Cool Products You wish you could buy

Seems like you could but chain or cables on the house to tether it. Set up the “hoverboard” lifters to only activate when vibration is felt, they lift 2 inches, wait until sensors report all is steady, then drop again.

Have to put in angled cleats for the house to settle on, so it re-positions correctly, but that’s all just detail work.
There are already house kits that float houses in flood-prone zones. The wiring/ plumbing kits those use would work for the earthquake kit, too.

The motors wouldn’t be a huge expense compared to protecting the house. Looks like four motors hold up to 300 lbs right now, and they expect to get up to 500 lbs.

So if the below is anywhere near accurate then that’s 690 units to float a ranch house, or 690 units of power from however many scaled up units. The kickstarter is selling them for $299 a piece, so $206,310 to float a house, not including the metal base. I would not be surprised if you could cut it to a half that price, fewer stronger items are generally cheaper than individuals adding up to the same strength. Then assuming mass manufacturing capability then another half, bringing it to $50k or so. If it’s a house somewhere super expensive and the value of the home cracks a million, or several; what’s 50k plus installation to save the house?

360k for the larger house, a quarter of that is 90k, again, if you break 7 figures on the house it’s chump change.

Istallation would be a bitch, though it depends on teh number of units. I would assume you would use metal pylons set in the ground as the material to bounce off of, but I don’t know where the weight goes, I assume this won’t work with a material that can’t take the weight of the whole house, if they could do it with foil people would be jumping all over it.

I think the ideal way would be to wait a calculated time after the initial shock to avoid any aftershocks. If the system is built well you might not even notice false alarms with the house lifting to avoid light shocks.

I built a hypothetical 1,600-foot, single-level home in my head and
on paper, based on known delivered weights of given materials. It
totaled 345,000 pounds (including 160,000 for the foundation and 30,000
in the garage floor), compared to the rule-of-thumb house weighing in at
320,000. Pretty close! Of course, what good is a house without a deck?
In my hypothetical house, I added a deck, a gazebo and a hot tub, which
pretty much explains the difference. Adding in the weight of a
foundation, slabs, appliances and fixtures to the house-mover’s figures,
we cross-check pretty well.

Refiguring for the “average” 2,200-square-foot, two-level newer home,
rule of thumb comes it at 605,000, which I suspect is on the high side.
Why do I think that’s high? Because the foundation hasn’t increased
dramatically in size over my hypothetical single-level house. But then
again, I don’t have a scale that big, so what do I know?

Imagine what this could do for the mobile/manufactured home market though, shipping and installing just got a lot easier. slide out the metal plates for a path to the home site and just move it with a Bobcat.

Or just put metal on fast lane on the highway and really get some speed out of that old Camaro. If you could just mix metal into the road surface maybe you could use this system to reduce the weight of vehicles on old bridges or any number of things.

I’d be happy with just a hoverboard or a land speeder. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Gotta have something to bullseye womp rats from, right?

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Of course.

That was a T-16, not his landspeeder.

</pedant>
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I stand corrected. I have lost my geek cred. :scream:

So is that like a MiG21?

Nah, it’s the Microsoft version of an F16.

I thought T-16 was the model of his landspeeder, but I could be mistaken.

But I was wrong… the T-16 is an airspeeder, not a landspeeder.

So, this simple farm boy had himself a souped up 4x4 he would go shootin’ in? And he wanted to go into town to get a new fuel injector for it. Boy, he really was a spoiled brat at the beginning. Bit better than his grandmother the slave, but a step down from his mother the queen.

I may have missed this somewhere, but I’ve wondered, exactly who was Uncle Owen? Neither Padme or Anikan had relatives did they?

nevermind, wiki’d it. I had actually wiped all of that from my brain. I didn’t remember the stupid Sandpeople slaughter until I read it again.

That blew my mind… I had never thought of it like that.

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Oh yeah, and his dad the war hero who was instrumental in winning two wars. Helping win the Clone Wars, which was a brutal battle for survival, to the extent that creating new life just for the sake of fighting was considered the wise thing to do, and then helping forge an Empire out of a half smashed Republic.

And then Luke’s greatest call to fame is really just that he’s a hot shot pilot. Nothing he does is really all that incredible except for the shot on the porthole of the Death Star, the rest of it is all due to the fact that he’s related to Darth Vader. Yes, he becomes a Jedi Knight, but what exactly does he do with that? Get his sister’s deadbeat boyfriend out of a debt. Everything else was just surviving and resisting long enough for the Emperor to try to kill him.

I believe there was one sentence in one of the movies where Anakin’s mother mentioned her brother.

I thought she got married to a moisture farmer after Anikin won the pod race, and either Uncle Owen or Aunt Beru was a sibling of her new husband. Now I’m curious; gotta go look it up.

I was close…
From Wookipedia:
Cliegg Lars was a Human male who was the widower of Shmi Skywalker, the step-grandfather of Luke Skywalker and Leia Organa, the stepfather of Anakin Skywalker, and the father of Owen Lars.

What I always wanted to know is, who elects a teenager as their ruler?!

Well, I didn’t see much of the actual culture and population (other than the bootlicking captain of her guard, the treasonous senator, and the suicidal body-double), but any culture that manages to piss off the indigenous population that much isn’t winning awards for rationality.

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Yeah, I think anything Lucas’s wife wasn’t involved in shouldn’t be canon.

There, I fixed it for you.

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