• "Laser" @lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    19 hours ago

    Call me pessimistic but I’m guessing this is only time we’ll be hearing about it

    • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      8
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      17 hours ago

      NIckel Iron is fantastic without any revolutionary improvements. Batteries made 100 years ago still work today. They are large and heavy so are only of use for home power.

      The big “down side” which is the reason it isn’t commercially developed at large scale is that they last forever. No investors are going to give billions to a business that can’t generate revenue forever with a product that needs replacing every 3 years.

        • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          12 hours ago

          They are large and heavy. They are only useful for their virtually infinite life. If the military needed it for a few of their bases, they’d contract it out, a few hundred would be built and that’s it.

          For example a few thousand ISDN adapters were built for the government military. But it lacked corporate support because the Telcos didn’t want it cutting into their profits. So ISDN barely existed for consumers. Consumers suffered with 56k modems for 5-10 years until broadband- which telcos sold for more than a phone line, were immune from all the competition requirements of regular phone lines, plus got TV programming profit.