• Aaron N. Cutshall - Friday, July 14, 2017 5:39 AM

    Jeff Moden - Saturday, August 24, 2013 4:08 PM

    On the outside world, my Dad, Brother, and I are submitting the paper work to (hopefully) win a Phase III contract (final testing and implementation phase) with the U.S. Navy on "Moden Fuel". We have 3 different versions depending on the application. MF1, MF2, and MFX.

    That does sound pretty cool, Jeff!  I really wish you luck on it as it sounds like a much better choice than the alternative.

    It hasn't worked out and the inventor of the fuel, my Dad, has passed away.  The reason why it didn't work out is because we were aiming at propulsion improvements (using the fuel) of certain torpedoes for the U.S. Navy and their FMS (Foreign Military Sales) and the Navy didn't reveal that they already had a major improvement project going on (although it had nothing to do with propulsion methods) .  The problem, it appears, is that there was big money involved with modifying the torpedo sensors, electronics, and programming to do something that, as a major side effect, Moden Fuel would have made such a modification totally unnecessary and would have cost a whole lot less.  We even designed the relatively inexpensive engine modification they would need to do to burn MFX and extend the range of the torpedoes but it was their engine and so we were at their mercy. They played us like a fiddle.

    Once we finally realized what was going on, we shifted gears to UUVs (Unmanned Underwater Vehicles) and MUVs (Manned Underwater Vehicles) and ran into a similar problem.  It seems that people selling batteries and battery powered propulsion systems also have powerful lobbyists that we don't have.  It's a real shame... instead of having to remove a vehicle from the water, charge it for 16 to 24 hours (and maybe have the damned thing melt down or explode as Lithium based batteries have earned the reputation of doing), and then return it to the water, it could have been "Gas'n'Go" while in the water and the duration between refuelings would have been a fair bit less than the duration between battery charges meaning that the vehicle could have done its job longer instead of spending so much time in transit for recharges.

    Heh... it's almost as bad as trying to convince Microsoft that there's a need for a high performance, built in "Tally" sequence generator.

    --Jeff Moden


    RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
    First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
    ________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

    Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.


    Helpful Links:
    How to post code problems
    How to Post Performance Problems
    Create a Tally Function (fnTally)