilding. The project will represent a new class of naval hardware — universal sea complexes (UMK),”

Nevskoe Bureau (a major Russian designer of ships and the sole designer of aircraft carriers and simulators.). NavalNews.com
Nevskoe Bureau (a major Russian designer of ships and the sole designer of aircraft carriers and simulators.). NavalNews.com
Nevskoe Bureau (a major Russian designer of ships and the sole designer of aircraft carriers and simulators.). NavalNews.com

The approach appears well suited to modern ship building practices. At modestly sized commercial yards. It is very much in line with the skeptics view of aircraft carriers as a modestly sized vessels with a reasonable strike force. It is not at all a competitor to a US Nuclear Super Carrier in itself but is well suited for power projection and strike warfare in a fleet setting.

Noting the sea gate at the stern you could see this ship as having a significant landing force either standard or optionally providing a strong ‘swing’ capacity. This might be an ideal Marine Amphibious warfare ship.

Looking at it one can see that it is unlikely to be able to support even the noted 24 aircraft wing for long periods at sea. But is that really necessary if you have enough ships so that in peace time they only spend a couple of months at sea at a time?

You can also see that it is unlikely to be able to support a fleet commanders facilities and staff. Again that makes sense, with high bandwidth covert data links the fleet commander can and ought to be separated from the strike asset.

If there was a significant Marine contingent the air arm would have to shrink. But once more you need to think of distributed capability and building your fleet from blocks of assets rather than one Super Duper anything.

So once more the Russians have set the fox among the hens, at least in an intellectual sense. They are always listening and watching the rest of the world and trying to conceive of a ‘system’ that gives them an advantage versus the rest. It’s always a good idea to understand what they are thinking…as in chess and mathematics they are often leaders in the intellectual sphere.

Oh, oh oh, oh oh oh oh, I saw this coming !

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Last Cassette Player Standing, in American Conservative
From the article: Photo by: Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

Money Quote:

There are several lessons here. The most politically salient is that in manufacturing, as in cooking, it is possible to “lose the recipe.” And with an accelerating pace of technological progress, it is possible to lose it in an alarmingly short span of time. This is perhaps the strongest argument for some form of industrial policy or trade protection: the recognition that the national value of manufacturing often lies not so much in the end product itself, but in the accumulated knowledge that goes into it, and the possibility of old processes and knowledge sparking new innovation. Of course, innovation is itself what killed the high-end cassette player. But many otherwise viable industries have struggled under the free-trade regime.

The fact is that technology is not embodied in a drawing or set of drawings or any set of instructions. It is embodied in human knowledge. One of the key problems in the industry is the loss of control a customer or prime has when they let a contractor develop the ‘data package’ and ‘product’ with no significant oversight. While the customer or prime may ‘own’ the IP because they paid for it, the fact is that the majority of the capability is embodied in the people and culture of the contractor not in any set of information.

The Hellenic world had machines as complex as early clocks and steam engines of a sort but lost the recipe in a few generations or less. Various complex building skills and wooden machines, metalworking and early chemistry were discovered then lost again and again because the data package was in human brains and examples. This is why the printing press and its ilk were so incredibly important to technological lift off. Along with a culture of progress and invention.

We are far ahead of that world but as above, not above losing the recipe of a complex technology. This is one of the drivers behind Computer Aided Design, Analysis, Documentation, Fabrication. Our cybernetic tools have the ability to record the data package in detail at least for certain classes of things so that we should be able to maintain the ability to replicate things. Making special, small run, even one off technological objects rational rather than nutty.

But at the same time I think that it is likely that the artisanal ethos and products will remain relevant and even increase in value as people shift away from a mind/economy/culture of scarcity to at least sufficiency and if we survive and expand into the universe eventually richness. These transitions will be extremely difficult because they are at odds with many tens of thousands of years of genetic/mimetic coding of our behaviors based on small group hunter gatherers and kin group bonding. Those transition will be enabled by machines that fabricate, even machines that invent. What will happen when humans loose the recipe for technological advancement, because too few engage in the complex enterprise of development??? Is that the point of the Rise of the Machine???

