Nuke

that could be a sign that its only downhill from here.

i liked that there were some hard sci-fi elements in the design of the ships. despite the fact that the jupiters are all belly landers (which i consider acceptable because space shuttle with the jupiters being treated as shuttles), they dock with the resolute in an up is forward orientation. but they seemed to forget that pretty damn fast. but season 2 went and dumbed it all down even worse.

today's star trek picard episode had one of the worst space battles in star trek history. so sick of seeing the cut your throttle maneuver they stole from top gun where inertia is immediately forgotten. only reason that worked in top gun was because of the lift induced drag. the mandalorian did it too, but in a much less lame way. and the crew acting out the slowness of the inertial dampeners seemed overly exaggerated from usual.

binged holocaust movies, listen to angel of death on a loop, had a bagel, didn't forget.

we had some nice weather last month, and by nice i mean absolutely fridged. as the sky tends to clear when its really cold out. you could see the stars, but if you look too long your eyeballs would freeze in place. then it warmed up and started snowing. even in this little rural alaskan town there is still enough light pollution to be problem, but go 10 miles out of city limits and you get a good view.

i dont think these funding bills tell us anything of value. most of the interesting stuff requires long term planning that exceeds the length of any one funding bill, or administration. things are constantly being defunded to get votes around election time. sometimes i think they set up pork early on so they can cancel it later on to make them look like a hero to the tax payer, a process that likely wastes more money than it saves.

can we move europa so that it orbits the super earth? the merged jupiter-saturn's moon system is a little crowded. maybe we can keep urannus, but as a moon of same, or just tilt jupiter-saturn 90 degrees and add its mass to the whole shebang. makes me wonder if we merged all the gas giants if we can haz a second star.

i do think picard was jumping to conclusions a little too quickly, which i felt was out of character. but i guess that was done to move the plot along. otherwise the entire episode would have been picard second guessing himself and we would have to wait till next episode to get the action sequence.

i kind of thought it felt like trek again, after so many things that did not. its full of subtle easter eggs. for example when dahj sees the vision of picard the first time, THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!

i think he needs altitude control for his balloon. probably a ballast system of sorts. or perhaps a small hydrogen/helium tank and release valve to control the volume of lifting gas. problem with those systems is thay require consumables which would limit flight time. another option might be a small heater for the gas bag, get a small amount of buoyancy control.

you could probably turn a shuttle into a centrifuge if you instal a counterweight and tether system in the cargo bay. deploy for spin. tether could also double for power generation. for a space plane going say from earth to venus it makes sense to be a belly lander since you are going to need one at both ends. once you get into space it doesn't matter how you orient the craft. you could have your transfer engines pointing down through some doors in the heat shield so the belly down orientation still works (either in a constant thrust or tumbling pigeon).

i like the idea of surrounding the crew area with your mission consumables. things like water, spare parts, fuel, etc. you have to carry it anyway so why not use it as radiation shielding. then you have whatever superstructure you need to support the drive, reactor, radiators, solar, etc built on top of that. i even thought about making the whole kitten kaboodle a toroid so you could spin for gravity, but that might be problematic structurally. endo spin or thrust gravity might work better in this config. deck style layouts are only acceptable for belly landers, the shuttle falls into this category. for when it spends any amount of time flying in an atmosphere (not falling). like in expanse season 4, un1 gets away with it because they actually show the ship disembarking from another vessel. i presume you could argue that the ship is stowed for transit on a more conventional thrust gravity configuration (may even be docked cross axially such that mothership down == belly lander down, or the crew may move to the mothership for transit). once docked it is essentially cargo. incidentally in the books the rossi is actually capable of belly landing. but i think they didnt want to confuse people who may already be confused.

when i drink wine its usually the napa stuff. mostly because its cheap.

i think russians are better with technology than we give them credit. never met a russian who wasn't good at hacking (though in my case the sample size is 2).

nothing i can post here.

i know that burt rutan of scaled composites prefers white which supposedly improves the life of composite structures (presumably through reduced heating). you see it on most of their planes/space craft. not sure what interview i heard that but its probably on the intertubes somewhere.

thats where you can go out in your boat after the launch and get free snacks.

i want to say that these are pressure fed engines and dont have them. they stick an air bladder in the fuel tanks, and pressurize them with helium. this expands to displace fuel as it is used, effectively pushing the fuels out the tanks. simply opening the valves starts the engine, the fuel does the rest.

they had orbiter. like kerbal is the first space flight simulator. it took little green men with questionable design choices to make it fun for the masses rather than the nerds.

i spent the last 10 or so hours watching it. its pretty good. lots of sub plots that were not in the book. stuff to set up the adaptations of the next four books. season 5 gonna be gud.

computing the energy of a collision is not really that hard compared to actually running the collision detection algorithm. problem is its not hard to come up with absurdly large energy numbers from conventional ground based weaponry. doing the same for weapons in space where the differences in velocity alone are pretty large, you might end up breaking the floating point unit. also the term dps doesnt really make sense in the real world. what you really want is a single high yield impact with as much energy as possible to effectively one hit the target. rapid fire is usually either used in area denial, say a kill zone with machine guns. in psychological warfare, suppressing fire. or to ensure a single solid hit, which is the idea behind the gau-8. any one round can kill a tank, but you fire 300 of them because it ensures you hit something critical like tha magazine. dps is strictly a video game thing that is used for rating a weapons performance, a grossly simplified mechanic that does not take into account the physics of the projectile. most games use a hitpoint system so rating a weapon by the rate of hitpoint depletion makes sense, but in the real world its significantly more complicated.

buy all the things!

i was talking to one of my friends, in their own language. i said "meow".

sometimes i am ashamed to tell people my country of origin as we seem to ge going down the toilet lately.

i have a hunch that additional resources aren't far beneath the surface. stuff that doesn't last long on the surface may be quite abundant a few meters down. moon spelunking required.