The 50 Technologies

Walking through the 50 Technologies and Their Economic Impact

Disclaimer - Graph of completion Here we discuss all the tools, but please remember that in Part 1 of the 4 Part Series, many of the machines are still on the drawing board.

Agriculture

If you eat, you use a Tractor. Maybe not you directly, but the farmer that grew your food. And food is a $8T industry. The GVCS field agriculture machinery that support this $8T industry are:

Fig 1. The Tractor, Microtractor, Microcombine, Universal Seeder, Spader, Hay Cutter, Hay Rake, Baler, and Dairy Milker, and a Bakery Oven are critical tools of the $8T food industry.

Tractor, MicroTractor, Bulldozer and Power Cubes

The tractor is a cornerstone of a farm, construction, or other materials production industries. A tractor has the traction to pull things, and to do utility work with variou implements that can be added to a tractor and use the tractor’s mechanical power through a Power Take-off (PTO). As such, the tractor can be a swiss army knife of heavy duty work. For the smaller individual or home scale, we have the MicroTractor in the set, which is a small, walk-behind or ride-on tractor at the 16-32 hp size that can perform many gardening and utility functions and can fit in a smaller areas where a large tractor would be impractical. If we go up in scale - use a stronger frame and at least 64 hp, and add a bulldozer blade to the tractor - then we have a bulldozer.

The tractor is a machine on the scale of 50-320 hp in the GVCS ecosystem, and unlike traditional tractors, we focus on modular power. We currently use small 16 hp engine units at $17/hp (ref), which is the lowest cost way to obtain engine power, while making maintenance very easy. Like in nature where a tree is made of many branches, our tractor is made of many small engine units. This way, the same design pattern can be used in the 16 hp tractor as in the 320 hp tractor. The price for using larger diesel engines is 2-4 times larger.

By using the modularity concept, we create our typical construction set approach for heavy machines. For example, if a large tractor frame is fitted with a bulldozer blade - then we don’t require a separate bulldozer in addition to a tractor. This saves a lot of resources - making technology significantly lower cost to maintain. Exploring the limits of modularity, we found that it is much less expensive to scale our machines usig modular and overbuilt parts that make sense both for small and large machines. For example, we can use 4 of our identical track units, each rated for up to 80 hp - Our track unit, for example, allows for a $30k version that matches the traction of a Cat D7 - a sizeable cost savings comprd to a base price of ½ a million. .