Nuke

the only way i see of making a generation ship viable is to make it really really big, big enough for a city sized population. big is good because you use that bulk to protect the humans living in the middle of it from radiation. besides habitation space (a centrifuge) and the infrastructure that supports it, the ship would be built mostly out of its own propellant in a frozen state. this eliminates large tankage structures, you can simply mine the exterior surface to feed the engines (which need to have a high isp). the engines can be some kind of electric propulsion, probibly using fusion reactors as a power source (not only engines but for life support, hydroponics and recycling infrastructure). im not sure if xenon ice would sublimate in interstellar space, or perhaps something more common like ammonia ice. water might also be used as a hydrogen storage medium (surplus oxygen can be either used for life support or vented overboard).

all i see is a bunch of spot lights reflecting off of the clouds and a few aa shell explosions. it probibly had something to do with one watch station reporting that they thought they saw something, then all the other stations pointing their lights at the spot. then all the gun crews opened fire in the confusion.

go with mint instead. ubuntu has been bleeding market share to mint for awhile now.

need more data points. one is not enough. if we find life elsewhere in our solar system that would be a second.

there is a possibility, however small it is, that we are one of the first intelligent species in the universe. it could be that up to this point the universe has been too active to produce life in abundance. extra radiation for example interfering with the initial development of biochemistry into early life. i read something about most of the galaxy for example being 'too hot' to be inhabitable. life would currently be relegated to the areas of sparse stellar populations, like the fringes of the galaxy or between the spiral arms where we are located, such that the radiation levels are low enough for life to exist. as the universe cools life might sprout up in abundance far beyond current levels. such would open the door to new paths to entropy to make up for all the dying stars. this is of course limited to life as we know it. perhaps other life chemistry would be better adapted to high radiation locations in the universe. the kind of abuse that space does to our electronics would seem to indicate that even if you had silicon based life it too would be susceptible to radiation and would be limited to evolution in pockets of low radiation, like dense atmosphere super earths. space exploration for such a species in a hotter than usual part of the universe would likely be fatal and so evolution might take a path of high efficiency to conserve the limited available resources for the planetlocked civilization.

ive been running a motorhead playlist for the past weak. it doesnt run out, ever.

for crew/light payloads only. nothing on the scale of the shuttle itself. large payloads are better left to rockets.

last game i played that had an end was probibly rage. it was disappointing, it got shelved and never played again.

i hear they are good for video editing rigs where you need high disk speed or various other professional workstation tasks. i saw some cheapish ones around $200-$300 (ram not included!). i hear you can raid0 ssds as well for more performance, though diminishing returns kicks in and you stop seeing meaningful gains at anything more than 3 disks. doing these kinds of things for a game is kind of crazy and a waste of money. if you want to do the ram disk thing, just get a rig with 16 or more gigs of ram. do a 4-8gb disk, and have some scripts to copy data to and from it at start up/shutdown (and dont expect any performance other than faster load times).

i saw a submarine design awhile back that mounted the batteries on rails and moved them back and fourth to pitch up and down, thus changing the angle the dive planes.

before ssds took over all the things, there were a few dram based products that would turn old ram sticks into a hard drive. some were battery backed, others backed to flash media like cf cards. they were limited by the speed of the sata bus at the time and i think a modern ssd would blow it out of the water.

i think subtractive techniques would work better for foams. cool thing about foams its fairly easy to use that as a base structure for application of carbon fiber composite. i know scaled composites does this to make filler cores for carbon fiber composite aircraft parts. i once used a power drill and some sandpaper to form a bock of foam into a nosecone for a model rocket, after a bit of epoxy and fabric had a fairly decent front end. i know there are a few processes for converting the waste that this would create back into new foam stock for later machining.

while we call a certain wavelength of light 'blue' or 'red', i dont think all humans perceive those colors the same way. we might all agree on what yellow is but the way we see it in our minds could be completely different.

you can always use the cstrings library. though i perfer doing all my string manip the c++ way. its great for writing file parsers and the like. actually this falls under the tag [Computer Science] and would be better off in the science labs. might get more programmers eyes on it.

low gravity locations are a good place for industrial centers. if you have an industrial center then you have the capability to construct a centrifuge to fix the gravity problems for its inhabitants. low g helps that kind of mega construction project. of course the main advantage is launch cost being really low. you can build your space infrastructure components on the ground and launch it mostly assembled. i cant imagine any place more perfect for this kind of thing than ceres. it would also double as an asteroid mining hub. the heavy mining and processing ships needed could be constructed and surface launched here rather than brought in more expensively from other planets.

the shop is strong with this one.

abandoned industrial sites make excellent paintball arenas. sister's inlaws had an old gravel pit in the middle of nowhere (not quite inactive), with dilapidated excavation equipment all over the place. big rock crusher, piles of gravel, overgrown areas, silt flats everywhere. one of my sister's friends brought a bunch of paintball guns. we managed to get 8 people, enough for a game of ctf. it was kind of awesome.

sure you can cross the atlantic in 4 hours, after spending another 4 going through security.

this is the way i see things. there are so many good bands out there and to pick a favorite is just a way to say 'im done listening to new music'. before i developed this way of thinking, i had a few bands that i called my favorite at the time. i dont think i listen to any of those anymore, not even for nostalgia. i just discovered that they weren't all that great after all. if my most played counters in winamp are any indication (they are not, since its a fairly fresh install) i like motorhead, darkthrone, triptykon, hank III, marduk, gwar, thorns, eyehategod, and judas priest.

i also found out fairly recently that potatoes go good with spam.

thats pretty much the point of the thread. people listing their computer specs for others not to read.

Computer Name - 1MP3g3dd0n Operating System - Win8.1+classic shell (because derp) CPU - i7 4790k Motherboard - ASRock Z97M-ITX/AC RAM - 8GB DDR3 2400 GPU(s) - GTX 750 Ti Optical Drive(s) - lol, nope HDD(s) - people still use these? SSD(s) - 2x 256gb and 500gb Chassis - COOLER MASTER Elite 110 (mini itx cube) PSU - 450w CPU Cooler - stock Additional Internal Components - none

potatoes: best served with bacon.

im right on the edge of that but chances are its gonna be overcast. last time i saw them i was out in the boonies with zero light pollution. they were pretty impressive.

they are signed 16 bit axes. hid is weird, i spent days trying to get unsigned 16 bit axes to work, but the second i set it up as signed it just sort of worked. where it says 0x16, 0x00, 0x80, // LOGICAL_MINIMUM (-32768) 0x26, 0xff, 0x7f, // LOGICAL_MAXIMUM (32767) 0x75, 0x10, // REPORT_SIZE (16) 0x95, 0x08, // REPORT_COUNT (8) is where it sets the axis range. hid likes to pack bits as tightly as possible to save space. for example if you used 4 10-bit axes, it would fill up 5 bytes (not sure how they would be packed though). here ive pretty much told it to waste space so i could get full 16 bit axes. limits seem to be context sensitive. the example i found had used usage(SIMULATION CONTROLS), but i switched to usage(GAME PAD) and that might have something to do with it. i pretty much spent a couple days playing with the descriptors till i found one that didnt throw an error and showed the right range. once that worked it wasnt hard to write the serialization code for the data. now i can use my ads1115 i2c analog digital converter (i found the chip on a breakout board on ebay for cheap), which can do 4 single ended 15-bit channels, or 2 double ended 16-bit channels. so i used 4 15-bit channels, plus 4 of the 10-bit channels from the arduino adcs, and scaled them to fit the full range and had all 8 working in windows.