Oh, that salary was just the tip of the iceberg.
They raised millions in cash from investors. A small part actually went to R&D. The rest disappeared through the various financial contortions that fill up the majority of the filings.
Chris Nelson had been in charge of the WHE engine at Cyclone for years, constantly making predictions of production in six months. Remember that PR he put out announcing their "factory" in Ohio? Look at all the photos taken inside the Q2P building and look for factory machinery. There isn't any.
The last report listed their primary asset as shop equipment with an acquisition cost of $9500. That's all that's left to show for the $6 million they burned through. (Yes, I am ignoring the listed value of the Cyclone IP license.)
The lion's share of that money didn't end up in steam engines.
Of course, Chris Nelson had known for years the WHE engine couldn't be made to work at Cyclone. He also dealt with the Ohio State University engineers who couldn't make the engine work there. The last word from Ohio State was they couldn't make the water lubricated bearings work and they had designed a bearing test machine for more research in hopes of making a bearing that could work.
There is no bearing test machine in the Q2P photos. Bearings were the key critical hurdle, and Nelson put no visible effort into solving this problem. There's not a word in any of the financial filings saying the bearings were being worked on.
Q2P has that contract with Phoenix Power that makes a $150K progress payment when an engine runs under part load continuously for 200 hours. This payment was never made, so we know for certain Q2P never made an engine last that long.
Nelson knew his product did not work, and had no reasonable prospect of being made to work. Years of experimentation at Cyclone plus the conclusions of the Ohio State research proved that. Yet he told investors the technology worked and was ready to deploy. He even sold a system to that company in Florida.
Bottom line is a lot more than Nelson's salary disappeared with nothing to show for it. The little bit spent on R&D had no hope of making Q2P's only product work. Only the guy who spent all that money knows where it went.
