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Say we had a Hydrolox (Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen) sea-launch rocket. Would it be more cost-effective to develop an ISRU system for the launch ship to gather its fuel from the nearby waters or would it be better to just carry some pre-made Hydrogen and Oxygen?

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1 minute ago, NSEP said:

Would it be more cost-effective to develop an ISRU system for the launch ship to gather its fuel from the nearby waters or would it be better to just carry some pre-made Hydrogen and Oxygen?

Theoretically, this is plausible, but there may be one serious complication - the cost effectiveness.

Here's an article discussing ocean water as a clean fuel possibility:

http://www.newsweek.com/ocean-water-and-sunlight-are-turned-clean-energy-brilliant-new-floating-solar-751192

And here's a basic discussion on the power requirements to do such a conversion of creating oxygen and hydrogen from ocean water:

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/131168/how-many-joules-of-energy-are-required-to-convert-1-liter-of-water-into-hydrogen

To sum it all up, you'd essentially need an on-site nuclear power source to generate the needed joules to produce the oxygen and hydrogen to fuel a rocket. At the current stage of technology, it is not feasible financially or with the level of technology we have at our disposal. 

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6 hours ago, SaturnianBlue said:

Instead of the classic approach to space-based solar power, which uses a solar array to generate electricity and transmit it down to Earth for collection, would it be better to have a solar mirror that reflects the light down to Earth for collection?

From a practical point of view, maybe. From the point of view of not needlessly killing anything that strays into the path of the beam, definitely not.

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(And that's why KSPI-E mod contains a plenty of parts for the microwave network, to transmit the energy from the orbital collector to a random (including planes, ships or rovers) receiver.

Keep in mind that different purposes require (as in real world) different wave lengths.
So you put a primary collector near the Sun, transmit energy to the distributing receiver/transmitter at one wave length.
Then send this energy to the clients with different emitters depending on distance, atmosphere, etc, at other wave lengths)

Edited by kerbiloid
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On 1/27/2018 at 6:15 PM, NSEP said:

Say we had a Hydrolox (Liquid Hydrogen and Liquid Oxygen) sea-launch rocket. Would it be more cost-effective to develop an ISRU system for the launch ship to gather its fuel from the nearby waters or would it be better to just carry some pre-made Hydrogen and Oxygen?

Is this a Sea Dragon type of rocket? Because the other thing you’d have to worry about is seawater freezing to your rocket.

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On 29/01/2018 at 12:44 AM, Racescort666 said:

Is this a Sea Dragon type of rocket? Because the other thing you’d have to worry about is seawater freezing to your rocket.

Yeah, hopefully that would just shake of when it launches and if not, it might need to have some kind of shroud, that catches all the ice during fueling and when it the launches detaches from the rocket so there is no ice to worry about during launch.

Is there a way to stop Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen from boiling off and out of the tanks? Are the holes in Graphene small enough to stop it from happending?

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1 hour ago, NSEP said:

Is there a way to stop Liquid Hydrogen/Oxygen from boiling off and out of the tanks?

Yes, but it requires storing it under pressure, or actively refrigerated down to its liquefaction temp, both of which cost way too much mass.

**edit**

For the record, the Sea Dragon design used kerosene and LOx in its 1st stage (ie: the stage most in contact with seawater) so there is going to be far less ice than you'd think. You dont need as much volume of LOx as fuel (especially when its LH2), and LOx is much less cold than LH2. This is a good thing, because I dont think a massive tank of LH2 is going to take kindly to being immersed in water that is 250K hotter than it.

**edit2**

Actually scratch that, from the material on project rho, the whole thing is fuelled horizontally in the water, so the whole thing about LOx and kerosene and water is moot.

Dang thing is crazy.

Maybe its just supposed to have really good insulation I dunno...

 

 

 

Edited by p1t1o
avoid double-post
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That depends on what is divided, the representation of the number, and the algorithm. For integers: if it does multiple subtractions then nothing happens. If it does shift operations (division by 2) then nothing happens. For floating point one could multiply by the reciprocal of the denominator, which would result to 0. There are other approaches for fast algorithms, but in the end it boils down to if the compiler or assembler or interpreter or runtime environment or whoever is responsible doesn't spit out an error weird things will happen.

But i am not a specialist :-)

Edited by Green Baron
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On 1/27/2018 at 9:58 PM, SaturnianBlue said:

Instead of the classic approach to space-based solar power, which uses a solar array to generate electricity and transmit it down to Earth for collection, would it be better to have a solar mirror that reflects the light down to Earth for collection?

I wouldn't think so... my guess is that you'd be reflecting down unwanted wavelengths like ultraviolet which are a good thing for power but not so good on the skin.

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I found this when I was browsing Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DragonPower-induction-tankless-water-heater_60700064987.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.136.3d264856I15qnw

For some reason the seller description fonts render as some sort of wingdings on my Linux Firefox, but the question is that in what use case does induction heated tankless water heater  makes sense? I cannot think about any advantage of this compared to resistive heating

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5 hours ago, Aghanim said:

I found this when I was browsing Alibaba: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/DragonPower-induction-tankless-water-heater_60700064987.html?spm=a2700.7724838.2017115.136.3d264856I15qnw

For some reason the seller description fonts render as some sort of wingdings on my Linux Firefox, but the question is that in what use case does induction heated tankless water heater  makes sense? I cannot think about any advantage of this compared to resistive heating

induction heat the metal pipe directly so you don't need to open it. 
Yes an heating coil would work better as I see it as you heat the water rather than the pipe.
Seeing how short the coil is I have issue seeing much uses,  
one is to keep water from freezing in pipes, this would only help with running water however. 
 

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Hey guys, I think I need help double checking my numbers.

I'm designing a ringworld (New writing project, in development :wink:), and I'm trying to find the surface area compared to Earth.

It orbits Lalande 21185 (not important, just context), at 0.15 AU, it has a 1.41 x 10^11 circumference, a 4,023,360 m width (2500 miles wide, about ~300 miles wider than the moon), and from my numbers, it has an internal surface area of 3,693,284,000,000,000,000 meters.

When I tried seeing the land area in relation to the Earth, the numbers were huge, way more than what's probably realistic, so I dropped the '^2' on both sides, and got 95.2623x the land area of Earth, but that doesn't sound right, which is why I'm asking for the actual number, and where I messed up. Or if it is correct, and it's just a lot lower than I expected.

Thanks :)

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Let's see (rounding): 150,000,000 km * 0.15 * 2 * PI  * 4,000km width = 567,000,000,000 km² / 149,000,000 km² = 3,805.37.

Your tape with radius 0,15 AU and width 4,000km has ~3,800 (threethousandeighthundred) times the surface of earth's landmass.

Edit: miscalculation on first try (4pi instead of 2) :-)

Edited by Green Baron
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