Codraroll

"Ideal" can also mean "hypothetical, unachievable, can only exist as an idea, imaginary", such as a frictionless vacuum, an infinitely thin, straight line or the ideal turbine used to derivate Betz' limit for wind power efficiency. In that usage, the word may actually be appropriate. But anyway, give it a few months, and Russia will probably boast of having it in their arsenal anyway. There seems to be a trend in Russian defense news that if a weapon can be conceived on paper as a conceptual possibility, it is considered operational and in use by the armed forces, even if the concept has only been tested once to spectacular failure. See undetectable torpedoes, hypersonic missiles, radars that detect stealth aircraft, tanks that survive anything, etc.

This. Also, since sci-fi engineering by necessity is very difficult engineering, it takes an expert to understand the finer details of everything. Heck, just try to write an account of the Apollo missions while explaining the ins and outs of the minute details, and that was fifty years ago! Now scale everything up to the observable limits of technology as viewed from a state-of-the-art perspective today. For the story to contain an accurate description of everything that's going on, a lot of expertise has to be written into it. This means you either have to write a story about an expert, for whom it would be natural/reasonable to narrate the finer details, or you have to assume the reader is already an expert so you can jump straight to the juicy parts, or the story has to contain tons of narration to try to make the reader understand what is going on - in which case the reader usually tends to find something more interesting to read. Spending chapters upon chapters on minute explanations of technical details might have worked for Herman Melville, but Moby Dick was salvaged by its great characters and great prose. Nobody reads it - or remembers it - for all the time it spends poring over the various aspects of whaling. Much more commonly, and usually more effectively - just wing it. See the The Expanse books, for instance. The Epstein drive works. It's efficient. Later books reveal it's based on laser ignited fusion somehow. That's all there is to it. It is mentioned that - but not how - the problem of waste heat has been solved, and that's not a big problem for the story, because The Expanse is not a patent application for the Epstein Drive. The Star Wars universe has its hyperdrives, whose technical descriptions boil down to "this is the part that lets you travel faster than light, it's a Bad Thing if it gets broken". So yeah, at some point you have to invent some magic. If you try not to, it tends to take over the book, and that is much less interesting.

I'm reminded of a case I read about a few years ago. A big Chinese city had set a lofty goal for crime reduction: that there should be fewer than 30,000 cases of violent crime that year. The goal was met, just barely. At the end of the year, the tally stood at 29,998. The last of those had occurred on September 26.

Elected or forced at gunpoint to take office?

By this rate, things will get interesting in a month or so. We'll quickly get to the point where the diagnosis will be ready before the test can be taken. I can only imagine getting a test in the mail, with a letter attached: "The test results show you are infected with the coronavirus. Please take the test in order to preserve the space-time continuum."

If they want to go all the way to the full launch weight including all the margins, it will be exactly 1 at the point of launch. It might not get all the way to orbit that way, though.

I read this thread a little too late in the evening, skimmed through, and saw this as "What do you mean N? The N-word?". Needless to say, this made tater's response look rather ...odd. In other news, it seems like the situation in Norway is reaching a sort of linear rise and not exponential, which is ...something, I guess. The number of hospitalized has risen by about 30 per day for about four days now, and there haven't been any new deaths (now 7) reported in the past three days. The number of registered infections has also been linear for 12 days now, around 150 registered per day, but as they aren't testing everyone with symptoms anymore, it's hard to get a clear meaning out of those numbers. One graph even goes a little down: the number of hospital employees in quarantine has gone from 9400 yesterday to 8800 today. I choose to believe this is because their quarantine period ran out without them reporting any illness, and not because they're told to ditch the quarantine and get as many idle hands as possible to the hospitals. For now, the situation seems manageable, which is reassuring seeing as we've been in a partial lockdown for a week and a half now. On a brighter note, according to the statistics on the linked page (it's all in Norwegian, sorry), the number of people registered recovered from Covid-19 is today higher than the number of registered cases on March 2. As the number of cases rose about exponentially from there, hopefully the number of recovered will rise likewise. The sight of those two lines finally crossing will be uplifting when it finally comes, at least.

This could potentially let you attach your kids' first smoke signals to the fridge.

That's 0.6 percent, I sincerely hope. Otherwise, we're in a load of doodoo.

