Sillychris

Awesome! With your Blue Duna I can crash down hard in the ocean and use less fuel to get there!

I think they screwed up when they set the speed of light as the same for any observer in any inertial reference frame. That bug has a lot of kraken consequences throughout the entire simulation.

I both agree and disagree with you, as both statements are partially true and partially false. In regard to maintenance, 8 legs would be a more complex mechanical system than 2 legs. However, with 8 legs the reliability of any individual leg is not as important. Thus the mechanical maintenance would be more complex but not as important. In regard to stabilization maintenance, 8 legs is a piece of cake to control whereas bipedal motion is actually a very challenging problem. The computer systems and programming required to command more legs than 2 is ironically simpler than strictly 2. In regard to maneuvering, I think it really is situation specific. In tighter quarters, 2 legs is better. On loose or sticky/sucky ground, more legs is better. I'm not sure if 2 or 8 legs would be better on steep terrain, though. I tend towards more legs on steep terrain since when I go rock climbing I have to use all 4 limbs and hence I become a 4 legged vehicle. Of course, if your mech's gun arms had hand like objects, this would eliminate that problem. I think we need a mech modeled after a scorpion. Whole lotta legs, two light guns in the front and a big badass rear mounted gun. Nice and low like a tank, too.

The legs should have bayonets, too. Maybe even lightsaber bayonets or a similar can opener attachment.

Pretty much. I'm just using water for getting the thing working, the liquid used in the actual experiment will have much different properties. As much as I would love to machine a flask out of metal, the chamber needs to be transparent. Plastic, on the other hand is quite tempting...

I think 1977 should be year zero... the year star wars was released. Then our dates would be BS and AS (Before Star Wars, After Star Wars). I was born in year 6 AS

I can't thank you guys enough for all the suggestions. You've all given me a pile of ideas to work with. This is for a senior research project I am scheduled to complete in a few weeks so I obviously will only be able to implement a couple suggestions by the deadline, but I plan to incorporate all the suggestions into my paper. I suppose I owe an explanation of what I am trying to accomplish. The centrifugal forces will generate negative pressure in the central axis of the fluid. If the cohesion of the fluid is sufficiently high that we can keep it on the threshold of pulling apart, then an interaction with a particle could deliver enough recoil to fracture the liquid and create a tiny bubble. I am then hoping that the bubble continues to pull apart under the centrifugal forces and grows to something that can be optically detected. For what purpose? I would like to establish a proof of concept with a neutron source but ultimately the goal is to use this apparatus as a detector for WIMPS (Weakly interacting massive particles) ie dark matter.

How long do you think until somebody breeds or engineers a tiny toy car shaped cellÉ

Totally righteous!

The goal is to create a particle detector. Recoil momentum from a weird particle needs to be sufficient to fracture the liquid while under high centrifugal forces. All the ideas so far are ****ing excellent. My favorite is make the driveshaft thicker.

Look at the scorpion tank from Halo: Not a bad idea. Variable geometry treads for improved terrain abilities. Let's make the treads more variable and more variable until they function as legs as well as treads! Maybe in the future the distinction between tanks and mechs will get somewhat fuzzy?

I don't think that legged motion is more efficient than wheeled motion, and I don't think that's why it was chosen by evolution over wheels. I think evolution favored legs because they are actually plausible with biological methods. That being said, I often ask biologists how we could perhaps engineer an organism with wheels instead of feet. What do you guys think? Also, I think we are overlooking that the mechs of the future would probably have wheels on their feet. Maybe a wheel tripod or something like that that can be locked for walking purposes and can be driven for high speed driving purposes. Let's inject THAT idea into the discussion!

I posted a figure of the apparatus. I have since removed the driveshaft bushing since it was catching on fire. GOing to give up on the vacuum for now and see if it is actually needed.

I like the shooting in the dark because it may just introduce something we haven't thought of. I'm really hoping it isn't vibrations from the motor because then we need a new motor. But it probably is. Maybe I should post a figure...

I am definitely switching my bathroom scale to exajoule/c^2 now. I'll ignore g on the scale since it's a constant, anyway.

I need to spin the hell out of a glass vessel with fluid inside. So far I have gotten an erlenmeyer flask up to 2400 rpm with water inside before it shatters. It seems to pick up some kind of vibration which shatters the glass. The setup seems fairly balanced up to that point and I suspect the fluid inside has a self balancing effect on the entire apparatus. ultimately, I'd like to push the vessel up to 13000 rpm but I need to kill this vibration in order to do it. So who knows stuff about spinning things? I have since removed the driveshaft bushing. That did reduce the vibrations but not enough. I am also starting to suspect that a vaccuum is not necessary.

I think I pick up what you're putting down. I like your description of mass vs energy. Why distinguish?

