I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Projects that attempt to put things in the road tend to fail to be economical or practical. It’s almost always better putting the same (or less) investment into something equivalent that sits next to the road rather than inside it.

    The key features of roads that make them so economically successful are:

    1. They are very cheap per km to build
    2. They are very cheap to maintain (they’re fully recyclable, they get remelted during resurfacing).

    Installing anything in the road surface completely voids these two points.

    Detailed problems:

    • You will need a pickup device on the bottom of your car. To make it efficient you will need it as close to the road surface as possible.
    • Roads are dirty and covered in debris. Your pickup device will get torn and worn.
    • You will need a LOT of road installed with this, which makes it intrinsically much more expensive than roadside chargers. 10 mins of charging at a standstill requires one charger, 10 mins of charging at 40kmph is about 7km of underroad chargers. Intersections might do better, but they’re intermittent and provide unreliable charging opportunities. Even 1km (6kmph*10min) is silly expensive compared to a cluster of roadside chargers.
    • The charging coils underneath the road will need to be as close to the road surface as possible (to make it efficient).
    • Worn or buckled (from truck braking) road surfaces will require specialised work and extended road shutdowns to repair.
    • You can’t ignore this costly maintenance: exposed electronics (even if isolated) will have inconsistent traction and may damage tires.
    • Under-road assets such as communication wires (even just for traffic lights, let alone internet infrastructure), power cables (11kV and up), water, sewage, stormwater and gas will be much more expensive, slow and complicated to install and maintain. More and longer road shutdowns will result.

    The fundamental, core problem of all of these “put solar panels in roads” or “put chargers in roads” projects is that they are romantically and narratively attractive. Roads are ugly wasted space, but if we could put them to better use then wouldn’t it be magic? Sadly this never works. Roads are ugly and wastes of space because nothing else works as well for transport infrastructure (other than railways).






  • To add to this: “level design” typically covers things like the design of paths through the level (both physically and plot/objectives) and visibility of paths affecting player thinking and choices (ie making it clear to the player how to progress, not get lost). These are “big scale” things, not fine detail.

    “Gameplay design” typically covers things like movement, interaction and item/skill progression mechanics. The are “small scale” (or for inventories & skill trees: “no physical scale”) things.

    In practice the two terms do often overlap quite a bit, so you can argue basically anything to be in either category.



  • That looks super frustrating :|

    I just finished the last level of Perfect Dark (released in 2000 for N64). The hardest part was right at the end (boss fight with rockets being fired at you, one hit and you’re dead) and there are no checkpoints. I repeated this same level so many times and had to read a walkthrough in the end – it turns out I was stuck at a red herring.