Nuke

drill a hole in the ground, add water and a nuke, cover with a steel plate. bolt on a lawn chair. instant spaceship!

jus adding a coupole zeros to the specific impulse of current gen engines is usually enough to suffice. usually such gains in isp usually mean less thrust. but if you can have your cake and eat it too then why not.

if you can go aneutronic you wouldn't have to worry about neutrons and charged particles are very easy to accelerate or slow down for direct conversion to electricity. you would probably want to do one or the other. in space it would be beneficial to spew the high energy alpha particles out the tail pipe as you would likely get more bang for your buck that generating power to run an ion cluster to do the same job the reactor is already doing. having the option to switch modes or to partition the output between power and propulsion would be good to have. if you have an isru capability the ability to pick up arbitrary remass and using it in ion engines or arcjets then you need power for that should your high isp/low mass fusion products be insufficient thrust. you can also have a lot of power for launch systems like first stage electric ducted fans, electric turbo pumps for chem engines and arcjet enhanced engines. of course you could argue that the reactors place is on the ground making carbon neutral cryofuel depending on the size of your reactor anyway.

go to basement with a bag of cat treats. shake. when they all show up dump em out and run for the door before one of them gets bored. though i question the logic of putting cats in a basement during a flood warning.

rip grumpy cat, your unbridled disdain for all things has come to an untimely end, and you will be missed.

mechwarrior living legends makes a lot of the other vehicles kind of powerful. unfortunately nobody plays it. there are a few who still work on it. mwo, my other game, has developers that don't seem to want to develop and are just farming cash at this point. give squad $15 bucks and you get unlimited dev and free dlcs, give piranha $300 and you get more mech shaped skins. mw5 looks like its going to be the same stuff over and over, vehicles are just there for you to trample or swat down. living legends got almost everything right though, damn those demolishers. as for the books im only a few books in and there are over a hundred or so, im reading it in chronological order. as for dune the first is all you need. the next 2 are kind of meh, then the final 3 are good. the kja/bh books are all pulp. monopoly on shipping was held by the spacing guild, they kept their navigators a closely guarded secret (contrary to the '80s movie). but they themselves were dependant on the spice. the holtzman drives they use are pretty common knowledge but without a navigator they are very unreliable. you can also use a computer but those are illegal in the duniverse.

up to 5 g for combat drops. i like their space stuff, but realism kinda drops off the second mechboots hit the ground. also nobody really knows how the jumpships work and they are somewhat irreplaceable. so instead of space battles you get mech battles. the zenith and nadir points are were jumpships usually go. not in orbit just hovering above the solar pole at about a distance of 1 au, and you need to provide thrust to avoid falling in. its kind of an unorthodox way to do things. of course they have torch ships so all is good. dune is another great example of one thing a lot of scifi glosses over. if you go ftl you are flying blind. and it really helps if you have a mutated navigator doped up on spice that can see the future (at least far enough in advance to avoid collisions). though in some of the kja/bh books the navigators can make some incredibly accurate jumps. like into drydock, on ix, underground, with no room for error. in the pre-navigator days it wasn't uncommon to slam into a star or enter a black hole because you couldn't account for everything you might encounter, death rates were like 1 in 10 for each space fold.

i may be getting tired of ribeyes walked through the kitchen. i can now make incredibly impressive pork ribs. day before i rub them down with smoked paprika and seasoned salt. wrap in tinfoil so they are ready to go. give them a four hour precook in the oven at about 200, low and slow. then you stick em on the grill slather them in sauce (i use my own) and grill it low and slow.

i warn you there will be zombies!

we require more minerals! does this mean we also get to construct additional pylons? oooh and i get it for free too. ksp may very well have been the best game purchases i made in the last decade.

with the way game of thrones is ending im not sure i would trust another hbo series. of course i was wrong about the expanse. which i avoided because of how repetitious that space opera had gotten, and yet it has turned out to be one of my favorite space shows.