Let space bring us together

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One of the things that stabilizes a civilization (IMO) is the ability to expand. Like an imaginary pressure vessel with a self replicating gas one can see that at the beginning the gas molecules bouncing around have plenty of space, the ‘pressure’ on the cylinder is negligible and the molecules don’t collide that often. As the molecules become more abundant the pressure and the collisions build. If there is some external source of ‘heat’ say the energy of invention etc, the pressure builds even more and the ‘collisions’ are more violent. Eventually the pressure vessel gives way along fracture lines and explodes releasing the gas into the void….

Carry that image a bit longer, this almost mimics what happened to a lot of the early civilizations. They blew up and dissipated into the wilds leaving almost nothing behind except wreckage.

America (and other civilizational islands let’s call them) had an immense (to them) hinterland. The pressure vessel had something like a sealed bellows (or say a metal balloon) that was stiff, wouldn’t expand easily but could expand. The particles would ‘explore’ this even early on. The cold walls ‘cooled / calmed’ the average energy and allowed the particles to rub along with each other better. As the particles multiply the bellows/balloon expands releasing the pressure on the parent pressure vessel, and providing more wall to absorb energy at the same time.

The human ‘particles’ in our pressure vessel continue to multiply, thankfully, hopefully, at an increasingly slower rate. But the ‘energy’ of invention and desire for ‘happiness’ continues to flow and be amplified by those people/particles. Rearranging the particles…partially solidifying them?…in urban masses lowers the pressure in some ways but does not eliminate it. It provides pseudo new space for the really energetic particles say. But in reality do what we can on this world the pressure will grow too great unless we expand into, we need newSpace.

Even the space (volume) of our solar system is almost infinite from the perspective of the human particles today. And the boundaries of ‘our system’ are only imaginary. The universe is here there and everywhere and there is no reason not to make it ours except fear, mostly fear of ourselves.

We need frontiers, we need places where we can be with ourselves, we need challenge but also calm centers. While the homes we create away from our birthplace will be nothing like what we see today, our descendants will love and hold them just as close to their heart as we hold our home and our memories.

To explore you need Access

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Photo of a nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) system from the Rover/NERVA programs (left) and a cutaway schematic with labels (right). SOURCE: M. Houts et. al., NASA’s Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Project, NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, August 2018, ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20180006514.
Space Nuclear Propulsion for Human Mars Exploration
National Academics of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine
National Academies Press
2021
[ParabolicArc Executive Summary, Findings & Recommendations from National Academies Report on Space Nuclear Propulsion
February 13, 2021 Doug Messier]

While a chemically powered trip to Mars is feasible given the ability to lift a lot of mass so orbit, See SpaceX-Elon Musk, this is probably not the solution you would go for first. I think it makes sense as part of the Vision Setting that Musk does but the preference has always been for nuclear propulsion it enables faster (safer) trips and makes reusability even more effective since the ‘shuttles’ are not spending many months in transit each way.

Posit a Freighter something like the illustration below. Departing Mars having dropped of say 2, 3, 4 starships’ worth of cargo. MarsStarships shuttle up and down and provide point to point transport on Mars. EarthStarships shuttle cargo up to earth orbit. Maybe LunarStarships shuttle fuel from production stations on the Moon to reduce the cost of fuel for the starships and the Freighter.

Illustration of a Mars transit habitat and nuclear propulsion system that could one day take astronauts to Mars. (Credits: NASA) [ParabolicArc: Executive Summary, Findings & Recommendations from National Academies Report on Space Nuclear Propulsion February 13, 2021 Doug Messier]

Now you have a system that provides Access to the solar system with significant cargos and the ability to establish and support exploration stations wherever you go.