Nuke

thats clickbait, i think they are just putting a few of the metallic tiles on to see how they do.

right now its the starship of theseus. we still dont know what the end product looks like, we just know it will be big and reusable.

you are already starting to see nationalism go on life support in favor of globalism. there is still quite abit out there, especially from the superpowers. as much as china, us, russia, etc all want to point nukes at each other they will, but at the same time thats stupid because you depend on them for trade and your own economy would collapse without it. i expect there to be considerable economic warfare, info wars and psy ops where the superpowers try to destabilize each other from the inside, and the usual proxy wars. the smaller countries may want to band together or align with one of the super powers for defense. i dont know how stable that is going forward, its certainly not the kind of thing that leads to a singular world government. but it can reduce the number of countries pretty fast. i think a singular planetary government requires an external threat. star trek may be correct in this regard. humans seem to have a hard wired us vs them mentality that you cant shut off. without a them the us fragments to create one. best we might be able to do is a handful of super powers looking for an upper hand over the others (which may lead to total war ala 1984). when dealing with other intelligent species you might be able to have different hard wired impulses. not everyone evolves as a predatory ape offshoot. can you imagine a world where bonobos evolved to intelligence? war might come in as second in existential threats, to epidemics of stds and unsustainable population growth.

thing its there is always a kitten calendar. with many warm fuzzies. at the end of the year mom cuts out the pictures and staples them around my desk in a vain attempt to cheer me up. my actual room is completely undercoated. hundreds of staring eyes, demanding scritches and treats. from the wells of stock images, i wonder how many are still alive.

i have a hard time feeling anything about an arbitrary counter rolling over and having to buy a new kitten calendar.

were gonna need a bigger engine

or its a test subject and this is the autopsy. fly it again you may lose valuable data.

its clear its made in four sections. i didn't think it was sheet metal mostly for the lack of rivets. but those could be ground flush and filled over. it usually leaves a round mark you can see through the paint though. but it could have been machined out from the top as well.

that should come in handy should someone's science experiment escape.

i couldn't play that game more than a few hours without rage quitting. any game where you cannot make any significant progress after 4 hours of play does not respect my time. i want a game not a job.

your talking 500 pounds, i can legpress that (granted the last time i tried was in 1999). and half that, angle iron's got it. the point of failure would be the soil its standing in, here it would probibly push it all the way in, we got soft ground. but in packed earth it would stay up. the angle resists tensile loads and the steel can handle the compression easy.

you can farm live soil. it might be more involved than it is on earth since you are washing out perchlorates and introducing compost and bacterial cultures, maybe a few earthworms (insert shai hulud reference here) and imported (or locally "manufactured") fertilizers. doing your aeroponic food crops mostly for food production, and the wastes of that go into soil production. then you can expand to crops that need soil. and you are always making more soil as a byproduct of food production. you eventually get to the point where you are importing livestock, probibly not for meat initially, less pigs and cows and more goats (eat anything and produce milk and fertilizer) and sheep (human populations require textiles). once the colony is thriving then you can think about pigs and chickens. though in the expanse they seem to be at the point where they have cattle.

angle iron is pretty robust.

i think were pretty much just talking grow lights. supplemental to natural light unless you need to grow underground. you can hack your grow cycles if you give them an artificially short night cycle and keep the lights on most of the time. running the lights low during day to supplement natural daylight, and also charging batteries so you can run them for at least some portion of the night. you also have to power water reclamation, but if you use aeroponics or gmo crops, you can reduce water usage greatly. life support is your other power requirement, but plants help with scrubbing co2 and producing oxygen, so you wont be running life support at full capacity. only other thing would be machinery but an ag colony can just to it the old way, and the low gravity should help make the work easier.

really depends on the type of colony. if its just an agricultural settlement then yea solar is probibly fine. an industrial base or large scale colony probibly needs the high output and reliable baseload. no matter what you do you are going to need to send a huge payload to mars.

ive been playing the forever winter for the last week, and i realized that its really just the distant prequel to scorn. at least if you assume the euruskans win the war.

another case of ip hoarding ruining franchises. they either sit on them and collect royalties without actually producing anything, or they hand it off to the intern-run shovelware studio or whatever content assembly line fits the media. everyone wants to be the walmart of entertainment. we really need to go back to shorter copyright terms, then they would be forced to innovate rather than simply operate the machine. which will happen anyway when they obliterate all the profitable franchises with pre-existing fanbases.

for some reason it looked more like a tank part than a rocket part. probibly because the gearing and the fact that it looks like a fairly solid piece of metal. also pay attention to the way the ring is joined together with 10 big fasteners (bolts or perhaps plug welds). it looks like it was made out of four identical pieces. if this was an aerospace part it would not require such robust joinery and it would be machined out to be mostly hollow as well. on second though the gearing doesnt look like gearing after zooming in. given the spaces betrween the teeth are a lot wider than the teeth themselves, and the very square profile of the tee (they normally follow an involute curve).

you also dont have to send people out in pressure suits to dust the panels all the time.

id sooner use what they sell at the dispensery.

some time in the last 3-4 days i did something to my right shoulder, though i have no idea what. its been sore all weekend.

bonus if its a carrier.

yet another problem that can be solved with nuclear weapons.

fast food should not be taken internally.

lunacrete has made its rounds before. i mean you can do wonders with shotcrete and rebar. assuming you can make rebar. and shotcrete, and have one of those big concrete pump rigs. i suppose you could do it with forms and a shovel though. having done that kind of work before, idk if id want to do it while also wearing a space suit.