you should have went to the school i went to. it was the dumping ground for sociopaths and other failed attempts at humans. everyone was a bully so it made an interesting dynamic. sometimes it was their turn and sometime it was ours. students bet on the fights. i hung out with two of the crazier students. one was a crazy russian with a blackbelt in tae kwon do, and the other was fond of self mutilation and bb guns, he killed himself about a dozen years ago. it was the 90s but we all listened to 70s and 80s metal and we all wore black trench coats (columbine had just happened and we had more in common with the slayers than the slain) while everyone else just wore flannel. its ok because the school had metal detectors and a security guard for every 10 students, a couple of them were former nfl football players. because of all the hostility it was common for students to get tackled and dragged off to an isolation room (much like the ones you find in mental institutions). kids who got floored by they one day would often be talking sports with them the next day. we mostly got graded on behavior and academics were practically non existent, we were doing fractions on our senior year, they called it review, but we never moved on to anything beyond that. you could pass just showing up for class. later few years of high shcool they would bus us off to another school that did vocational training, i took computer science and then an electronics class. the electronics class had me doing math i didnt even know existed. all the time on the school buses led to other interesting shenanigans. the junkie thrash metal crowd (kind of an extension to our 3 man group though not completely comprising shared interests) used the interchange as a chance to smoke dope, i joined them once or twice. i ended up staying an extra semester after my senior year to finish my electronics class, and because my buddies were a grade year below me. on my graduation (being mid year there were only 2 students) my russian buddie thought it would be interesting to poke me in the buttocks with the american flag. the teachers weren't bad, many of them meant well, but they were shoehorned into a dumping ground for social rejects thought up by some politician who just wanted us out of the way. they were told they could do some good and help at risk students, and then got no budget to do it. the average low iq of the students allowed me to sweep all the engineering contests held by my science and math teachers. rocketry, egg drops, bridge building, marble floats, etc. i won em all. this was before participation trophies too. for winning they gave me a certificate printed off of an old dot matrix printer and was most certainly made on a mac se (one of the higher end computers we got to use). they were the dumping ground for the old apple 2s the school district was phasing out. because of my oddball schedule i had a whole 45 minutes of free time every day. and so for fun i slapped apple 2 parts together until i got working machines, i set up a computer lab with a stack of pirated apple2 games (the school certainly didnt buy them. i honestly dont know where most of them came from, the apple 2 was certainly well beyond its usefulness by then so it wasn't any of the current students at the time. but i made sure every class room had a copy of all the disks. except on thursdays when the weight room was open. we did more screwing around that actually pumping iron. if there wasnt a fight or unrelenting pranks, or students smoking, or doing a number of other things that were technically against the rules, then we would just sit around and chit chat and let the weights crash. the ta only looked in a couple times if we got too loud. the whole thing was in a converted storage closet and so there was no visibility to the rest of the gym. we didnt even have showers which is why no one took gym class seriously. the smart kids would have social studies first and gym last. the social studies teacher was an old hippy lady that ran class like a game show, with prizes. i won many. she always brought snacks and if you got there early you would get the lions share. all in all it was a lot of fun, despite the fact that it was a half step up from juvie.

if voting machines are to be used i would prefer them to: be air gapped. they should contain no hardware for network transmission. nor should they have any external ports for common data storage devices. they should be cased in a faraday cage and fail to operate if not properly grounded. the machine would isolate its local power to avoid any possible feedback path through the power line to avoid exfiltration. the whole box would be armored and locked while the machine is in operation, nor should it operate if unlocked. they should use some kind of uncommon worm storage like a big rom module installed at setup time. the machine cannot run without the module installed, nor can it be removed until the end of the election day. voting data would be encrypted with multiple keys with each one being provided by a specific campaign. officials for each campaign represented on the ballot would need to deliver the key and enter it manually when the machine is in setup mode. to set up the machine, a new module would be installed, the machine would enable all internal locking mechanisms, additional external locks would be added by the local election officers. the machine would immediately boot into setup mode. officials could input their keys, once all the keys are entered and verified the machine can be placed into voting mode and stays that way until the end of the election. if there is an error the machine would burn the roms and render it useless and you would need to start over with a new module. any attempts at tampering or power loss events will be logged to the rom. the machine should remain locked if the power is out, on reboot the module will be detected with a vote in progress and the machine either returns to vote mode or finalizes the rom if the vote duration has ended. when the module is finalized it will burn padding to all remaining space. the machine unlocks and the module can be recovered and sent to the voting office. the main security here are the officials. since the keys are only known by the officials (and the candidates) and are secret to that campaign. every campaign would be responsible for their officials to ensure they are trustworthy and incorruptible,and for keeping their keys secret, which is in the best interests of the campaign. the module cannot be read without all the encryption keys and is just a block of bricked silicon otherwise. the authentication process would be much like the setup procedure, all keys would need to be entered. once opened then you would review the audit data, then officials would have to agree that the machine was not tampered with and the vote is legit, only then will the final tabulation be computed. if the module was in question, a copy of the unencrypted audit data (no voting data, which would remain secret) would be sent off for a more thorough analysis. if that fails to please the officials then the whole election would need to be redone.

