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[McLaren Fan]

Disappointing news. As I said before, the lights system has many advantages, so Ferrari should not just look at the bad points, but the positives as well.

You say "as I said before" but I cant find your previous post MF. I just cannot see any advantage of lights over lollipop, and if Ferrari plan to use both then that is just plain stupid.
I really do not know what advantages the light system has - please explain. Thanks.

The biggest advantage of this for MF is that Ferrari is screwing their own drivers
That's what he had in mind I believe

You're along the right lines. I do feel that the system does offer some advantages in terms of saving time by reducing the effects of human's reaction times. So, the system is a good idea in theory, but it s very much in its infancy and Ferrari need to do some work with it before it's ready to be used in Grands Prix. My post was, however, meant to be sarcastic. As somebody who very much wants McLaren to win, I feel the disadvantages of the system outweigh its advantages, so wouldn't mind if Ferrari kept on using it.

[darwin dali]

Disappointing news. As I said before, the lights system has many advantages, so Ferrari should not just look at the bad points, but the positives as well.

You say "as I said before" but I cant find your previous post MF. I just cannot see any advantage of lights over lollipop, and if Ferrari plan to use both then that is just plain stupid.
I really do not know what advantages the light system has - please explain. Thanks.

the advantage is taking away the reaction time of the lollipop man seeing the nozzle released, then raising the lollipop then the drivers reaction time to the lollipop being raised. probably 1 second in all of that.

compared to this system where the only reaction time is the drivers reaction to the light going green, which would be green as soon as the nozzle has been released.

obviously though its flawed when there is a congested pitlane

Thanks Bud, I really doubt that the delay is as much as a second though. I have been both lollipop man and driver in the past (not F1) and, when I was lollipop my eyes where totally focussed on the last man working on the car - as soon as he moved to finish the job (wheels or fuel) I was lifting the lollipop, I would say that I was reacting to him finishing his job a couple of hundredths after he did. At the time of my reaction the mechanic would be just starting to move to finish, by the time the driver was off the mechanic was away from the car. As I understand it, the reason Massa got the green light too soon was because the fuel rig operator pressed his 'clear' button too soon. Well, if the rig operator has to press a button does that not equate to a lollipop reaction time? I really think that the benefits, if any, are marginal, and the safety risks are high as has been demonstrated.
To be safe, a lights system would need an automatic sensor detecting the proximity and speed of other cars in the pit lane as well as fuel rig detectors. What if other work is done on the car?, say new nose cone, and the fuelling is finished before that work? It means that we are back to the manual control of the lights, as it is supposed to be with cars in the pit lane now. Point- there is an override system supposed to be operated by someone watching the pit lane. So why did Massa get the green light when there was another car in the pit lane? 2 Ferrari errors in 1 !

The Singapore incident was unusual in that the automatic system for the green light was turned off since the mechanics were to clean the car from debris. The automatic system is linked to a proximity sensor on the fuel rig that indicates when the fuel hose is pulled out of the car. There is a reaction time gain when the system works as advertised. But as I said, it was set to manual to protect mechanics potentially still getting debris out of the car even after the fueling was completed.
The big disadvantage in my opinion is that once the green light is on, there's no way to stop the driver while the lollipop man could easily bang the lollipop on the car again or hit the helmet to make sure the driver knows something's wrong. One way I could imagine is a system with two light boxes, one where it's now and a second one a car length or so in front. The second one could act as a lollipop helmet banger if manually set to red during an incident.

[loosecannon]

This thread has really gone off topic with the pens in space, but since we're here, I'll wade in. If you had a normal, unpressurized pen in space, I think it would probably still work because there is no gravity to pull the ink away from the ball (as opposed to writing upside down here on earth where gravity would pull ink away). As you see in footage from space(assuming it's not faked, but that's for another thread) objects just float about randomly, so wouldn't the ink inside the pen also just move back and forth inside the pen and contact the ball? And if for a moment the pen didn't work, wouldn't a quick flick of the Bic would (using centrifugal force) push the ink to the ball?