New start.

As we get back into working, I realise that this half of the semester we really need to focus on exactly what it is that we want to achieve within the time frame we have. We already know we plan on creating a rail system of some sort which we will us to guide our messages to their destinations, but need to focus on how specifically we are going to do this. 

We have looked at a number of ways of powering our delivery system but still have a number of things left to consider, including the ways in which we are making our network decentralized, how we are going to create the switching system so each message can be sent to the appropriate place and exactly how we are going to construct or create our powering system for these messages.

So far for inspiration we have looked at marble machines, and the rube goldberg devices for inspiration with our rail system. We have also looked at a variety of ways of powering our engines including, rocketry, steam, solar and hydro power to move our capsules from A to B. A number of complications were found with a fair few of these power sources. Firstly with rocketry there was obviously a huge fire hazard, and putting that into practice within a studio environment is not exactly ideal so we decided to scrap that idea but from there we decided to look at how people had generated power in the past and decided to settle with steam and air powered engines. These engines appealed to most of the group as it was a concept not many of us had explored before and seemed like a viable source of getting the power we needed in a way that was not only fun and exciting but reasonably cost effective. Below are a a few of the examples of engines we looked at: