Casual Conversation
500 readers
162 users here now
Share a story, ask a question, or start a conversation about (almost) anything you desire. Maybe you'll make some friends in the process.
RULES
- Be respectful: no harassment, hate speech, bigotry, and/or trolling.
- Encourage conversation in your OP. This means including heavily implicative subject matter when you can and also engaging in your thread when possible.
- Avoid controversial topics (e.g. politics or societal debates).
- Stay calm: Don’t post angry or to vent or complain. We are a place where everyone can forget about their everyday or not so everyday worries for a moment. Venting, complaining, or posting from a place of anger or resentment doesn't fit the atmosphere we try to foster at all. Feel free to post those on [email protected]
- Keep it clean and SFW
- No solicitation such as ads, promotional content, spam, surveys etc.
Casual conversation communities:
Related discussion-focused communities
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Edit: I removed the HELP and extra question mark from the end since I've now left it be outside and don't need a advice. I thought the cross post would include the body text from the first post on [email protected] so I guess I accidentally left out all the other pictures and additional info, oops
10
12
Just like what the internet told me, what one buys, including books they don't read, actually speaks more about themselves. Not in a negative manner, such as wasting money, procrastination, or laziness, but because the unread books they purchase reveal more about who they are.
Unread or less-read books actually indicate that there is more they want or need to know and that there is so much more to discover in this endless universe. So, I did that too. Now the internet answered why I didn't read my books, both electronic and physical. I bought them because of an undiagnosed FOMO, maybe; if I don't do like others do, then I feel like I'm missing out lol.
So, now I subscribed to this managed hosting service for this app called BookStack. BookStack is a lightweight wiki software and a website that I pay rent for, which can be accessed at this site: bookstack.kadaikupi.space.
Personally, I very, very don't know what to post or publish here. Sometimes it comes to my mind that I want to post low-quality content (shitpost) lol, and sometimes I want it to be a site to post quality information instead of low-quality. Or maybe both.
This showed me that there is so much for me to discover that I haven't found anything, not even one thing, to post or publish on my wiki site.
13
14
There are several reasons that I'd like to see a "self-unfurling car tent" that could extend from a car and cover it when parked, and "de-furl" itself when returning to a car.
Shield the car from sunshine
People are always trying to park in what (usually very limited, where I am) parking spaces that are shaded. Carry a reflective, vented tent, and the problem goes away; you've got your own shade everywhere you go.
There are already car covers:
But these don't self-unfurl and furl, so they're enough of a pain to use that most people won't use them unless they're parking their car for some time; manually deploying the thing on a grocery store trip isn't worth the effort. The most people will normally do is put up a windshield sun shade, which is a lot less effort to put up.
Solar panels become a lot more practical
Volvo had a prototype unfurling-from-the-trunk solar canopy over a decade ago; I haven't heard of it since.
That thing took up a ton of space, and wouldn't work in a parking lot, but something that closely-matches a given car model's exterior shape might be a lot more practical.
There are vehicles that have factory built-in solar panels now; the 2025 Toyota Prius PHEV has a solar roof option, for example:
But they don't provide a lot of surface area, because they can't cover the whole vehicle, just part of the roof, so provide a limited amount of power. That Prius can get a maximum of about four miles (6.4 km) a day of range from sun.
But you can put whatever you want on the exterior of a tent that's only deployed when parked; surface constraints go away, so now you have a lot more surface area to work with.
There are existing car covers that have integrated solar panels, but the solar panels on these are tiny, just designed to keep a car battery topped off when a car isn't being used for long periods of time; they aren't designed to feed a larger battery bank.
Hail resistance
There are some places in the US where hail is a real problem, where it damages a ton of vehicles every year.
Cars, which are normally rigid, don't do well with hail. Fabric-like materials, which are springy, do a great job. There are some existing car protection systems that fit onto a car that make use of this, have a little standoff distance to permit the hail to decelerate in, as well as fixed structures and manually-deployable static fabric hail protectors. Looking online, soft-top convertables will suffer damage to the body in hail that the soft-top roof can just ignore. I don't know how well hail resistance would play with flexible solar panels---might need to pick one or the other. But I'd expect at least one or the other to be possible.
Issues
There are some issues I can think of.
A big one is that car exterior surfaces are more durable than tents, and I can imagine accidental damage being more of an issue for the tent, like being cut or something. Maybe it'd be practical to make such a system out of modular pieces that zipper or otherwise easily attach to each other, and if one piece of the tent is damaged, just pick up a new one, detach the old one, and stick a new one in; no big deal.
Theft of the tent (or pieces thereof, if modular) might also be an issue.
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24