Nuke

i do have a degree you know. school is not enough, you also have to be not insane. now where did i put that squirrel stick.

ive launched into a direct circular orbit before. is usually because my rocket is underpowered and i almost dont go to space, but manage to squeeze in anyway. usually i launch with such an op first stage that its hard not to over shoot your apo target.

i had played the game for about two hours before i became comfortable with navigation. did the beer run and racked up a couple bounties in the process. then i decided to go asteroid mining. this took forever and was tedius, especially because i could only refine one ore at a time. i had to watch plantum float by because i had 95% gold. i came back with gold, platnum, and silver. unfortunately i got my landing gear mixed up with my cargo eject and ejected the cargo in the station during landing. to add insult to injury they fined me for it. i had never ragequit a game so fast. i havent played since.

boosters generally dont work well for transfers. they are great for getting to orbit but once there you want a more optimized engine that gives you good isp and uses fuel that wont boil off on you during the voyage. before ion propulsion became a thing most probes just used hydrazine or something like it. apollo service module, and lm ascent and decent stages all used aerozine-50 and n204 and had pretty decent isp around 300+ (and being hypergolic simplified a lot of things). if i wanted to do a brachistochrone trajectory i would want something like that so you can be all tank and a small simple and light engine. not sure what the feasibility of brachistochrone is with ion propulsion. now you really dont need to go full brachistochrone either, since both the target and return destination have atmospheres, use aerobreaking to save fuel instead of a deceleration burn. this places limits on how fast you can come in but saves a lot of fuel mass. in ksp i would just resort to rather violent aerocapture (ignoring the fact that you need to get uncomfortably low for this to work), jeb seems to think its a good idea.

i had a job once, but i quit. its just not worth it.

i guess i spoke too soon. here is a backplane for a 16 node pi zero array. it was only a matter of time.

i just thought of another use of such a survival suit. putting out fires by depressurization. assuming you have an emergency pressure suit near by and you hear a fire alarm, ship doctrine would give everyone 45 seconds to get suited up (were assuming the easy to get into autolaced suit and beech ball helmet and 5 mintue o2 supply, or even a rescue ball, where astronauts have drilled down to 30 seconds) before the ships computer automatically depressurizes the sections which are on fire. even those who cannot get suited in time might still survive a couple minutes (with training).

i think no matter the size of the suit what is really going to get you is the size of the life support pack. it has to have an o2 supply and scrubbers, neither of which can be made too compact. essentially bigger means a longer duration of life support. you might have a suit with a small pack in the the with a 5 minute o2 bottle, and a small scrubber. then in an emergency your first task would be to get a larger life support pack out of a locker. you might even have receptacles built right into the ship as well in case you cant find a pack. then you can have a mask and life support module in your belt. the mask would include a receptacle for either the portable life support unit, the larger pack or the emergency port in the hull. i dont think the idea of wearing a survival suit all the time is a good one. for one this would subject the suit to continuous wear and tear, vs it being safe in a locker somewhere until needed (exception might be during space combat, where your ship is in danger of being attacked at any time). it would also not be very comfortable and would interfere with normal tasks. you might be able to design a more comfortable garment that can be instantly switched to survival mode with powered laces or muscle wire, if you can make the servos and control hardware small enough to wear comfortably (im thinking super caps and peltier devices, so the thing would be powered by a stored charge from body heat). they would need to be tough comfortable and durable. i remember engineer uniforms in star trek 2, which seemed to have a life support system built right in. in the ambush scene you could see the engineering crew scramble for the masks and you see scotty wearing one in one scene. it kind of suggests that they had a loss in life support rather than a full depressurization event, i dont think that gear would have worked at all in full vacuum. perhaps with a full helmet, but as i understand it st2 didnt have a huge budget.

relevant xkcd is relevant

i actually want to call it IX because of the dune reference. and that its roman numerals for 9.