More like: 6A. The corp awards you with a cushy board-member position where you're paid six figures to attend two rubber-stamp meetings annually. 6B. Profit.

Yikes, that's the kind of statue you design when you have zero faith in your sculpting skills. Or just very little time to work, I guess. "Yes, it meets all your specifications. It's three meters tall, Gagarin's on it, and I got room for all the text for the plaque. Well, it's not really a plaque anymore..."

Woo, it'd only take 20,000 days to test the entire population! That's only 54 and a half years!

To illustrate the problem posed by this virus, here are some data from Lombary in Italy: It is a very crude way to calculate, and probably missing a ton of context, but at the moment the number of deaths in Lombardy - from people who got sick a week or two ago - already constitutes around half the daily average number of deaths for all causes. It can of course be assumed that there would have been some overlap between the numbers, so that those who died of Coronavirus would have died of something else around the same time anyway, but the numbers still seem pretty scary.

That's where Italy is now. And honestly, I think it's smarter to take measures to reduce infections right now, than to wait for hospital beds to be filled up and then doing it out of necessity. This excellent graph has been making the rounds on social media over the past day, and I believe it warrants a repost here as it illustrates the issue very effectively: (source)

Somebody did: It runs on efficiency. Case closed.

If they recommend sacking each board member individually, they could rack up quite a few recommendations on that alone.

Chemical rockets would be better than nuclear, I think, if you only plan to use them when the jump drive isn't suitable, which I take would mean that the jump drive is used to "teleport" from place to place and the rockets are used to match the relative speed of the spacecraft and the planets/stations/whatever you are teleporting towards. This means that rockets would mostly be used in proximity to spaceports, where you wouldn't want to spew radiation in every direction.

It's wrong to compare a disease which is endemic in the population already, with a disease with only a few tens of thousands of cases known worldwide. If the coronavirus became endemic the same way the flu is, we'd be deep in the doo-doo. Or, well, not that it would wipe out humanity or anything, but the extra strain on the healthcare system in addition to all the other stuff the healthcare system is already having its hands full of, would at the very least be hellishly expensive. It's an inconvenience worth fighting against.

A backpack full of batteries and shoulder-mounted auto-aiming lasers should take care of that threat. You could possibly also just jam the drones, cause them to detonate prematurely, or shoot down the plane that dropped them in the first place.

It's as if they believe the tests is just a milestone to be completed as quickly as possible. The point of the tests being to pass the tests, so that a box can be checked and the product shipped. "We mustn't do any tests the product is likely to fail, because that would delay the project and make shareholders unhappy". It's almost strange that they haven't swapped out the entire leadership. Sure, the head honcho had to go, but it seems the philosophy remains.

If I remember the SpaceY engines correctly, the engine referred to is the 5-meter "multi-Ratite" cluster of 5 Ratite engines. This being an emissive texture sounds to me like it's about the "glow" effect on engine bells if they've run for a while. No idea how to address the issue, though.

The closest comparison here would probably be airships of the 1920s and 30s. They had compartment walls made of fabric and all the furniture was made from balsa wood to reduce weight. It was a good attempt at luxury - though far from that afforded on an ocean liner - given the tight constraints.

Uhh... this doesn't quite make sense to me. Its density is 22.59 g/cm3, or 22 590 kg/m3. A five meter sphere of osmium would have a volume of 65.4 m3 and weigh almost 1500 tons. Assuming you input that wrong number in your calculations, your already pretty spectacular estimates are too low by a factor of almost 150.

At that speed there wouldn't be any Earth to hit at all. Go faster than light and physics break down. Heck, with that number of zeroes there would barely have been time for physics to happen even in the frame of physics as we know them. It may be that a ball of such "super-matter" capable of moving at such high speeds wouldn't have time to even interact with physical matter because it would instantly travel the width of the universe, passing through all of it without leaving a mark. Time itself is a very iffy concept when high relativistic velocities are involved. From the ball's perspective, the universe would go straight from the Big Bang to heat death the instant the ball appeared in it. From the universe's perspective, the ball wouldn't exist for long enough for its existence to even be registered.

In theory, this is possible, though. Cutting off a part of the ship and throwing it away to reduce mass. Air balloons do it all the time. Doing so in a spaceship might be a little more perilous, though.