think about it, you cant trust any news unless its boring, and even then maybe they made it boring on purpose to confuse us. i heard a phrase the other day: "post reality world". now that i heard this phrase everything makes sense again. reality simply does not exist.

things are easier if you never had it to begin with.

what if we take optical media up the spectrum? using hf uv and xray. could we get more information density than what we currently have available with hard drives and better?

sd cards come with all the wear leveling machinery taken out and is essentially dumb flash that fails when it fails. its completely unmanaged unlike say an ssd. im not to thrilled about flash's data retention rates either. or rather the lack of hard data about data retention rates. im not sure if we have been using ssd's long enough to characterize their failure rates accurately when used for archival storage.

might want to look up the feep thruster while you are at it. very low thrust, but with a very high isp. i think some satellites already use it. uses liquid metals as propellant.

replace star trek with the expanse and profit more.

i wouldnt want to build an exobyte storage cluster on microsd for obvious reasons. m.2 sticks are up to about 2tb. and i know ive seen quad m.2 to pcie-16 adapter cards. so thats 8 tb per board. i found server boards with 7 16x slots to give you 56 tb per server. of course the server eats all the space you save with the m.2 and on top of that for large nas clusters you probably want mechanical drives, ssds just aren't cut out for server loads. 14 tb drives are available. you could get a 48 bay nas server for about $20k that gets you up to 672tb. about 2000 of those and there's your exabyte. congratulations, you have invented the datacenter. you might be able to cram 3 of those per rack so you would need 666 racks because math worships satan. thats not counting routers and switches and everything else that setup would need. so it would be about the size of a fairly large room if you want practical storage. if speed is not an issue you could go with a tape system with a robotic tape recovery. i think 10 tb tapes are the norm these days and you would only need 100000 of them.

rockets without kerbals is like a hamburger without cheese. its just not as good. there probably is a kerbal plushie on the iss right now.

im also more convinced that modern cartoons and advertisements are more likely to cause autism than any vaccine. i think science exists for that, but i dont have any sources (just something i read somewhere).

well its just the display. right now its connected to an esp32 and an imu board. the inertial reference code needs work but the screen works great. there was the time back when they used crt as memory (a williams tube). think of it as optical dram. you charge the phosphors, sort of like the cap in dram. writing was accomplished by an electron gun which illuminates the phosphors and changes the electric charge on the surface. the x,y coordinates of the gun act as the memory address. this can be read back with a thin metal plate on the surface. it had the added bonus that you could see the contents of the memory which certainly helped with debugging. they could store about 2.5kbits. modern screens pretty much are memory at the low level. if you didnt have a lot of ram to work with you could get away single buffering your render, once you send it to the screen it stays there until you write to it again.

i have an oled display in my desk somewhere. its a nifty display. but ive yet to figure out how to do math with it.

i take a less is more attitude to the modern internet. social media is seen as a panacea to all your website's traffic issues so when websites make a bunch of demands on me i simply tend to not use them. "follow us on facebook" "login with google" "turn off your adblocker". and phone culture as certainly made a lot of websites unreadable on my huge 4k display (im too old to squint). when articles use literally the center band of 800 pixels and try to cram everything in there including navigation links, social media icons, and ads (at least the ones that get through the adblocker) getting in the way of content, while you got all this empty space on either side that you could move some of that crap to. and all the unnecessary scrolling, and who ever invented infinite scroll pages should be shot in the gut, both kneecaps and hung (in lynchmob fashion). when i took webdev class all this stuff was in the part about bad design choices. of course when i took that class it was all html with very little scripting and none of this bs. you know back when the internet was fast, that golden age between broadband and web 2.0.