Nuke

this is why i never went beyond my associates agree. i felt i was just wasting my time and money. if you want to learn something just rtfm. just go to the library and check out whatever textbook for whatever subject you want to take. read it in its entirety, and you will have all the knowledge you need to put it in practice. its probibly not enough to get a job in the field as they want credentials most of the time, and the only way to get those is to feed the scammers in the education industry, but its not like you will ever get to do what you wanted in the first place. school isnt about education, its about indoctrination.

orbiter is scenario based. you usually spawn at some spaceport with a spacecraft, usually kitted out for a particular destination. you launch and go wherever. i seem to recall there being a lunar space port you could land at to refuel. this was useful if you wanted to go to venus or mars. it more deals with space craft operations than mission construction though. easiest way to check it out is to download it, its free, and i strongly suggest reading the manuals. its definitely the geekier simulator.

i had played orbiter prior to ksp. it was pretty much the only newtonian space simulator i knew of at the time. i got to orbit and began exploring the solar system. but the possibilities for the game were somewhat limited. i played with mods for awhile and then gave up. eventually i learned about ksp and that became the more fun newtonian space simulator.

i watched at least part of the series during its original run and then lost interest. ive been thinking about going back and rewatching them all.

yea i didnt much like the next generation of tv scientists. there were several trying to make science more exiting but i think thats kind of missing the point. mr wizzard just explained stuff, and if you were into that kind of thing you found your show, otherwise you would flip the channel. i was 5 or 6 when i was watching mr wizzard and it was one of the few shows that i remember watching when i was that age. i probibly wouldnt have half the skills i have now had i not watched that show at such an early age.

its not rocket science. well maybe a little.

brachistochrone -fastest possible and least efficient type of orbital transfer. im not even sure i spelled it right. torch ships anyone?

that scene kinda had me scratching my head too. the thing that bothered me was that it seemed like he was pulling gs, but from his perspective he should have not felt any gravity at all. and there would not have been any need for the ship to change orientation so frequently as to need to do it so quickly as to make things uncomfortable for the pilot. i guess the combination hank williams and beer tends to make things work funny in space (kinda remind me of the black hole and johnny cash scene in s.a.a.b.). of course i dont think ive seen any scifi tv show do things perfectly, the only other one that even tried to be hard scifi was babylon5, but some of the aliens were certainly using clarke's third law "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", so only the humans and some of the younger races were using the laws of physics. im not going to let this deter me from my show, there arent enough scifi shows as it is these days.

oh great, another superhero movie.

you can scale up all the dimensions but with it also comes a small decrease in accuracy. of course sub millimeter accuracy is not neccisary if you are printing a house for example (its being done). at the small scale it seems jumping from a hobby machine (mine only has a 160 cubic inch build volume), to something bigger is about a thousand bucks. its sort of like computer monitors, size is expensive, resolution is expensive, both are really expensive. increases in slop as the printer gets bigger necessitates closed loop control instead of the discreet stepping that desktop scale printers can get away with. even going as far as camera based systems or even radio beacons precisely positioned by a surveyor for the machine to use as reference points. its only a matter of time till some lunatic puts a hot end on a quad copter and creates an infinite volume 3d printer.

there is always a place for this kind of buisness. but 3d printing wasnt as hard as i thought it would be. but then again i had realistic expectations. i knew that there would be limits to what could be printed, and that most prints would need finishing. the print houses are still useful especially if you need high resolution or needed a very large print, or other print methods/materials.

printers are getting so cheap now its probibly going to be hard for the print houses to stay in buisness. and you can get a printer and enough filiment to get started for less than the price of a new phone.

been waning to do one of these, except with a 3d printed hovercraft. right now its a vague idea in my head. i did test up a mockup of a 3d printed lift fan and it seems i can lift the neccisary weight with it. i was just using a cardboard box and a plastic bag for the skirt (my plan is to use a bicycle inner tube on the final version). main problem is i dont have any bi directional brushless speed controllers to drive the propulsion fans. ive contemplated doing dual pivoted fans that can be flipped 180 using a continuous rotation servo. also considered doing variable pitch fans, i actually 3d printed a failed prototype for these. i also tried a ducted system with a single fan and servo activated thrusters, and those didnt have much thrust. i dont think a single fan and a large rudder would give me the control i want, but it would work and i wouldn't have to buy anything. all roads lead me to a place i dont want to go, where i have to buy additional parts i dont already have in my parts bins. electronics side im just going to get a bunch of level shifters to drive the servo control pins from the gpio header.

even if the bombs dont go off the conventional explosives are probibly powerful enough to destroy the fuel bay and render the ship uninhabitable by spreading radiation everywhere.

if the conventional explosives that initiate the fission reaction were to go off in an uncontrolled fashion, its not a nuke, its a dirty bomb. the implosion type device requires precise timing on the explosive charges, otherwise the shockwaves wont converge on the fissile material and you dont get perfect compression.

life is consistent with known laws of physics. if the universe has a path to entropy it will take it. life is a very good path to entropy. we do have a qualitative answer to the question 'does life exist in the universe'. still we need more data points before a quantitative answer is possible.

we will probibly find it in our own solar system. lots of underground oceans out there.

it makes sense as its the burn time that matters and not the intensity. the controller is essentially an oversized 3 axis hat switch. i find myself counting off burns and prefering the keyboard over the joystick for that kind of thing. i did sort of give my joystick a bang bang mode, where it would have a large dead zone and a rapid ramp up to the extremes. only problem is it lacked the tactile click of a limit switch. i suppose if you were using analog sticks you could fake it and just use a piezo buzzer to go click every time your stick left neutral and again when you returned. analog is still useful in atmospheric flight so if i were to go nuts with console building i think i would include an analog stick on the right side console (with a switch to toggle between bang bang and analog, and some trim controls as well) and a throttle and thc in the left side. it kind of looks like if you wanted to you could twist the handle to trigger abort/manual. you would just need to attach a bar on that washer and have it contact 2 limit switches at 180 degrees. that is assuming it can be made to rotate.

pretty cool. the whole unit has an awesome aesthetic to it.

i like my 4k for cad and image processing, which is the only place they really shine. not so great with gaming as its hard to make all those pixels happy.

why are schools still teaching kids to memorize long lists of trivial data? seriously this stuff is only useful when jeopardy comes on.

skylon takes it a step beyond that because to my knowledge nobody has ever skinned an aircraft in ceramics (unless you count the space shuttle tiles). i dont even know how you would go about that, having to fire large sections and then have them fit on the composite spaceframe. thats some serious stuff there. you can get ceramic parts to exacting specifications and im sure the tolerances are good enough for an aircraft. scaled does have experience with composite air frames though, experience that goes back pretty far. so even if they dont put the skin on the plane they could handle all the structural stuff. i can imagine them building the space frame and shipping it to a location in the uk where the internals can be fitted and the ceramic skin installed. the skin itself would likely come from a ceramics manufacturer that has never delt with aircraft parts before. this isnt an unfamiliar practice in the aircraft manufacturing world, as you have factories all over the place delivering sub assemblies to the main plant that installs them in the aircraft. the skin and the engines are really the only things we haven't done before.

no, but you can saturate the sky with them so they dont need to.

i dont see rel making an airframe at all. they dont have the facilities for it. especially not an airframe like skylon, which is down right huge. the initial testbed maybe. if they were smart they would contract with someone like scaled composites for the airframe. they are fairly good at building one off research aircraft, and have some space experience. virgin galactic might use the engines for the space tourism market, so it puts them in there with a potential customer.