Nuke

i like this thread.

i found a schematic of the psu in this hackaday article. ok after having the chance to look at the schematic i can get an idea of whats going on. voltage starts in the 160-225 range. that's like 54 lipoly cells in series. they are going to need to be thin cells. these are available in thicknesses in the 0.5-2 mm range and <= 200mah. these cells are designed for low discharge rates but can handle 10c in short bursts. the plane likely only has a couple minutes of battery life. anyway thats converted to ac using an h-bridge so that's 450v peak to peak. the control side just watches the output through the divider and provides appropriate pwm signals to the h-bridge. then it goes to a 1:15 transformer (multiply by 15), and then the voltage multiplier has 6 stages (multiply by 6). this type of multiplier also rectifies so it comes out as vdc. so with a fully charged battery that gets it up to 40.5kv if i did my math right. much of this can be done solid state, though a transformer is required its likely a tiny one. estimating the ampage of the psu requires guesstimating the stats of the battery. 10 amps in short bursts if they used off the shelf batteries would probably be the best case scenario. general rule of thumb for power supplies is that when you double the voltage you halve the current. since its battery voltage is going up by a factor of 180 (2*15*6) that takes our 10 amps down to about 56ma.

isnt that like all of them.

i thought about sticking in the resistance of air into the ohms law equation but it turns out its not that simple. the resistance of air varies a lot based on its ion content. and air conducting electricity will always produce additional ions, so its resistance will likely fluctuate. this makes estimating the properties of the power supply difficult. maybe its in the paper.

the internet, where men are men, women are men and kerbals are the fbi.

pretty cool. i was wondering how long it would take to get a psu small/light enough to do this. modern power components have gotten really small thanks to smart phones, so it was only a matter of time.

a hit and a shot are quite a ways from being stoned and plastered. not everyone who tokes is a brain dead zombie thanks to the miracle of moderation.

do i have to spell it out for you </londo>

at least they are trying. name another show where they lay their ships out properly in respect to the thrust vector. the only other show i remember even remotely trying to incorporate hard scifi elements was babylon 5. they did some stuff right and a lot of stuff wrong but it was still a great show. tv and movies are never going to be a good format for hard scifi.

i can name a couple areas where the show improved from that point on.

how about one of the planets was in an ice age or some kind of snowball earth type event, and the inhabitants are simply living underground to stay warm. perhaps have the story take place durring the early stages of thawing as the surface of that world becomes more hospitable and the underground civilization starts moving to the surface. you could also have it so that the inhabitants of the frozen world were at the same tech level as the current population of the other world prior to the icing event. however the need for survival put a hault on progress for that species which had to adopt a more simple way of life due to limited resources. you could have one civilization technicaly a few hundred thousand years older than the other while still having the same tech level. the inhabitants of the warm world could have made the transition from hunter-gatherer to agricultural during the event and have similar rate of advancement to us. there may have even been some long forgotten contact between the world previously or one may have been a colony of the other. but for some reason this knowlege was either lost or not known to either world. perhaps the colony succeeded in relocating but for some forgotten calamity or generational conflict resulted in their tech and culture being lost.

unfortunately these lessons are quickly forgotten.

was done for contrast. i think it worked out pretty well. and mr rain will be remembered a long time for it.

sensors are cheap, 737s are expensive. better to stack those sensors than crash those planes.

its one of those fonts where you got multiple characters that look the same. i hate those.

its a double edged sword. while it does slash development costs by a huge margin, i feel it leads to a bunch of games that are all more or less the same. whats worse is that with such a low bar to entry, your dev team isnt going to have the programming talent needed to really do anything spectacular with their game. there are some games (not this one) that seem to exist without having any programmers what so ever beyond a couple intern level script kiddies. you end up with game devs being nothing more than overpaid modders. now there are exceptions, ksp certainly is one, squad managed to muster a lot of talent while still using an off the shelf engine, so it didnt fall into the trap that lesser studios tend to fall into.

i played with pid controllers awhile back and found i could get good results by doing the following. i should point out that this was some time ago and this is all from memory. the system was a 1 axis self leveling platform, the actuator was a servo i had modified, first by wiring the motor directly to an h-bridge, with the potentiometer going into an adc. i was using an arduino though i dont remember which one. the platform was made from lego. in addition to the feedback on the potentiometer i was also using an accelerometer to "find down" in order to calculate the angle of the platform relative to gravity. all values initially to 1. bring up p until you get the response you want from the system. set it as fast as you can ignoring any oscillations, provided it doesnt loop around (for linear systems this will never happen so take this with a grain of salt). its actually a good idea to monitor power consumption, as you can reduce the rate to save power (which places a constraint on your design). once satisfied bring up the d to reduce both frequency and magnitude of the oscilation. keep in mind you arent trying to completely eliminate it. strike a balance between speed and stability. if you dont get the results you want you should start over and try a different p value. from there start tuning the i to get rid of the overshoot and eliminate the oscilation. my results were not perfect but the system was able to stay level enough keep a marble from rolling off the platform.

how many astronauts does it take to screw in a light bulb?

one of my computers had an ls120 drive. but the disk quality was terrible and they would just eat data all day. also big hard drives were everywhere by that point. zomg 8 gigs! so the desire to move data 120 megs at a time seemed like a turnoff. cheap cd/dvd burners ultimately killed it. i still have stacks of unburned dvds in my room. though one thing i did find i have in short supply is working cd/dvd drives. and the last optical drive in the house doesnt work. and today i seem to avoid using 32+ gig micro sd cards in favor of faster methods like network transfers. they usually end up getting used to install operating systems and havent done anything at all since i figured out how to pxeboot. i guess i can use them in raspis.

i usually wait a couple weeks for all the inevitable point releases to roll out.

i finally got my new computer to boot. find out there is no driver support for things other than windows 10. after a day of trying to install windows 8.1, 7, giving up, contemplating linux, giving up again, and finally biting the bullet that is windows 10, i find myself somewhat disappointed. this was followed by a day of installing drivers, updating windows, benchmarking, and performance tuning. i got a significant improvement in memory bandwidth just by using the xmp timings but clocking the ram at 2666mhz (aka two-satan mhz), which is the max the mobo will support. the ram can go up to 3000mhz so it gives me a little future proofing (provided ddr5 isnt out before then). theres probibly a way to get the ram to its full spec with the right overclock settings and still run stable, but its not really that big of a deal and not really worth shortening mtbf of the modules over it.

curious if radio augmented telepethy could be a thing. children implanted with radios connected to brain contact electrode arrays could in theory develop a kind of language of signals over the system. later on when they are 'fluent' they can upgrade the firmware to allow private encrypted thought channels.

this sim do helis? id like to practice flying without having a $20-$50 repair bill between "landings".

set your stops on your derailers.

some how i ended up with a 8086k anniversary edition cpu instead of the 8700k. last minute replacement because they ran out of 8700ks. i think its just higher binned and has a beefier clock. 4ghz stock. 5ghz boost.