Saturday, December 06, 2025

Quick notes: Solar hack | Self-reliance...

  • "We learnt a lot from the very first prototype in India": Placing solar panels over the 4,000 miles of California’s open canals could save up to 63 billion gallons of water annually — enough to meet the needs of 2 million people.
    • we need an Indian name for this solar hack


  • India Builds Best When It Builds Alone: Take missiles, for example. If you want a missile, you have to build it yourself; nobody will sell it to you.

    This is also how ISRO succeeded -- you can't import a satellite launch vehicle.

    In such segments, DRDO and ISRO come out looking very good.

    Take for instance, the ring laser gyroscope developed by DRDO under the Integrated Guided Missile Programme.

    Older missiles used mechanical gyroscopes; the new laser gyroscope is far more accurate.

    Nobody would give that to us, so DRDO developed it indigenously.

    However, in areas where an import option exists -- like fighter jets, main battle tanks, or towed artillery guns -- the moment DRDO gets close to a solution, someone shows up offering to sell it.

    The sellers also have an interest in undermining DRDO.

    There are also numerous critical subsystems developed that aren't as visible.

    For example, the heat shield technology for re-entry vehicles was first mastered in DRDO for the Agni missile.

    This is why the Americans were so opposed to Agni in the 1980s, unlike other missiles -- it was a re-entry vehicle.

    We also had to master the technology of mounting printed circuit boards in these missiles that can withstand extreme shock, vibration, and temperature.

    The US had a far better ecosystem for spinning off military technology for civilian use --Teflon came from the space programme.

    DRDO could have done this, but it was stifled by financial and ideological hurdles.

    For example, armour-penetrating explosives could have had mining and other civilian applications. Similarly the laser gyro, heat shield etc.

    The commercialisation never took off because our finance people were scared to make decisions.

    I don't necessarily blame them; they fear audit objections. The whole system is messed up.

    This is also why government startup funds often go unspent -- no one wants to take the risk inherent in venture capitalism, where you expect many failures for one big success.

    This culture of audit objections stifles innovation, and no government, including the present one, has shown the willingness to truly understand and fix this problem.

    Our biggest success was the control law for the LCA.

    It started around 1992. Girish Deodhare, who just retired as DG of ADA, was my PhD student at Waterloo and joined CAIR.

    Dr Kota Harinarayana was the programme director of ADA.

    Initially, Martin Marietta was supposed to design the control software. They would talk big but belittle Indian capabilities and refused to share design documents, only giving final numbers.

    Dr Kalam, who took over as DG in July '92, called a meeting -- on a Sunday -- and appointed Prof Roddam Narasimha FRS, to head a committee to decide if we could build the control law indigenously. We all said we could.

    These foreign companies weren't impressive technically and weren't offering a knowledge transfer.

    We decided to go for a state-of-the-art digital fly-by-wire control with a 32-bit floating-point processor, which was advanced for the time.

    Prof Narasimha recommended we do it ourselves, and Dr Kalam agreed. He appointed Professor I G Sharma of IISc as an independent assessor to report to the ADA governing council every three months.

    We designed the first cut of the control law in about two years.

    A major hurdle was computing power. Due to international restrictions, we couldn't get powerful computers in India.

    We rented time on a British Aerospace flight simulator in the UK.

    Our team would go there with the software on tapes, and our test pilots would fly the LCA control law on that simulator.

    Interestingly, the BAE guys, who were also working on the Eurofighter, invited our pilots to try their simulator.

    Our pilots later reported that they found the LCA's handling qualities to be better!

    Professor M Vidyasagar, FRS, is a Distinguished Professor at IIT Hyderabad. He earned his BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Wisconsin.


  • Blue skies are a luxury in India: It’s the same endless blue dome that stretches over America, Europe, and India alike. But it’s not blue anymore in most Indian cities. The saddest part? We got used to it.








  • Royal Enfield - From a Joke to Global Domination:



By -
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)