Nuke

http://hackaday.com/2015/10/18/coke-propane-rocket-blasts-off-without-ignition/ them ukrainians are at it again.

fusion has been done in controlled environments. the catch is it took more energy than it created. a farnsworth fusor for example gets a lot of fusions, its just all the energy ends up going into melting the grid so it can never break even (hence the polywell). they even fuse some rather heavy elements in attempts to create and study super heavy elements. you could fuse antimatter but if your resulting nucleus gets knocked out of containment, its going to annihilate.

should also point out that star trek has anti-gravity cracked. you only need to put out enough thrust to counteract drag and once out of the atmosphere go to full impulse or warp. yep, a lot of energy to land a ship of that mass. at least when compared to to a shuttle or a transporter.

im all for riding the nukes. we really need to get over this thing about returning home. if the ultimate goal is to back up the human race then no go backsies is the only way to do it. propagate humans to near star systems. when those colonies expand to the point where they can launch a nukeship, they do the same to their nearby systems. you can actually propagate humanity to a significant portion of the galaxy just by doing that iteratively. there will be lost voyages, but that was true when we were crossing the atlantic.

thats like saying windows is dos. droid and linux are not the same. droid is a derivative of linux, but its not linux.

just run real linux on your arm.

i found one of their keyboards in a dumpster. the thing is easily the best keyboard in the house. so far the only thing ive found that is wrong with it is its missing a control key.

sounds like a very interesting way to get eaten.

there are lots of things you can throw in water to make it react violently.

given the local climate i dont think a bikini is a good idea. i have on a dare jumped in the local water (which has chunks of ice from the glaciers in the area in it), fully clothed of course, not recommended (and that was in the summer).

ive known about 3d printed clothing for awhile now. saw a 3d printed dress on hack a day. whats cool about it is that they are printed in a folded state and can be unfolded when it cools. the models who were wearing it said that it wasnt very comfortable. i just ordered me a printrbot play (with the y axis expansion upgrade with heated bed option). im mostly going to be building project enclosures for my electronics projects. have an idea for a modular panel system for various games. no intention to print bikinis (i dont think it will fit in the 4x8x5 build area on my bot).

i like the engine but i really dont like the plane so much. i think they should focus on the engine itself and let someone else (like scaled composites) design a space craft around them. actual in flight testing might be carried out with a heavily modified sr71 testbed (cant think of another platform that could handle those flight regimes). im thinking keep the main engines and then put a scaled down sabre up on top of the fusalage. you dont have to put the thing in orbit, but it does let you test things like switching cycles on the fly, and test the engine throughout the various flight regimes.

this is my kind of science. im going to need a case of tequila.

the formula to determine the resistor is: resistorValue = ( supplyVoltage - ledForwardVoltage ) / ledForwardCurrent (amps, not ma, divide by 1000 to convert). different colors have different voltage drops, different forward current ratings, and different luminous intensity. some are designed to be very bright and others less so. values can vary quite a bit from part to part. that board looks like it has some logic level conversion mosfets on there. other side of the ribbon cable plugs into the pi's gpio header. the raspberry pi uses 3.3v logic levels, but most bread boarding is done at 5v. it kind of makes sense. if i were to take a guess why the red led comes on when touched, i would say make sure your resistor wires dont cross. also you may be acting as a pull down resistor and tripping the mosfet.

they found a skull...

im thinking something as simple as building a 1km diameter spherical pressure hull out of 1/4" welded plate steel built on the inside of a steel exoskeleton of sorts, perhaps with a second layer outer hull. add a large airlock and a bunch of small ones. once the hull is in place you can pressurize it (probibly with an inert gas at first) and can begin constructing the internals. the hull would need a main structural backbone to support construction of various centrifuges over the life of the station. initially you could build up a temporary centrifuge for mining/construction crew with extra shielding that might be able to support 50 or so. you bring the asteroids in side for processing. as asteroids are mined for materials you can then collect mining debris on the surface and hold it in place with steel netting or some other mechanism, this becomes your shielding, essentially creates an artificial asteroid. processed materials go into further station construction. population would grow over time as more shielding is installed, more facilities added, bigger habbitats created. once the station is fully operational it becomes a thriving metropolis and hub of space comerce, facilities continue to process materials but for export. eventually you need to build a bigger one. i can see something like that orbiting ceres. of course then you install a big ass raygun that can destroy an entire planet.

