alt Hacker NewsI, for one, would absolutely love to see you carrying up a mountain the contraption in the video with its full 50kgs weight, then raising said weight by three meters with the power of your muscles to launch each single 4 grams pellet, and doing that for several hours every day. I am curious though if you have considered how much you would have to eat to power your muscles, how do you plan to procure the abundant food supply you'd certainly need (and which of course it should have been produced without chemicals and industrial processes of any kind), and how would you carry that up the mountain as well.
What part of "I can't wait to see this optimized into a portable version" did you not understand?
Yes, this prototype is big and unwieldy. So?
The development process is obviously on its way towards the construction of a smaller, lighter version.
BTW, there are rocks up the mountain. They can serve as the weight once you get there.
It's the math of the thing that is going to end up becoming optimal. Not just the material design - which is important once the loading and tolerances are understood. The gearing/screw mechanism is especially interesting from this perspective - it provides a clear path for optimization.
Once he has the equation dialed in, it will be interesting to see it scale down. The winding gear provides a path to optimization on the horizontal plane, and that is going to be very interesting to see go through a few more iterations. Pun, intended.