Nuke

in before relevant xkcd

you can never have too much good taste.

i just got doom, the first 2 descents, and q3a working on my raspberry pi 3 + touchscreen. minecraft comes stock, and i got a lead on how to get starcraft to work. i think im good. ksp would be nice but i dont think it would work with the current art set. maybe something stripped down and with simplified collision data. now to increase battery life, implement online charging, and add a sound system to the 3d printed case and im good. maybe some thumbsticks. parts in the mail.

this thread needs more iron maiden.

birds have evolved a lot of weight saving mechanisms. hollow bones, simplified, non redundant organs, fibrous beaks which are strong and yet light and some of them have the best vision of any animals this side of sea level. however i think the weight of additional grey matter would limit their flight capabilities and so would not be considered a desirable trait for natural selection and simply not evolve. however if they evolved on a planet with significantly lower gravity, many of those traits might not need to exist at all. so you might see bird-like creatures with teeth and solid bones, possibly a head like a seal or a cat for optimal streamlining. such a critter would be much more robust than their earthly counterparts.

i tend to build computers in cases with weird configurations. mine has a single 140mm fan feeding a coolermaster elite 110 case, which is down right tiny. the psu gets its own intake from the top. a lot of cases seem to have a separate psu intake, and i think that goes against the atx spec. of course my case stays cool reguardless. but the one big fan kinda feeds the intakes of the cpu and video card and keeps the mobo cool. the only caveat is the psu isnt modular, so there are a lot of unused cables blocking airflow, im thinking about clipping off some of those and heat shrinking the ends. my build only uses a couple sata power cables and the mobo/cpu connectors, the video card doesn't have a connector (750ti).

no matter how ingenious your cooling method is, rest assured that a cat will figure out a way to make it not work. i havent had problems with cats sitting on my case. there are vents up on top but this mostly serves as an intake for the psu. so if they did decide to sit on it i would have problems. that said i think my cats are too big since its just one of those mini-itx cube cases with only about a square foot of area. i dont think the cats would be very comfortable there.

ooh new version of orbiter. soon (tm). orbiter has a pretty strong mod community too.

been noticing a lot of keyboards that are designed like that. the one im using now has them. they have drainage holes that pass through the membrane and out the bottom of the case. in theory you could run water through them and clean it out that way.

there was the lapcat derivative of the skylon. pretty much an atmospheric only engine. it would use scimitar engines, which is a sabre minus the rocket mode. it would still have a precooler, and look more like a rocket than a turbine, but no lox injection systems. and like the skylon, it would be a flying fuel tank.

i have a system for cleaning keyboards. membrane keyboards are easy (if its a sealed membrane, dishwasher). otherwise gut it, clean the keys and the casing. remove the board and membrane layers. if there is no gunk in them just set them aside, otherwise you need to clean the layers. with alcohol and let dry thouroughly. when everything is dry, reassemble. i did find a keyswitch board in a dumpster awhile back, still haven't cleaned it beyond washing the keycaps (and 3d printing replacements for missing ones). but i still need to clean the internals.

a mutant worshiping a nuclear missile. from beneath the planet of the apes.

Grace Hopper, more for computer science reasons. i like her lecture on nanoseconds and why they are important to computer performance (and also satellite communications). especially when a cycle nowadays is 1/4 of a nanosecond. she died in 92 but if she was still kicking she probibly would be wondering why pcs put their ram so far away from the cpu (in sub-nanosecond timescales anyway). she arguably wrote some of the first compilers ever, at a time when people were still hand assembling machine code.

i use kapton on my 3d printer, i just wipe it down with alcohol and my prints stick fairly well. insane heat tolerance, you can poke it with your soldering iron and it wont burn or melt. people have used it to dead bug smd parts, kapton under the pads, glue the package to your protoboard and then you can solder each trace to magnet wire. generally good stuff. the down side is its expensive.

say i want to get a multi-rotor craft with electric motors powered by off the shelf apus. im assuming a 500kg craft. 500kg seems about right for an airframe (includes pilot/avionics/engine), and i figure that is going to take 4900 kn of thrust to counteract gravity, but to have a chance at controlled flight id actually take that to 7500kn. so we know what we need to lift it. so what can we get, lets start with ebay. whats the biggest bldc motor we can get? i found a 50kw motor that can spin at 6600 rpm and weighs just short of 6kg. how many of those do i need? use one of those static force propeller calculators, lets stick a 3 foot prop on there and i get 965 newtons of thrust, drawing 55kw of power. but lets assume 875 so that it doesnt burn out our motor. i need 8.5 of those to fly. lets carry 12 instead for redundancy, you can loose 3 and not die. our power requirements are now 600kw. these motors surprisingly only weigh in at 72kg. now lets find an apu that can carry all this. this is where i hit problems, i did find the numbers 4.4kw/kg and 8Mw/m^3 to give us an idea of weight and size for a gas turbine apu. i dont think anyone manufactures a 600kw apu, so you are gonna have to build it. were looking at 136kg for this system and it will fairly small. that gives us plenty of mass left over for structure, fuel and pilot. though if you want a backup you are going to have to start at square one and redesign it all over again with a 700kg craft in mind. thats just the basic rundown done over the course of about 15 minutes. but the devil is in the details. im confident that the gas turbine-electric design i proposed earlier would work. engineering is making it work well. i think a good vtol need not rely on down thrust in all flight regimes to stay optimal. once you get off the ground the vtol concept doesnt make any sense. so you want to be able to transition into plane mode and rely on airfoils for lift while letting the motors run low and cool, that way when you want to land you dont need to rely on a bunch of overheated coils and bearings to not die and fire up the backup apu while you are at it.

most successful one ive seen is this one. it at least appears as if it is somewhat controllable. this is an 8 engine monster, i assume its using servo controlled throttles and a good flight computer. its a little top heavy so its kind of a death trap. im wondering if it wouldn't be better to do a gas-electric configuration, with a couple apus providing the juice and a bunch of brushless motors. multi-engine configs without heavy cross shafts will never be accepted by faa standards. but redundant apus and multiple redundant ultra-reliable brushless motors might work well. should be able to survive the loss of an apu or 3 motor/prop failures. not requiring runways would certainly make it easy to set down if there was a problem.

i have a hard time taking trek seriously when there is a motorcycle involved.

horrible, horrible things which i cant mention here.

checked out vektor yet? i for one have no problem coding to extreme metal.

usually something easy listneing. like slayer.

the article really just says they got funding. its also the first time they mentioned how their de-icing system worked.

i have to post this i cant stop listening to this epic thrash metal space opera.

dont get me started on how terrible mwo is. i swear they have the most inept dev team ever.

modern gpus are seldom the bottleneck anymore, even budget cards like the 750ti. i own one of those and i really dont see enough bad performance to justify getting a new card (not to mention limited case room, im not going to run a machine bigger than the agc so i can fit in a video card i dont need).

still waiting for someone to walk in front of a bus while trying to catch a pikachu.