Nuke

i think id use more composites in the structure, that would take off quite a bit of weight, at least from the parts of ship that aren't fuel.

the agc was only about 32kg. a modern rad hard and ruggedized computer wouldnt be that much of a weight reduction (ive picked up modern-ish servers that heavy). unless you go with something giving you the bare minimum of computing power, something like you would find on a cube sat. i think id rather have the beefy space computer though.

theres still a couple applications that have me stuck in windows land. i recently started using gimp instead of photoshop and i think its a transition i can make painlessly. 3dsmax -> blender not so much. getting the specific version i have a license for to run in wine is a lost cause. other stuff i use like eagle cad already supports linux out of the box, and i kind of want to switch to one of the open source alternatives like kicad. i alreadly love gcc more than i will ever like visual studio. there is winamp, which is woefully out of date and pretty much abandonware now, but is probibly the peice of software ive run the longest (it manages to sort my well tagged files better than any alternative ive used). there arent many games i still play and i think they all can run in wine but with diminished performance. every year the switch gets easier, but its just out of reach. i do run it on my raspis and i do have a mint/windows dual boot box in my lab so i know linux pretty well (well enough to right device drivers for the system, i cant say that for windows). so its not like i dont use linux.

i got a bunch of old technic legos (pre studless era, some studless though). i rarely get them out. getting too old to sit on the floor hunched over a bucket of bricks. but i recently found myself in need of a 3d scanner for a completely unrelated project. now normally when i want to scan an object in 3d i have to take literally hundreds of photos of it from every conceivable angle, feed them into visual sfm, and hope my point cloud is usable enough to generate a mesh. i wanted to automate this process, but i didn't want a long drawn out 3d printing project. i figured i could do it with lego instead and save some time. so over the last 2 days i build a scan rig (and yes i killed my back doing it), finished up the mechanical parts. first part was a turret. pretty basic, pretty much a direct worm to turret drive. except with a cam to hit a switch (from one of the old rcx mindstorms kits). i don't need precise positional data here, i just want a pulse every few degrees of rotation. i can use this to trigger the camera. i can also count pulses so i know when a full 360 rotation has passed. for visual sfm to work, i need photos from different height levels so i build a large rack and pinon lift, it has a limit switch to find the lowest point. no positional feedback though, maybe il print me a lego-potentiometer adapter if i find i need it. i figure with the massive gear reduction on the lift i can just control the motor on time. if it over runs it will simply run out of rack and stop climbing. the requirement here is photos at different heights, no specific heighs are required, visual sfm will determine the orientation and position of the camera just using the image data, quite nifty. i made a camera holder, and i can just put a bolt though a lego frame into the tripod mount on the camera (an old point and shoot camera running chdk so i can have a remote trigger) to keep it in place. the frame is geared to the lift such that it pans down as the lift rises, keeping the turret in the shot all with one motor. i thought about gearing the lift+pan to the turret but opted for a second motor, i also had the option of using a servo, but then feedback on the lift would have been essential. i could have used math to get the right angles, but i managed just fine on trial and error. i built it so i can very easily take a gear out of the drive train to adjust the centering should the need arise. now i could very well control the whole kitten caboodle with either the rcx or the nxt bricks i have (the nxt would have been much easier as both motors have encoders built in, and i could have had a nifty ui). but im going to use an arduino. first of all my lego wiring is ancient and is in pretty bad shape (the insulation was literally disintegrating on me during tests. second, i also need to control the camera. thats its own little hack in itself since my camera doesnt support remote shutter (fixable with a firmware mod and a diy cable). i think i can trigger the camera directly from an arduino pin. i could probibly stick a relay or transistor on the nxt or rcx and control it that way, but id rather just be able to plug it in and go (and not have to include another power supply). as for power im going to be running off a 12v wall wart, which i will split between the aruino and the motor controller, the arduino's regulator provides the 5v for the logic signals, and camera trigger. probably going to use hardware low pass filters for both switches, they are old and probably bounce a lot. program is going to be something like this: 1 home the lift 2 activate the turret until i get a rising edge off of the switch 3 take a photo 4 repeat 2 and 3 until the turret has rotated 360 (by counting iterations, the number of times depends on the gear ratio that i haven't determined yet) 5 raise the lift abit (gonna need to time it with a stop watch to determine a good height to time ratio) 6 repeat 4 and 5 2 or 3 more times (im probibly going to fill my sd card too fast if i do too many vertical iterations) 7 done after that pull the sd card and feed the images to the computer, and be glad i bought an i7 instead of an i5.its an extremely cpu intensive process. id show some pics but its an incredibly ugly apparatus. maybe after i get the electronics sorted out.

