Nuke

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.

all glaciers are. lots of crevices, usually leading to pools of really cold melt water. also sharp edges everywhere.

i flew on one of these once when i was like 13 or so. that was when flying was still fun. i believe its the largest aircraft ive flown on (also the one with the most engines). probibly smoothest flight ive ever had. this was in the 90s so they still had in flight meals and movies and the works, made sure to get my free wing pin and deck of cards. i totally did not die from the experience. these days you get groped going through security and crammed into a couple cubic feet of seat space and dont even get a coke, and the interactions between flight attendants and unruly passengers result in the plane reeking with the maturity of a junior high school bus.

heh, i used to live down creek from the first one. never actually went to it but i always wanted to.

when the particle gets close to c, it becomes harder to accelerate it, the energy has to go somewhere and ends up increasing the relativistic mass of the particle. so if you eject the particle out the tail pipe it gives more thrust than a low energy particle. you end up with isp near c. not sure what the accelerator size or power supply requirements for this are, i assume both will be huge. as a result overall ship mass will be high, and and thrust will be very low. might work out for a generation ship.

obligatory 'there is no spoon'

x86 cores have better performance than equivalently clocked arm cores, especially in the flops department. im not sure but i think clock speed is more important factor for the arm architecture than it is for x86.

i think most cooks opt for the ice chest method. like if you are going to make a large pot of stock. its very easy for stock to go bad on you so its very important to cool it off as fast as possible and get it into the fridge (even then it only keeps a few days). one trick i use is to stick the pot in the sink and run cold water around it. i have one of those gimbal nozzels on my sink and i can usually make the water circulate around the pan. i tweak the flow rate so it the water level remains constant. it uses a lot of water though. you can also get some copper tubing and make an immersible coil hook one end to a pump, fill a sink full of ice water and circulate that through the coil. the coil will draw heat out of the soup and transfer it to the sink, thus cooling it. pretty much a diy heat exchanger.

gamer is the catch-all term. its too general for phrases like "real gamer" to mean anything. you can subdivide that to competitive gamers, and casuals and every shade of gray in between. ksp really isn't a competitive game though. i have a feeling with multi it will focus on coop play. i suppose through the challenges forum you can kind of have a form of competitive play though its not actually part of the game itself.

i thought it might cause the calculator to use a different instruction if there was an accumulation before an exponent. guess i was wrong.

i dont think blasters are actually lasers.

i dont think it would help ksp much, ksp's bottlenecks are mostly on the physics side.

i wonder what 2^(254+1) or 2^(256-1) would do. it might allow you to do the calculation without being totally wrong.

yea i seem to recall that the probe would be collecting particle data in more or less real time till then.

there are a lot of electric engines that have parts which are subject to corrosion over time. mpd engines have electrode wear, like the grid wear on electrostatic engines. though there are a number of engines being developed that do away with the wearable parts. i think that is actually one of the main (and seldom mentioned) advantages of vasimr since it uses rf heating.

i expect in the future we will have a cpu (and cache), gpu, fpga, neural net, and main memory all on the same die.

i always figured it was kind of one of those strap in and wait kinda things, requiring a 20 page checklist to make sure everything is stowed. im actually supprised they are allowed to screw around and make videos during the reboost.

tankage isnt the problem, i think the main issue is the danger of grids burning out.

what if instead you keep the accelerators on fixed stations and use the space craft as the bullet. have a small moon or asteroid with an accelerator on it. it can accelerate a ship on a trajectory to another object with another accelerator (running in reverse as a decelerator) and only needs to carry enough delta-v for course corrections. accelerators would be fly through devices and can be used to either speed up or slow down ships flying through them, possibly using multiple passes over a series of orbits. it would require really precise orbital control though. you need to hit a target on the other side of a planet with sub-meter precision. you could use a series of momentum transfer stations all over the solar system, they would require two way travel in order to keep their orbits more or less constant. they would need to be build on existing bodies in the solar system in their natural orbit. or the travel schedules can be tweaked to move those stations to more desirable orbits over time.