An early work-in-progress dedicated to
helping precipitate the
Great Mobilisation,
circuitouslby provoking a novel by an award-winning author, to provoke a movie etc. of, to help build the mandate for the Churchillian leadership of…y
Dare to be wise!
Kant
Straight to the Action: Powered by up to three, modular, multi-clean-fueled, rotary-valved, supercharged fuel-injected dry-sump lubricated, two-cylinder two-strokes, a latter-day staff car could turn heads and heads of industry towards the myriad benefits of participating in the Great Mobilisation economy, as opposed to banal business as usual. photographer Harold Paton
Legendary Rodney Times chief reporter Jack Keys, was sound asleep in the directors chair he’d availed himself. In the regatta lunchtime lull, it had been cool and peaceful in the old-school canvas square tent pitched on the sand to shade the stalwarts who’d manically typed certificates for the eager little fingers of the endless line of winners and placegetters excelling in the morning’s beach events. Minutes earlier, Jack had asked:
Tell me, how did this new Mahurangi Regatta sponsorship come about?
It was 1990, and, unbidden, an insurance company had stumped up the undreamed-of amount $1000 for that regatta and for those for the foreseeable. Jack was a thorough, longtime chronicler for the newspaper that had published since 1901, originally under the name Rodney and Ōtamatea Times. Impervious to the proprietor’s attempts to encourage a more economic style, and to the entreaties of the newspaper’s ill-hired editor, was disinclined to die in a ditch—ever—but certainly not on a weekly basis, Jack filled column after column, page after page with unrelieved type.
Warming to his subject, Cimino had just begun explaining the relationship of the sponsorship to the resident park ranger’s wife, when soft snoring delivered its own message to the long-winded. Cimino, thus, is as acutely aware of the proclivity he shared with the testudineousgiven the author had search for this word—first-used 1692—defined as: tortoise-like… reporter, and of the irony, as he sets about addressing the need for an elevator pitch, early in his novel modello. The thing about elevator pitches, Cimino has long advocated, is that any meaningful journey of exploration should include physically traversing a landscape, not simply going up—or downalthough up, presumably, such as when the target is en route to a pivotal, board-room meeting—on the same spot. The pitch, rather than elevator, can be kerbside and super quick, such as:
Jump in!—there’s something nearby you really need to see.
Acutely aware of his proclivity to tangentalise, Cimino decided—rather than fight it—to make it a feature not a flaw of the project, which after all, was not aimed at the casual reader, but at the mere handful of people who might word-of-mouth be persuaded by intermediaries to suspend judgement on its quirky, modello-novel style and content. The modello staff car, meanwhile, is designed to form the terrestrial component of a trio of head-turning vehicles, the most preposterous being rotary-exhaust-valved-2-stroke-powered amphibian spotter plane capable of taking off from the nearest football field or unconsented farm dam. Circling languidly at 40 knots or less, would allow for the unhurried, Shawesque contemplation of ‘why nots’…
Liquid Fuel from co2 Breakthrough: Although not the first to produce liquid fuel from carbon dioxide, Dr Ziyun Wang, right, in collaboration with researchers at Chinese institutions has developed a cost-effective alternative, particularly applicable—presumably—to powering those public transport modes that can’t practicably be grid-powered—intercity buses and inter island ferries spring to mind. Least said, meantime, of the far from affordable, sky-high cost of hydrogen-fuel-cell mobility. image University of Auckland
Rotary-valve 5-stroke modular generator Conceivably, the rotary-valve of Jim Clark–Bruce McLaren-astounding New Zealand engineer Ralph Watson could be married to Gerhard Schmitz’s stringently fuel-efficient 5-stroke to form the double-compound-v 3 heart of the ch2o2specifically, formic acid liquid-fueled small modular engine-generators required, at-scale, to zero-carbon-power everything from interisland ferries and intercity buses, to bulldozers. Regardless of their precise pedigree or configuration, such generators are needed in numbers commensurate with the Anthropocene biosphere’s current burden of one billionpredominantly private, 1.31 billion in 2020 light vehicle fleet, projected to be 2.21 billion by 2050 – International Energy Outlook 2021 private light vehicles—unless the profoundly inspired inside-out Wankel of Soviet-trainedDr Nikolai Shkolnik considers he was advantaged by his broader-than-American engineering training Dr Nikolai Shkolnik and his mit-trained son Dr Alec Shkolnik is indeed so superiorly thermally efficient—and can be made sufficiently clean-burning and reliable—that it does succeed in burying all new forms of the reciprocating piston engine, after its 312-year-and-counting reign. Same-same, in respect, and with the greatest respect, to the implausible-sounding Patented 1-Stroke double-swashplate, horizontal square-four engine—in either its silken opposed-8-pistontantalisingly, 8-piston but 4-cylinder!, or muscular unopposed-4-piston, configuration. In a halfways rational world, the megamobilisation global procurement process would already be scoping the Schmitz–Watson modular generator, possibly sized to power a householdor modest private light vehicle—essential in the deeply unfortunate localities where reliable grid-electricity is no longer, was never, or is never likely to be, reliably available.
Six-degree-separated v 9 liquid-fuel-head fantasy A 6° v might not sound like any sort of v-cylinder head-turner at all, but a bank-angle of 6° might be as much as makes sense, given anything more would put the cylinder heads in the bank of big low-pressure pots too far away from those of their counterparts in the high-pressure bank to be efficient, much less be serviced by a single, rotary-valve valve-train. The almost-inline v 9’s potentially infinitely harmonisable exhaust acoustics, however, might sonorously compensate for its less-than-Detriot-90° v8 machismo.
only to be overtaken by the…
Seriously undersquare rotary-exhaust-valved multi-fuel two-stroke In a non-dysfunctional world, sufficient billions would already have been thrown at exploring the potential of Alpha-Otto’s genius rotary-exhaust-valved two-stroke for the large-scale production of several options to be imminent. Many motorheads—including this writer, whose long-time friend is a large-vessel marine engineer—have lived their lives in abject ignorance of the fact that the world’s largest internal-combustion engines, such as those that power the vast bulk of shipping, are two-stroke. Testing the efficiency extremes of say an electrically supercharged 500cc, contra-rotating-balance-shafted, seriously undersquare—big-ship bore/stroke ratio of 0.384in the league of the 25,601.8-litre Wärtsilä-Sulzer RTA96-C—single-cylinder, would be brilliantly illuminating. That such a two-stroke engine might potentially compare acoustically with the unforgettable authority of a jap-powered Brough Superior, is a dark-soul-of-the-night-dispelling hope that would be impossible to put a price on—the modular multi-zero-carbonzero-carbon-emission-liquid-fuel engine of the Great Mobilisation, electric-hybrid powering everything from small marine and optionally-in-motion-charging-road-vehicle to off-grid work camps.
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