Nuke

zomg, its zork IN SPACE!!!

sneak into the ladys room with a roll of saran wrap. place it on all the toilets under the seat and lower it. it should be visually imperceptible. hand out free bottled water nearby.

nobody tell me what i do.

the guy from hackadayio seems to have a more flight ready thruster. i have some question marks about his noisy test setups, but he has a 24ghgz rf supply (solid state), frustum (much smaller thanks to the higher frequency supply) and a mainboard for a 50mm cube sat. i have no idea how he intends to come up with the launch costs (kickstarter?). i kinda wish he would test the thruster on a more sensitive, less noisy test stand though. but he might be on to something trying to miniaturize it.

i dont think ive seen a photo of lm's machine with a plasma ball in it yet. so im gonna have to conclude that they haven't even fired a shot with it yet. of course they are being very tight lipped.

damn it i thought this was an independence day 2 thread.

big enough so that if it explodes on the pad, it wont kill anybody or break anything.

the reason fusion is always 20 years away, is that is because thats how long it takes to fund, build, shakedown, and test a tokamak. the reason its always recurring is there is always someone building another tokamak because they went as far as they could go with the previous iteration. tokamaks really suffer from their size and complexity and it really slows down the scientific process. the only reason we keep using them is that they are the most well understood method right now. but the competition is catching up. eventually we will get to a point where building more tokamaks is pointless. once you can say something like dpf or polywell is equivalent to the current state of tokamaks, and you have to choose which to fund. will you fund the one that costs 100 billion or the one that costs 100 million? eventually we will stop putting all the eggs into the same donut shaped basket. polywell will be tokamak equivalent when it achieves wiffleball. dpf currently has some plasma contamination issues to resolve. and those are just 2 examples of things that have the potential to outperform tokamaks.

its like that space combat game from the xplane dev, but with depth.

its good if you want a torchship simulator. that game is a lot older than windows 3.1. i remember playing on an apple2 or something ancient.

i recently went through lemmy era hawkwind. i really wasnt that impressed. the albums felt like a couple good songs wrapped in a whole lot of filler.

id imagine they would use stored sperm and embryos and just use the 4 as breeders. they would be all female. when one gets to old or dies then another is impregnated with a female embryo. embryos would be pre-sexed and sourced from genetically diverse stock. this allows you to maintain a high genetic diversity without needing to keep a large population going. upon arrival all 4 are impregnated with female embryos, and this goes on until a large genetically diverse population of breeders is established. they they are all artificially inseminated and are allowed to procreate naturally from that point onward. 4 is probably just the minimum number at which the odds for total failure are sufficiently small, issues with pregnancy, disease, infertility, even issues with the environment like depressurization events.

the wright flier had very thin wings. but it got its ridgidity from a network of wires that also allowed for wing twisting for roll control. i believe the lower camber on those wings was actually negative creating more of a cupped wing shape. overall thickness is the sum of the upper and lower camber i believe. structurally speaking you are going to need some support. you can still pull off single sheet wings if you fold in creases to act like ribs and roll up the leading and trailing edges as spars. something like that might work.

were long overdue for a new battery technology. lithium ion has really been showing its limitations as of late. ive been wanting to get some lifepo4s for awhile, some of the advantages of lithium ion but without all the explodeyness. but the energy density would feel like taking a small step back.

compute things very slowly. seriously the latency in the cpu would be atrocious.

people normally develop a certain amount of self discipline in early adulthood as they try to adapt to a new and potentially cruel and unforgiving world from what they are used to. your resources are limited and you have to learn how to make do with what you have. for most its purely a matter of survival and the difference of a few bucks is the difference from taking care of yourself and becoming homeless. maturity normally develops as a result. the problem with celebrities (the ones that self destruct anyway) is that many of them are very talented, and get in the buisness early, where most everyone else is working at burger king trying to make their rent. suddenly they are making 6+ figure salaries before having learned to make good decisions. then on top of that they are constantly bombarded with reporters trying to catch em messing up. then they are subjected to various bottom feeders looking to take advantage of a naive young star. its pretty much a recipe for self destruction. and of course if they had any previous history of mental illness then the whole situation is a thousand times worse. tell that to lemmy.

you got to be more careful with time warp, if you have any thrusters or engines running when you enter it, say bye to your fuel and enjoy your spin. get in the habbit of turning off rcs and shutting down your engines before warping.

ive only ever played the original starfox.

yep. moors law is meaningless when you are talking 2 square meters of solar area. how many wafers do you need to cover that? a dozen at least? should cost as much as a case of xeons.

its actually planet IX now. because dune reference.

i think it would simply be better to bring the engines to market and let the various aerospace agencies, who actually have experience building air and space craft, design and build their own space planes around them.

that looks pretty good. plastic bushings should be sufficient vs linear ball berings. they slide easier and dont require lubrication (or precision rods). the spring system should work but you might want to put calibration screws at the ends. if you can find rods with threaded ends but a smooth center, you could just use two nuts, one to adjust and a second to lock it in place. you want to calibrate so that the springs fit snug but wont fight eachother near the center. you might be able to get away with a single ended calibration system, with the back springs butting up against the back plate, with the front springs with adjustment screws. you might even do a single push/pull spring which could simplfy things a lot.

http://hackaday.com/2016/04/11/flying-the-infinite-improbability-drive/ so someone is making a tiny em drive that can fit in a cube sat. except this one is running at around 24 ghz instead of 2.4 ghz, which means the device can be much smaller and looks like its running some kind of solid state rf supply. it probibly wont work but a cube sat is approachable with a crowd funding campaign.

with the way semiconductor manufacturing works, i can imagine these things being very expensive. were starting to look at ways to use nanotubes to transfer heat in more 3d processor and memory designs to provide the heat of the bottom layers a path out of the die. the fabs know how to build these kinds of things. these recentness are really just a nanotube antenna and a diode, each one being a very small dc power source. if you need a square meters worth of rectenneas, several silicon wafers worth of parts, and thats going to cost you.

the problem with quad copters is they are a very brute force approach to flight. they are very inefficient. 20 minutes of battery life is a common number. adding blimp elements would make longer duration flights possible. but then you have a bunch of blimp problems, being draggy, slow, and subject to cross winds. or at least give the blimp a more oblong gas bag so it can benefit from a smaller cross section (less drag, higher speed, but more susceptible to cross windage). one advantage of having helium is you can shut down all the power hungry bits while in flight, drift with the wind or even recharge batteries with thin film solar cells. i actually think what we should really be after are fixed wing vtol drones like nasa's greased lightning drone. to you fixed wing range and the ability to land anywhere.