i do like the double hull concept. you have an external pressure/shielding hull with an internal centrifuge hull on magnetic bearings. you could float around the internal hull unsuited, though the internal hull has its own emergency pressurization system in case the outer hull is breached. you can use multiple habitat rings for neutral torque or you can use a lighter disc at higher rpm to counter out the torque of the habitat. you could also have a number of rings with different gravity levels for different purposes, a low gravity havier industrial ring spinning at a lower rpm than a lighter habitat ring would not only balance out but also make heavy industrial operations require less effort due to reduced gravity. the whole solar exposed area of the station would be covered in solar panels or a solar-thermal plant (replaced by a nuclear fission or fusion reactor on orbits too far from the sun). so crops will require large scale hydroponic growing operations in artificial light which can be more finely tuned to specific crops. having a large pressurized outer hull is useful for large scale space construction, you can build space craft or work on strip mining a chunk of asteroid entirely in a shirt sleeve environment.

im gonna at least wait for the tick this time around. i rather like my 4790k cpu and skylake is just a die shrink anyway. its better to upgrade when they come out with new architecture to take advantage of that shrink.

i think a more important question might be why? what function would such structures serve? one thing i can think of is a dyson sphere network. individual spheres would generate power and this would be beamed through space using microwave, lasers or whatever. receiving dishes would probibly need to be very large themselves. the huge amount of energy this would create could be used for interstellar travel. have power stations with a receiving dish and powerful lasers for beamed power for your engines (they could act as energy repeaters to refocus the beam). have them placed throughout various trade routes. you could also ride the beams directly with solar sails, perhaps have an accelerator beam in one direction and a decelerator beam in the other almost in parallel with each other. accelerate in one and maneuver into the other lane when you get to the half way point. you could also build smaller spheres or rings around white dwarfs for really long term settlements. you could take advantage of the compact nature of these stars to make construction a bit more feasible. also with lifetimes in trillions of years, should keep humans alive till the heat death of the universe.

hack a day had a good article about that the other day. did a really good job of explaining orbitals though the article was more about explaining the periodic table in quantum terms. http://hackaday.com/2015/09/16/dont-know-much-about-the-periodic-table-2/

i see a power supply and a driver for a bunch of 7 segment displays. lipo pack, or perhaps an arduino wrapped in shielding (ive had to do that for example interfacing with some lcd screens).

intel had a really hard time rolling out its 14nm process. hence the haswell rehash (and why im still running a 22nm machine). so the traditional encarnation of moors law might be coming to an end. there are still things that can be done. bigger wafers do reduce cost per unit. another thing you can do is build vertically. this can further reduce latency within the chip by reducing the distance from the actual cpu to the end of the cache bus. 3d blocks of sram could increase capacity while decreasing latency within the cache. i think that 3d construction might be easier in a zero g environment. perhaps we might see nanometer scale 3d printing or something like it. using a head to stimulate crystalline growth and place the contaminants needed to create the pn junctions. though i can imagine that being more expensive and harder than lithography and chemical processes.

now that i think about id of you are going to make all that plutonium and detonate it all, it would probibly be better off to use that energy in fission reactors to help make sustainable mars habitation possible. take the industrial approach, just manufacture everything you need to sustain life. power mining and manufacture, agriculture would be in the form of massive hydroponics operations. build dome complexes or underground if you have to. it would also give you better access to scientific data about the surface of the planet. if you nuke it you end up destroying potential data. you can also get data on human health in martian gravity, if more gravity is needed build centrifuges underground.

you are better off using the nukes in an orion drive to drop a mars crossing object into the ice cap. find an object with a close approach in the near future and nudge it in. you might not even need nukes, some kind of ion powered gravity tractor might be enough.

i dont need any special days to mourn for humanity, all of them work.