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Green Baron

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Everything posted by Green Baron

  1. Green Baron
    So that would be a solar power friendly setup then, or a battery saver ... :-)
  2. Green Baron
    It would be nice if you could give a short excerpt of what it is about because people like me don't watch half an hour of video for something we already know or expect to be just plain nonsense a waste of time. If the video is about re-breeding or back-breeding or however one wants to call it of extinct species then someone else has not understood how evolution works and the stuff is grossly misleading people. It is impossible to resurrect lost species, evolution does not have a direction. Once you have understood that it will become clear. One can replicate certain traits by actively selecting them, but this is then a new organism, human-made. Even if you could bring ancient worlds back to life (which is impossible) and set out similar species in them, they will not evolve to the same species that once were, there will be differences simply because just one mutation leads to different outcomes, the space is limited, climate is different, the ecology has changed ..... If the video comes to the same conclusion then everything is fine :-)
  3. Green Baron
    Great work, guys ! I am lucky, there apparently is no shop for railroad model making on the Canary Islands, and having the stuff sent here and through customs and all is too damage prone.
  4. Green Baron
    It is already an incidence to watch a quiet sky for more 10 minutes, I find it annoying nonsense. Hough.
  5. Green Baron
    On the danger of further annoying @p1t1o, yes we have a proof. Its speed. Its too slow for escape and too fast for coming closer.
  6. Green Baron
    In Nairobi ? That's a cool Museum. I was there 6 years ago. Or 7 ? That is an extraordinary place where you live, then.
  7. Green Baron
    I don't question that, we can further discuss how it came to the abundance of large organisms that grew to the limits of the material in use, i only gave an example that an organism does not necessarily have to be a predator to be "a towering hulk of meat and muscle". Btw., there were bigger ones ... Don't get me wrong, Trex was a hunting predator who probably didn't let a shortly deceased body go back to the kitchen if he (or she) stumbled upon one. But the shear size is not a good criterion. As you have mentioned just like i did, you need to look at the organism as a whole and the environment, all information that you can gather to get a picture of the niche it filled.
  8. Green Baron
    Looks like i now have a reputation to defend ... :-)
  9. Green Baron
    This is not incorrect, but there are contemporary animals far larger in terms of body mass than Trex and they fed on herbs. In a world without grass ! One must get a broader picture of how an organism works, all together from teeth over skull, appearance of the skeleton, movement etc. This is called functional morphology and takes into account the material in use (bones, muscles, etc.) and how that works, like what angles are possible, what is the maximum stress the frame can endure, what can be done with the teeth and the jaws, were and how are muscle joints to the bones arranged, and the joints between the bones, flexibility and rigidity and so on. If there is more info about the environment that can be used as well. And then there are strategies that work and others that don't. That is how e can infer how fast that animal may have run and how it kept balance, the force of its bite if you stayed for the night :-), and more. All together traces sum up to a more or less probable picture ...
  10. Green Baron
    I think the current definition of planet tries to avoid using composition or size as criteria for a planet. Only that it must have an orbit around a sun without being a sun, being roughly ball shaped and having cleared its path from competition. According to this Jupiter is a planet and we live in a unary system. Otherwise there would problems distinguishing between small brown dwarfs or large gas giants or whatever lies in between.
  11. Green Baron
    Sure there is a big difference. From out of a car it is very difficult to tell if a bone was gnawed. I am not sure if the rangers picturesquely place bones, probably if the scenery was covered with them. I was once in Kenya and Tanzania on guided tours and only saw a few bones. A bone in the open sun quickly looses its biological components, what remains is the bright white mineral part.
  12. Green Baron
    @kerbiloid, were you aware when you posted ? Say that you were !
  13. Green Baron
    In the end (and the beginning): bacteria. Never a mistake to mention them :-) Seriously, the circle will control itself if it works, and it did for many 10s of millions of years. You'll have a food pyramid with predators at the top, but there will never be more than can feed on the biomass below. A singe rotting top predator is a rare sight. We can imagine that once a trex was too weak to hunt or too old, it was killed and eaten. Though probably meant as joke (i never know when you're joking :-)), this deserves a like !
  14. Green Baron
    That depends, those who have the ability to feed on carrion do so of course, those who don't, don't. Cleaning up carcasses is a niche, but it is rare, as is carrion. But that is not necessarily a parallel to Jurassic big lizards as their lifestyle and niches were different. Just take warm and cold-bloodedness for example. @Just Jim: really a buzzard or a vulture ? Just asking, as i have heard that there can be confusion ...
  15. Green Baron
    This has nothing to do with cleverness. Organisms only need a rudimentary signaling device to tell the good from the bad. Insects signal a path but haven't even a brain. Wild living hyenas actually hunt most of their prey themselves.
  16. Green Baron
    This is one of the rare cases that i (hobby palaeontologist) actually recommend a wikipedia article, namely that of Tyrannosaurs. Read it with the usual grain of salt and follow the links, especially those with a real scientific background, like studies on functional morphology and palaeoecology. tl,dr: clearly a hunter, but probably didn't leave a body found lying by the side of the road if it wasn't too smelly yet. The ability of digesting carrion is extremely rare, for most organisms it is toxic to deadly.
