Electrifying a 1950s pickup truck. The work would be fun, and the outcome would be superbly useless with almost no range. But I would do it if I had the resources.
To be fair I could have range with the hella expensive batteries, considering that weight isn’t a consideration (truck made out of steel) you might consider including a basic two speed transmission to keep the motor rpm more in its efficiency sweet spot for highway vs city driving def cool project considered doing something like that with a large boat style car. Plus (and this might just be my justification) if you build it and battery technology progresses it would be a simple matter to swap out the batteries and increase range while keeping the rest of the stuff (modulo maybe charge control) the same
I can dig this. I actually have a '59 mercury in mind for the job. But with my current resources it is like a ten year project. With unlimited resources I'd be on it right now :)
Small? A proper shed/workshop instead of a corner of the garage. I know it asked impractical, but with how long I've been trying to make space for myself... It feels impossible at this point.
Yes, I love the idea! It's too much, in my opinion. The centrifugal forces to achieve that linear speed are just too high. I love the idea and I'm glad they're actually trying it.
Last I saw it launched a dummy payload just fine. However, the payload has to be rugged stuff. It can't be sensitive equipment because of the high G forces due to the rotation.
But the technology is feasibly, now just have to optimise satellite builds, and I'm sure institutions like NASA are better at making "the bullet", and this company is rather just the gun-smiths, metaphorically.
But the technology is sound, and pretty impressive to boot.
As someone with a tiny workshop as well I take pride in how compact and efficient I can make it. Sure, a larger one would be nice but I'm so damn grateful for what I've got. Used to live in an apartment building before where I could only dream of a space where I didn't always need to pack up my tools and shove them into a closet when I was done with the job.
It's something, for sure! I feel like after 15 years of trying to get proper space, it's just not gonna happen. Maybe there's a chance in the distant future but everything and everyone in my life is pushing back on it. Sigh.
Thinking a lot smaller here..... I've always wanted to build a custom pinball machine. I already possess most of the necessary skills, but the materials are expensive and I don't really have the time or space to do it right
A matching pair of show cars, custom built from the ground up to cruise in and turn heads.
Also, build the modern equivalent of the Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, something like that. The super practical, oddly attractive, easily repairable, energy sipping cheap-mobile. It would be hard to meet all these goals plus modern safety requirements, but that's where the endless money comes in for R&D.
Giant floating island to stay in temperate zone, of course everyone would suffer sea sickness and it is question how would we keep everything in place.
My list is quite different than the ones currently in the thread.
The boring ones:
Creating a vaccine or other cloaking to make humans invisible to ticks & mosquitoes. A separate project would be to do the same for parasites.
Enacting strict pollution/carbon limits and mandatory circular economy everywhere in the world.
Researching, trialing and Enacting a sustainable post-capitalist system everywhere in the world.
Developing solar energy until covering global energy demands, including a power network that can transport energy from the sunny side and/or orbit everywhere.
The slightly more ambitious:
Establish self-sustainable colonies living on off-earth resources, most probably also situated off-earth.
Create a Dyson swarm with enough energy output for in-system exploration, mining, colonisation, and terraforming.
Perfect matter replicators.
I have some other ideas as well, but those would be a start.
Mandatory circular economy sounds like it means basically mandating that each person break the second rule of thermodynamics. It’s assigning impossibility to people, like making it mandatory to draw a square circle before one can go to recess.
Not really, it's just a regular orb that glows with a dark energy and floats in the air due to a hyperspherical extrusion into 4-dimensional space. Nothing crazy.