Nuke

maintaining a good vacuum is essential to running most reactors. its likely going to be on a pid controller to keep levels below the desired threshold. pumps will kick on when the measured pressure in the chamber approaches the threshold. neutral atoms in particular are rather bad, they steal energy from the things you want hot, conduct it to the walls of the reactor and your plasma never gets hot enough to fuse. fusion products on the other hand are going to be at energy levels higher than the yet to fuse plasma and get ejected from confinement. then its not hard to get rid of them after that.

helium is probibly going to be removed by the vacuum system. for reactions that produce alpha particles (helium nucleus), you can let them pick up an electron (usually as part of a direct conversion system), which makes them neutral. then it can be removed by mechanical means. polywells would do this on the p-b11 reaction. i dont know how tokamaks would remove their alpha particles, but i think they physically impact the walls (energy is too high to contain by the magnetic fields) and pick up an electron there to become neutral.

ive always wondered how fast you can push an electric turbine. since i got my 3d printer ive been experimenting with a lot of ducted fan designs for various motors in my parts bin, with results ranging from 'thats cute' to 'omg what a monster' (usually depending on which motor i use). currently waiting on a new brushless motor for a centrifugal fan (stl file ready to go) for my hovercraft built out of trash. i saw [URL="http://hackaday.com/2015/11/16/ev-motor-not-powerful-enough-make-your-own/"]this build[/URL] the other day and was impressed. it has me wanting to re-wind some of my weaker motors with thick magnet wire to make them a little bit more powerful, and i certainly have the magnet wire for it. i suppose if you use superconducting magnets cooled by liquid nitrogen or whatever, magnetic bearings, and a powerplant like a polywell or dpf reactor, or the thing that the skunkworks is building (does it have a name?). i figure those are going to be the only powerplants small enough to fit on an aircraft, tokamaks, stellerators, and laser machines are all out (too big to fit on an aircraft unless hovercarrier). you can probibly push a fan to the point where centrifugal force will shatter any known material. its an engineering problem, though not as hard as building a fusion reactor.

i remember an episode of classic doctor who where the phrase is used by the cybermen, pretty sure the master used it once as well. i dont even think that was the original use of the phrase either. trek didnt invent it.

[quote name='Lohan2008']Fear of nuclear bombs dropping from orbit.[/QUOTE] you can drop inert masses from orbit and get nuke-equivalent results.

i am quite fond of tga myself. its like an 18 byte header followed by raw data, which you can do whatever you want with. ive also been able to hack bmp and uncompressed dds formats (i needed to dump a z buffer from a software renderer i was working on, and needed a 16 bit grayscale format).

house cats kill far more birds than power generation ever will.

chernobyl has a thriving ecosystem around it. fukushima will too in time. i like to think of nuclear disasters as learning experiences. sort of like how planes get safer every time one crashes.

its to keep the intake pointed into the airflow and to keep the thrust vector pointed at the cg.

reactor designs like this make me like the polywell more.

as an alaskan i say get your own damn water.

as i understand it cd is something you have to determine experimentally. the old way you stick a part in a wind tunnel and see what it does, nowadays computer models are good enough to test design models. a coefficient is really just a fudge factor anyway. it represents everything we do not know about aerodynamics.

i haven't seen the martian yet so i really dont want to vote yet. interstellar would win over gravity easy. i like that these kind of movies have become a trend and hope to see a lot more of them in the future.

sort of similar to a hypothetical problem ive always wondered about. in my scenario we are discovered by hostile aliens. they invade earth and start exterminating humans. unable to stop them, some humans steal a time machine and use it to send all our knowledge and technology back in time, giving it to ancient egypt or rome or whatever. idea is you ratchet up the tech level so that when the aliens arrive you can deal with them (assume accidental discovery, they were flying through on a 5000 year survey of their part of the galaxy and just found us on accident). if you want to pass the scientific method, and you give them a stack of the most important science papers in the last thousand years, the scientific method would end up requiring that they would have to re-verify all that knowledge before they could make progress on their own. and the technology, give the roman legions ak-47s, aircraft and nukes and see how long it takes them to take over/destroy the world. having the tech and not learning the discipline that comes with each technological advancement could be very destructive. to set limits on war and industry such that they dont put the world on an even more destructive path than we have. i always think that the aliens would show up to a dead planet and start terraforming. on top of that if you try to give them knowledge they might burn you for heresy. you would probibly have to show up with an army that can deal with any threat and forcibly teach them. even then there is the zulu scenario, where a primitive army with numbers can take out a smaller army with better tech (and why we didnt use that on the aliens is beyond me). there is also the obvious problem of infrastructure. just because you know how to make steel for example, doesn't mean you can use the most advanced process right away. you will probibly have to bring out iron age technology to help the egyptians bootstrap industry. its not just building factories you have to build everything that makes a factory, and everything to make the supplies the factory requires. you cant just shovel rocks in one door and computers out another. you dont just depend on the previous generation's knowledge but also what they built.

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).