i figure much like the pressure suits worn by u2 and sr71 pilots. they had a helmet like a space suit, but the suit itself was skin tight and held together by its own structural rigidity rather the pressurized man-shaped beach ball paradigm that nasa uses. thing was they had to be tailor made to exacting tolerances, and the pilots had to maintain their body weight to within a couple of pounds. so its not something that can be mass produced. actually this is not a bad idea. corsets are designed to be adjustable so that women and crossdressers can cinch in their waist over time with blatant disrespect for their internal organs. this would not be the case for space applications but it does give you an idea of what kind of engineering you need to use. corsets sometimes have steel structural members in them to make them rigid then the lace up in the back allows for adjustment. so imagine a stiff fabric possible reinforced with kevlar cable then you would have a flexible seam for a lacing system. these would run up and down the extremities and down the torso and possibly the neck and would need to be adjusted before use. if you needed a one size fits many suit you could mass produce, but still needed to be able to suit up very quickly, you could put servos in the lacing systems (power laces!) that would allow the wearer to push a button to fit the suit automatically. the helmet could be made out of thick transparent kevlar reinforced vinyl (or perhaps something better) and be inflated by a connected life support pack. astronauts might drill to be able to get suited up in about 30 seconds.

these days it seems they just gravity assist like a boss. and they do it with no delta-v budget.

im a cat

it would probibly have to be a flyby. the delta-v to match the object's velocity is likely non trivial.

it occurred to me that you really cant call it planet X anymore. since the demotion of pluto you are actually looking for planet IX.

im still waiting for a pi zero array. i suppose thats difficult due to the lack of ethernet, but surely you can use the gpio as a parallel bus. im also disapointed not to see a compute module backplane pop up.

ive seen a lot of parallel computing done with raspberry pis. beowulf clusters with many nodes like this 33 node setup. i guess its ok if you want to do parallel computing on the cheap. sort of a way for hardware people to get a cheap intro to supercomputing. software people would just use their gpus and ee types their fpgas to learn about writing code for and designing supercomputer systems. so there is more than one angle (the cheapest one being gpu based coding). what it wont do is make a replacement for your pc. whole different paradigm. software for one wouldn't work on the other unless it was specifically designed to. ive mostly used my raspberry pi 2 for a makeshift diy tablet, which i never use because horrible battery life.

every problem is preventable, at least until upper management tells you they dont have the neccisary funds to buy new parts, and expect you use your voodoo to fix it anyway. at least thats my experience with pc repair.

one thing mars (or better, a moon base) would be better at exporting: space infrastructure. you could build large structures on low gravity build sites and move them into orbit with less expense (energy wise). one big hold up for space colonization is availability of suitable power supplies. you might never see a 10 megawatt reactor launched from earth, at least not a fission reactor. so a big export might be drive stages for long duration space missions.

i think people will be driven away rather than to. for example mining. say looming environmental collapse forces a moratorium on all but essential mining operations. so people might go to mars to escape the bureaucracy of legal mining operations on earth (which no doubt cost more than launching a space colony). that of course ignores the fact that in that scenario our economy will be so shot to hell that launching a colony ship would be impossible.

there are a lot of compact reactor designs that might work well for space power applications. it will certainly make colonization more plausible.

nuclear doesnt have to be fission. i dont think anyone will have issue with launching an inert fusion reactor and then powering it up while on an escape trajectory. not a today project, maybe a 50 years from now project definitely. i dont think we can build a tunnel boring machine that runs by itself yet (they all require infrastructure, like a mud plant and a lot of prefabricated reinforced concrete liner sections), not to mention a large crew to operate, and a lot of survey work and inertial guidance to keep it on course, and also someone to change the cutting wheels periodically. an you need to communicate with it underground, so it needs to set up its own communications relay system to an outside transceiver. when we can build something completely autonomous like that we might have already cracked the fusion problem. underground does have its advantages. radiation shielding, direct access to natural resources, lots of space for hydroponic gardening. circular tunnels can be build for centrifuges in low gravity planets. also here is some reading

i think id probibly drop a small nuclear powered tunnel boring machine. have it carve out some underground infrastructure. astronauts can come in later, install airlocks, epoxy the walls, and pressurize the interior with the appropriate atmosphere. then recover the tbm's reactor to power a base.

a certain scene from one of the terminus episodes of the walking dead comes to mind.

survival yes. but life will be more regimented than a fremen warrior with a little morlock thrown in for good measure.