Nuke

problem with lunacrete is where do you get the water? will concrete even cure if its in a vacuum?

i was a lot more excited about this than the eclipse. but i havent had a good look at the sky in weeks. so im not exactly sure how to find it. i guess just look for the giant dot in the sky.

regolith removal will be essential for most moon bases. i imagine giant leaf blowers being used. but since there is no air, you will need a rocket or some other compressed gas source. then you will have issue with low gravity, so you will need to steak everything down during operation. the reverse vacuum cleaner approach, where you use a gas stream to blow dust into machinery that can remove it mechanically. of course its going to eat that machinery alive. best approach ive seen is a rover with a giant magnifying glass that will slowly glassily the surface into bricks, which you can later use in construction or as rad shielding. you could do the same with lasers i guess, much faster, if you have the power. or just get a bunch of guys in space suits with shovels to scoop it into your lunar regolith 3d printer. i imagine a system of interlocking bricks with perforations that allow cables to be passed through. you can then form brick rings, and tighten the cables. these could be interlocked in sections and capped off with other printed elements. cinch all the cables to be as air tight as possible, then coat the interior with resin, and perhaps glass fiber made form regolith (think cotton candy machine from hell). you could then pile on regolith bricks until the internal pressure is equivalent to the pressure of compression from the external material. the result is a pressure holding volueme for lunar habs. though it might be easier to just bring a hab sized printer.

you just need to bring chemicals that have a highly exothermic reaction when combined with the alien atmosphere. we can call this fuel. eg for gas giants, its probably going to be oxygen you bring. it might not even be fire in the earthly sense though. not sure what kind of exothermic reactions you can cause with co2 atmos though. ive seem more than one video about ammonia engines.

ducted fans are well tuned systems which can be well optimized. but that optimization usually comes at the cost of a vary narrow operational envelope. laminar flow wings have a similar problem. fan design in general is a deceptively complex problem.

they react to any kind of food packaging that cat food/treats/nip are packed in. bags, cans, pull taps, those little zipper pouches. sometimes i open a bag of chips and then the cats guilt trip me for not giving them any treats. i usually either give in and get them some treats or, if i dont have any, hide from them because i dont want to see their sad eyes while i eat my chips.

my mom desperately wants to move, but that's a lot of expense and effort and i will have to throw away a third of my stuff to stand a chance of affording the logistics. its mostly junk really, parts for projects im either working on or i thought it might be useful somewhere down the line. moving would be hard on everyone, mom the cats. another small town just getting furniture will be a nightmare going without a chair for a week while amazon drags its knuckles is not my idea of fun, and mom cant even get off the floor without a call to the fire department. and i would have to deal with moving all our possessions without funds, vehicles, or the ability to make friends with strangers. when i ask why its always something like "the people here hate me" but i dont see it. they paid for two of her mobility scooters, they always ask how she is doing. maybe if she left the house more she would interact with them more. her own sour and entitled behavior probably is part of why no one comes to visit. moving isnt going to change that. wherever you go there you are. it goes beyond simple wanderlust. i figure the woman 2 doors down is the other side of that. running from something inescapable to something ambiguous and undefined. and my mom's own behavior is similar. we moved so many times growing up i never developed relationships. all because of some mental pathology that makes one run away from everything they know. someone ought to write a paper on this.

the lady 2 doors down is crazy, clearly bipolar. making enemies left and right. shes one of those down southers who watched all the alaska reality shows, fell in love with the fantasy alaska and is disturbed that its just another town like any other. i was sitting on my deck, playing with one of the cats and reading the local paper (a good way to blow 5 minutes), watching the 5 or 6 eagles circling around overhead. after having a fight with her neighbor's daughter over an unused parking space, and leaving in a huff, she looked up at me and said "i dont know how you like living here". not sure if she was talking about the state, the town, or the apartment. frankly its an old building and has too many floors, the appliances are trash and the place is drafty. but its better than some of the apartments ive seen/lived in around our state. and way better than some of the ones i lived in while in phoenix (5 kinds of roach motel with a pool that is safe to swim in sometimes). still the town is as close to mayberry as you can get in 2024.

i figure there is a lot of free memory left as a lot of the devices that would consume most of it (like image buffers) are no longer needed/dont work/no longer have enough power.

i was pretty much raised on horror. even going back to kindergarten staying up to 3 am to watch the slasher flick of the month. im so desensitized to such things now, i thought that saw was a comedy. cracking up while the other movie goers were hiding behind their popcorn. these days i avoid them because they are usually cinematic drivel.

slept mostly, got out of bed around 9:30 pm.

most of the diagnoses ive had have been of questionable quality. getting an actual psychiatrist to sign off on what you have so you can actually get services is the hard part (they will hand out meds on the spot though, treating symptoms only). you can wait six months for one appointment, and thats not enough time to get an idea for whats going on. how to fit 40 years of failure and trauma into a 30 minute session. and that's even if you are willing to talk about it with a complete stranger. still not comfortable talking about certain things with my therapist who i have been seeing for a couple years now. the word of a therapist also carries very little weight with the bureaucrats.

i see christmas starting in september has crept into horror movies.

well i went to school in the 90s and graduated in 2000 (mid semester because i wanted to finish my electronics program, id have graduated in 1999 otherwise). the only opt in i got was for my vocational classes which was at a different school (none of them were near where i lived, so i spent much of the day on buses). i was given no choice about spec ed. its like the school district rounded up all its troublemakers, boat rockers, and kids with learning disabilities and dumped them into one school. i always questioned the logic of putting autistic kids with the psychopaths. a point system was like two thirds of our grade so anyone with an iq over 100 could game the system and graduate with very little effort. the teachers who worked there were great for the most part, but the system they worked under was highly flawed. teaching us material four grades under our level. it always bugged me that i had to take a math class for the credit, and they never got any further than doing fractions it seemed, meanwhile i was doing far more complex math in my electronics class (the alternating current unit was hell).

he does have a point. you might be turned down for jobs or military service for your mental disabilities, but then the disability people will tell you that you are not disabled. at least that's been my experience. i was spec ed in high school and most of the other students at the time, we knew we had all been singled out by society and kept down and that any special treatment we were getting would go away the second we turned 18 and we would be thrown to the wolves. some prepared (i did the stem classes), some avoided it, some accepted their lot in life, one of my friends committed suicide. when columbine happened we saw those guys as freedom fighters, my friends all bought black trench coats. i don't condone this kind of violence though, the fact that it continues and at much higher magnitude is disgusting. this is just how we felt at the time (and keep in mind it wasn't omnipresent like it is today). the fact that this started happened right around the time we moved into participation trophy era could not have been a coincidence. we need to take a good hard look at whatever policy changes happened during that time frame and have persisted to this day and ask if it is worth it to continue on this way. so what the schools need to do is to take a much more hands off approach. provide the stem education for those that want it (autistic people seem to gravitate towards those fields on their own without any help, i know i did), but don't force it. don't push labels on kids or categorize them for convenience sake. don't segregate them from the normies. these are the people they will have to live with on a daily basis. they never consider what those kids lives will be like when they are adults. they assume that the government that pays their salaries will take care of them, but that couldn't be further from the truth. and Darn it get the politics out of the classroom. one side or the other's vision is not reality and reality is a beast. ugh, and i came here to complain about my circadian rythems being offset by 12 hours, but that seems unimportant now.