siege at firebase gloria is one of my favorite war movies. gunny will be missed. o7 semper fi.

the thing that bugs me are the structural engineering problems. you want to spin up ceries it will work, slowly. but at the tipping point where g goes negative your dward planet becomes a slightly denser asteroid belt and not a habitable station.

lets hope china builds nuclear reactors better than they do office chairs or can openers that cant even last a year before going kaput.

looks like they did a redesign on the engine, or is this the scaled down test engine?

well they calculated the energy to spin up ceres, but has anyone figured out what you would have to do to maintain structural integrity? i figure the process of simply reinforcing the rock would be a lot more difficult than the spinup operation. you would have to tear up the whole rock and rebuild it anyway. figure it would be easier just to strip mine the whole rock and use the materials to build a massive oneil cylinder with enough external radiation shielding to keep everyone alive. even easier would be a large number of surface centrifuges built in domed over pits. every time the population becomes untenable, build another one.

well i did kind of read them all in rapid succession so theyve kind of blurred together in my head. but i think heres whats going to happen: the rest of caliban's war mid season finally abaddon's gate (either partially or in full) why else would you introduce anna and ashford this season?

the spin up thing is kind of silly, but hey at least its not artificial gravity magic. anyway it looks like they are going to be cramming whats left of book 2 and some of book 3 into this season. they also threw in some references to book 4, but i dont think they will get that far this season. dont expect them to follow the story exactly though im curious to see what they do with it. *made vague so as not to spoil.

cats are better. they routinely sit on your keyboard and prevent you from using your computer. blocking your ability get sucked into social media. i for one never found much use for social media.

humans are stupid. i got that part figured out already.

well it was that or the gulag. i think he made the right choice.

unfortunately i grew up in the a.d.d. era, before schools switch to aspergers as their excuse for why some children do not follow the heard. even though every aspie test i ever took was positive, never could get a professional to agree though.

just figured out how to pxe boot linux mint. managed to get it installed in my lab computer next to windows. i was already using the practice of sticking a grub partition at the top of my drive so it was easy to play with other oses. was also trying to install reactos 0.4.7 with less successful results (it just doesnt seem to work on newer computers, doesnt work on my old i7 rig or my older core2 rig).

not a big fan of it myself.

good to see the kodiak space port get used for something. there was some debate to close it some years ago citing the "declining" population of stellar sea lions or some such (them things are everywhere, on any day i can walk 2 blocks and see at least one of them at the marina and an entire harem on bouy #3).

thing is 'very rare' is not never. even if its like one in a million thats still a non-zero chance. just takes one unlucky mishap to irradiate a lot of area. of course the only time you really want a nuclear powered aircraft is when you want to keep it up for weeks or months, so i doubt it would be viable as a passenger aircraft. its good if you need to keep a nuclear bomber on stand by. icbms obsoleted the aircraft reactor experiment, slam, etc. idk what other thing you would need a nuclear powered aircraft for, only things i can think of is research aircraft, perhaps as an atmospheric communications sat or a flying house for a rich person.

well if there is no momentum exchange there would be a blatant violation. but the theory is that there is some momentum exchange in the form of mass fluctuations. it uses the rest of the universe as remass. as i understand it the mega-drive is not very power hungry, unlike the em drive where you have to pump in a lot of microwave energy. mega drive you just have to run an oscillator, oscillate a small mass at a high frequency in tune to the natural fluctuations (you could do a mems device for chipsats i suppose). woodward was claming f1-like performance was possible using current space power systems or some such , in other words you can launch it from the ground. so when they demonstrate that capability then i will believe it. something something extraordinary evidence something. if it works then its a very ufo engine. thing that bugs me about it is if the mass fluctuations are natural, then wouldn't they be chaotic and hard to predict? certainly hard to tune for.

oooh megadrive thread!

its both easy and fun to fly. and its cheap.

also the chance of the plane crashing is non-zero.

mega drives. aka mach effect thrusters. they are "reactionless" drives (though you could say they use the entire universe as reaction mass). the idea is the mass of something really doesnt mean anything unless there are other objects to compare it to. but since gravity is not instantaneous, the mass of objects are in a state of flux. if you can determine the fluctuation and oscilate a mass in tune to it, you get free thrust. it does everything em drives do except there is theory out there to explain why it works. they are currently in a mad quest for more thrust but they are running into materials problems.

ive done a lot of c++ and some c programming. i tend to avoid vms and interpreted languages but im really good with lua, so its what i go to when i need a gui or something to talk to an arduino, i have the stub of a game engine written in lua but i dont expect to finish it.