CLEAR/TRANSPARENT material for underside tray?
 

i know the tray material issue has been beaten to death but i'd like to be able to see the engine through the underside tray to tell problems, if any. does anyone know of a material for this purpose? thanks.

I'd wireframe it then cover it with boat shrinkwrap... apart from around the exhaust components of course.


edit: Actually what would be an idea is to make custom panels out of whatever opaque substance is convenient, all the work/bother of fitting those is finding something to attach the edges to, and shaping those right. Then when you've got those right, you could cut "windows" in them and either make "easy off" access panels held on with industrial velcro or similar, OR just cover with boat wrap, window film, regular poly sheet etc.

Plexiglass?

Don't do plexi. It is too brittle in the thin kind of sheets needed to flex fit.

If it's anything like my stuff, it'll get dirty in no time, then you won't be able to see through it anyway, and then where will you be?

If you can afford it...there's always transparent aluminum. :D

Why did they even need to be able to see the whales in the first place? And if they had, cameras couldn't have done the job?

It's been important to more than one plots...they can't just do things the easy way unless the easy way is impossible (warp drive, transporters).

Wait, we ARE talking about Star Trek here, right? :D

Good point: Star Trek is not science fiction, but fantasy.

There is a technically intensive potentially feasible way of rendering aluminum "transparent" ... but it's on the order of give me a couple of million dollars and a couple of years and then I'll show you. It's a bit like the laser bounce method of bugging someone, only you're bugging eleventy billion atoms on the surface of the metal, then you need to cross modulate the output into the visual range.... very highly complex.

Was that the transparent to x-rays story? Only worked for miniscule amounts and it's extremely unstable, if I recall correctly. Sorry, Scotty. :)

That's an interesting brute force method, but not exactly what I was thinking of.

Oh, you were being literal. I'm not sure how your idea would work, since the impact of photons is extremely small compared to that of sound waves.

Yes, but you'd be using a much smaller wavelength, x-ray or higher, need to work out the angle of incidence for internal reflection from the front surface, (Might need very smooth or highly regular structure of Al to even hope to get anything) and you'd need a highly coherent x-ray source and beam splitter... simplistically when you applied the source illumination back in antiphase to what bounced back from the front surface, you'd get some kind of "picture" of what was happening.... as long as the source illumination is bright enough, the thermal noise is low enough, the aluminum structure is uniform enough and the alignment of the planets is favorable.... This sort of thing mayyyy become more practical with advances in making large metal mono-crystals, and engineering a metal specifically to be easy to see through.

But anyway, that wouldn't work to see through the aluminum panels under your car, because any dirt on it would mess things up.

It's the noise low enough part that concerns me.