Googling, this turns out to have been discussed a lot more than I would have guessed. Apparently if it does work, even with very good ball bearing and gearing, you can't get more than a fraction of a watt, and that's worthless since such a scaled up gyroscope will break long before it pays back its cost, much less turns a profit.
It's about what I figured. Energy is all around us, that doesn't mean its economical. I figure that a magnetic bearing will wear less than a ball bearing. How big does the gyroscope actually have to be for this to work? Can we just spin them faster? Why not an array of small ones? It might be cheaper to mass produce them. Also, the gear box was just proof of principle, you don't actually have to use gears. We could probably extract the energy more directly magnetically and trade volts with amps instead of torque with speed. And we can use superconductors to minimize losses there.
This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.
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