Instead of comparing mechs to tanks overall, why not consider their individual advantages? A tank is generally superior, I think. faster, tougher, simpler, etc. What a mech has going for it is the same thing infantry have going for them: Legs. A mech can step up or over thing that a tank can't cross. A mech could cross steep loose terrain, walk through a deep river, walk on ****ty terrain that would clog treads etc. Head to head I think a tank will flatten a mech everytime. What mechs will end up being is specialized niche vehicles that are used for their ultimate all terrain capabilities. Want to walk a tank on top of a mountain? No problem! Mechs will also be useful for baddassery propaganda purposes. Don't underestimate the power of national pride. Of course, if we ever figure out some sort of anti-gravity hover drive mechs will completely lose their one tactical advantage.

Yes, they turn into photons. I think it's fair to consider photons particles of pure energy since they have zero rest mass. Yes, when you consider their kinetic energy and apply e=mc^2 to it, there is no missing mass. However, when they hit something and spread the kinetic energy around a little, their rest mass remains the same. There are no special strong force bonds holding that kinetic energy. The particles are more massive simply because they are moving It's true, they have kinetic energy that didn't come from something that is analogous to a chemical bond which is exactly the point I was trying to make. I don't officially get my physics degree for another 5 weeks, but I think your point is that energy and mass aren't distinct, different, and exchangeable but rather that energy has mass and mass has mass. The real question is, do neutrinos have mass?

Einstein had a university degree when he deduced relativity... he wasn't exactly a layperson so it pains me when people cite his lack of qualifications in comparison to their own. Einstein also read a lot of scientific papers, so he was informed in his breakthrough. This is not analagous to the tinkerer who claims a breakthrough and is otherwise completely ignorant to physics. Einstein's work is deductive reasoning at its best. Special relativity was deduced strictly from 2 axioms. Since his logic was strictly deductive, anything he arrived at should be correct provided the axioms are also correct. The two famous axioms are of course: 1) Light is measured as having the same speed by any observer in any reference frame 2) All inertial reference frames are equivalent (ie velocity transformations) In a nutshell, while everyone else was assuming that an observer with a velocity relative to light should measure a speed other than c, Einstein thought "What if that isn't true?" In regard to general relativity, he approached it in a strictly deductive sense once again, and the only axiom he used is that there is no way an internal observer can tell the difference between being stationary in a gravitational field or accelerating at a rate equivalent to the gravitational field.

I disagree. Understanding how a virus works and what it is is pretty important to the common man since we are constantly fighting viruses. It is surprising how much of the population can't distinguish between viruses and bacteria and thus take antibiotics for everything. Taking antibiotics for a viral infection not only does nothing to the virus, but also breeds antibiotic resistant bacteria to become a problem later. This was all covered in high school biology and that's why I don't take antibiotics for the common cold.

Your rule of considering bonds/forces first and calculate energy later works very well for the coulomb force, I'm sure. When dealing with the strong and weak nuclear forces, it's not so simple. We are kind of lacking good models for the strong and weak force. What we aren't lacking is isotopic rest masses. I should also point out, all nuclear reactions are not simple rearrangements of neutrons and protons. Sometimes a neutron changes into a proton, and vice versa. In fact, a stray neutron left to its own devices will decay to a proton by emitting [an electron]. The mass of [an electron] and proton are less than that of a neutron. Where did that mass go? It became energy. There was no electron bonded to a neutron before the decay. There was no "energy stored in a bond". This is nuclear physics. It's not chemistry. Particles like to change their identity. Another example: Muon decaying to an electron. A muon has about 200 times the rest mass of an electron. When a muon decays to an electron, that mass differential is released as energy. There's no "bond" that gets broken to release energy, but the energy gained by the now relativistic electron is quite accurately predicted by e=mc^2 Anyway, if you want to look at energy stored in "strong force bonds": that energy is condensed and has mass. The same is true in chemical bonds, except the energy is on the order of eV as opposed to MeV. The increased mass from energy stored in chemical bonds is very very tiny. It would be unwieldy to do calculations on mass differences to do chemical bond energy, just like it would be unwieldy to do relativistic calculations for the velocity of a steam locomotive. In general, I have noticed that the non-physics crowd is extremely hostile to accepting that energy and mass are totally equivalent, but they are. The only caveat when switching between them is you have conservation laws to observe (Conservation of charge, lepton number, spin, momentum, etc.)

I'd start by attacking his outright false claims. When he's talking about radio waves moving faster than the speed of light, he is probably thinking of the group velocity. You can make a wave packet appear to move faster than the speed of the individual waves it is made out of. The separate photons, however, strictly move at c. As far as invisibility, yeah, it does exist. We have a working proof of concept that hides from microwave light and it's simply an engineering problem to generalize the method. Otherwise, he's making some pretty fantastic claims. You ask him for proof, he says it's a big coverup and so there's no proof then you ask him how he is so sure if there's no proof. Don't try to argue with an idiot.

Space-o-nauts are pretty cool, but what about those of us who explore terrestrially? Nautonaut(one who explores oceans) Rhodonaut(someone on a roadtrip) Trekonaut(hiker, maybe backpacking) Vertonaut(Rock climber/mountain climber)

You are an organism and you are a part of the ecosystem. Having a rudimentary grasp of your organs is surely valuable.