Nuke

its a cushy job. why give that up to work in a makeshift laboratory in an abandoned strip mall and routinely have to dumpster dive for parts. lm might be the winner on the small reactor front because of the funding they have available to them, but i really wish they would publish stuff. of course if they do it it will likely be classified for 20 years.

cats are superior to girlfriends. i have as much luck with girlfriends as Charles Bronson did in the deathwish series. its not that i cant talk to girls, its just they dont live long after that. cats on the other hand, they just stick around.

iter is why fusion is always 20 years away. thats just how long it takes to build a massive tokamak. so every time a physicist says ' we need a bigger machine' add 20 years to the time table. its also why it will never yeild a fusion reactor that is commercially viable even if demo makes breakeven. it will also never yeild a spaceworthy reactor because tokamaks are massive machines. 'its good science' but thats all it will be. the real breakthroughs are going to come out of the smaller machines. they lend themselves to rapid iteration, many are compatible with direct conversion schemes, and are all small and light enough for spacecraft use. the same makes them viable for commercial application. those are what you want to pay attention to. my money is on polywell and they are giving 3 years instead of 20.

we can fix it and leave at the same time. just use orion drive.

in the paper i read the machine did that. but you still have a lot of surplus heat to reject.

exactly, heat you need to get rid of. so you pump the fuel around the bell. this is essentially a heat exchanger to put the heat of combustion right back into the fuel. but you can use the technique to remove heat from any other part of the spacecraft.

its pretty much exactly the same thing as regenerative cooling. you are transfering heat from the thing you want to cool, to the propellant and then shooting it out the nozzel taking the heat away with it. the only difference is the thing being cooled. should work with any ion drive, nuclear-electric, nerva or fusion engine. i was reading an article on nuclear powered tunnel boring machines for use on the moon. they had a rather novel way of cooling the reactor. they would take resulting rubble and use it as a heat sink, then take it out side and dump it on the lunar surface.

its not so much wanting to go to space as not wanting to live on this planet anymore.

it occured to me that any propellant based engine could reject heat by sticking a heat exchanger between the propellant and coolant lines. this would likely also save power and/or increase isp for the engine, all be it slightly, by pre-heating the propellant. it might also be possible to generate power by putting a turbine beyond the heat exchanger since the propellant is expanding.

entropy consumes all. get used to that fact.

except this time the backbone isnt owned by the phone company. it kind of makes sense, its impossible to connect to your router without seeing 20 other routers with enough spatial distribution to create a mesh network that can serve thousands of computers. and thats in a rural environment, in an urban environment it just gets a lot better.

its mostly for media storage. i mean most routers have a usb port just for this kind of thing. i bough a $10 ssd->usb adapter and put my older well used ssd on it and plugged it into the router. instant nas+media server. it supports ftp server too if i want to access those files from the internet, but i dont have it enabled. this does not need internet to function. for net-installs i have a second router configured as a ethernet->wifi bridge (ddwrt <3) so i can just plug them into the computer with ethernet and they have a connection to the tftp server on my pc (why net-install doesnt support wifi interfaces is beyond me). the internet is more or less just more of the same. in lieu of net neutrality we might have a citizen's internet which would just be a mesh network of various privately owned routers using part of their throughput for running a mesh network over wifi. not as fast as a fiber line but it might be available. i hear there is a slower, but wider ranged wifi standard on the horizion (802.11af/ah) just for this kind of thing, offering low data rate channels with a kilometer or so of range. in dense urban environments shorter range networks with exsisting hardware are possible.

i dont need the internet to be working to use my lan. but i do keep a 1tb mechanical drive for backup on a seldom used computer.

avoid at all costs. they will only prove a waste of time and a frustrating experience.

i usually just use my network to move stuff around. i keep a 500gig ssd plugged into my router as kind of a poor man's nas. so my computer doesnt have so much as a card slot in it. i even installed the os over the network. sneakernet is so '90s.

with the bulk of your typical tokomak i dont really think its suitable for space applications. added to that you also have the same problem you have with fission, that you need a way to convert heat to electricity. now a direct converter on something like a polywell (which last i read was about 3 years away), where a good chunk of the energy output is converted to hvdc much more efficiency than with current space capable thermal->electric conversion technologies. this would greatly reduce waste heat and reduce radiator mass, and it does help that the polywell will be only 3 or 4 meters in diameter, and you can probibly dump the heavy vacuum chamber too if you never plan to take it into the atmosphere. in reference to op: i wouldnt be so quick to write off fusion as vapor ware. this mostly comes from the fact that we keep dumping time and money into the trainwreck that is iter. you dont even need breakeven to make a fairly decent fusion rocket that would blow all the other options out of the water.

the spice will flow

ignoring that the thermocouples are very inefficient.

have a bbq

a quasi religious holiday stolen from pagans where 2 of the 7 deadly sins are committed. i generally despise holidays because they disrupt my status quo. the only think im thankfull for is that its over.

this many replies and not a single picture of a goat. i am disapoint. i am also too lazy to do it myself.

i like goats.

i was under the impression that copywrite law actually required rights holders to actively defend those rights, where failure to do so results in defacto forfeiture.

being able to dump games is significantly easier with cd based consoles. rom dumpers are usually not that expensive if you have a large library of games to dump. many of my old pc games i still have the original media. i think its also legal to rip games that you cant buy anymore, as these are considered abandonware.

if i was really desperate id get my crimpers out and get some molex pins off ebay. the modular housings can just be salvaged from scrap. modular power supplies are nice but they never really help much. i havent had one where i didnt have to connect most of the cables because one doesnt reach. im actually using a modular sfx power supply now. my case doesnt support it but adapter plates are available for that. its tiny compared to a massive atx supply. its freed up more space for drives and cables and its modular too. i think atx supplies are getting bigger because i couldnt find one that would fit in my case when i upgraded my video card a couple months ago.