  17. Green Baron
    I have a small cabinet full of H0/DC parts. Sometimes i lay tracks on the floor (don't have the patience for model making) just to play around. Nice scene, @Cydonian Monk :-) have you tried Factorio ? A quite nice train implementation is an integral part of the game ...
  18. Green Baron
    If you guys are interested in discussing large lizard's lifestyle further: Falcon Heavy: looked nice and impressive.
  19. Green Baron
    A rugged one aluminium framed covered with glass and backed with a plastic plate for use in the backyard or on the rooftop weighs around 15-20kg. It is ~90*180cm. The weight mass can easily be halved for space app. At noon it will produce around 583*0.3*0,9*1.8 Watt, at midnight 0. 0.3 is the assumed efficiency. I assume your stuff needs 1kW all around the clock, that is 25kWh. Half of that must be provided by the battery which must be charged. Batteries should not discharge fully, so multiply again by 2, but depends on kind of battery(*), so 25kWh. Size calculation for the battery bank is trivial if you have the voltage (let's say 48V because the higher the better in terms of line loss), so it boils down to dividing the 25kWh by 48V which gives us a bank of *thispchasnocalculatorinstallederror* battary capacity in Ah. Pls. double check with one of the many online calculators. Keep in mind that the generation in them is for earth (1kW/m², not 0.583). (*) lead based batteries should not discharge lower than 50%, Li-Ion ones 70% ? Edit: state of the art consumer type batteries: according to a quick search a car battery (Li-ion) of 100kWh weighs around 600kg. To charge it fully from 0 and at the same time provide 100kWh one would need ~800 solar panels with a mass of 12tons. If you design your stuff to use 48V (should be done on earth anyway !) a few cables and plugs are all else you need. All easily scaleable and maintainable, and with the weight of the panels, i think there is a lot of leeway for space application, so we can get down to 6tons for the panels, 600kg for the battery, a few hundred kilo for cables and plugs.
  20. Green Baron
    Absolutely, one head and one a..., higher/lower latitudes than 50° it is not the first or even second choice. Another thing: the initial cartload for solar power generation would be a big one, but replacement/expansion/discontinuation/disposal is much easier than the nuclear stuff. I think we can expect batteries/storage to become much denser than today, especially in the course of electric cars and traffic. Also, i am high tech freak, technology from the last millennium just doesn't sound and feel right :-)
  21. Green Baron
    Solar is the best available technology for anything power. The "kilopower" unit has moving parts, a limited lifetime, highly toxic ingredients, operates at high temperatures, needs all kinds of shielding, weighs 600kg (that is almost triple specific mass to power ratio compared to solar panels !) according to this. I must admit, i doubt the mass, but there it stands ... is there something newer about this ? But if its true this is the time to give up the weight argument ....
  22. Green Baron
    Nah. See panels on the Juno probe. They are exposed all the time and degrade 10-15% from radiation over the decades, that's all. There isn't much, almost nothing. No shielding, transformer, cables. Eventually tracking stuff. But what's a small engine and a ball rest ? Less then with a nuclear thing probably. That's what makes them so interesting for space, even out to Jupiter these days. Edit: oh, batteries of course ... that's a (big) point. But a nuclear thing would need outage buffer at least ... clear ... much smaller ...
  23. Green Baron
    Nope. Winds here can reach 100km/h in gusts, no problem. Wind pressure on Mars is no problem at all. But someone needs to dust the panels or they need a dust repelling coating. Since they are angled it should work, but i do not know !
  24. Green Baron
    I will have my triumph the day Wikipedia falters. Yeah, 70 Watt average, 200 peak, and yes, panels on earth get this (surface, not space), for my area (28° North, >300 days sunshine/year) that's conservative these days. ISS is old stuff, no valid reference. Cables have only little influence if the right diameter for the temperature and current is chosen. Banana, same (or more) applies to other sources. Conversion from 18-24V or so to whatever is needed the other end doesn't swallow much. We can make this pretty easy: a (tracking) panel with two square meters, sunshine all around the year (assuming no or few clouds on Mars), near the equator, that's 12.5 hours each day 600*0.3*12.5 = 2.5KW/day average, 5KW peak. 300.000 of them will produce 54MW. Walla. Oh, i combobulated m² and pieces in my post farther up. I am as sorry as necessary :-)
  25. Green Baron
    Solar constant for Mars is 600W/m² (a little less than 1/2 that of earth) but atmospheric scattering is lower. Near the equator there'd be no problem with getting the maximum of a panel (peak only of course !) ~30-40% of that as electricity, assuming the latest generation solar panels. The ISS panels are out of style, like a pc from 2006 ;-) Seriously, several generations have past since then. Good household ones are better these days (25% are the ISS panels i read somewhere but can't remember where). But of course: conversion losses, excess panels and storage for nighttimes make it difficult. But then again, a failing nuclear device needs replacement or repair as well. And solar panels aren't dangerous at all. But will probably not work at latitudes 50° and higher ...
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