Nuke

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.

they also kind of use it for load balancing. with a known mean time before failure, its better to run one at a time and cycle between them such that each engine has been run for more or less an equal amount of time, rather than run one till it fails and then switch up. its better to have 3 slightly used, broken in engines than 2 brand new unproven engines.

i think the reasoning was that putting the props on the wing tip would reduce wingtip vortices and reduce drag. the props actually created vortices in the other direction that countered the wingtip vortices and eliminated a major source of drag in the process. you effectively needed less wing to fly. the navy got involved because they probibly figured it would make a good carrier aircraft with its small wing area. one problem would be that if you lost an engine you wuld have drag asymetry and would produce an uncontrollable spin. the plane actually had a cross shaft between the gearboxes in such an event. im a big fan of the boomerang, another asymetrical plane. its a one off and i think scaled uses it as a buisness plane and chase aircraft for test flights (they used it when flight testing space ship one). proteus is just plane awesome.

2+2=5 big brother said so.

spiders dont bother me, i dont mind a few of them in the house to kill all the other bugs that bug me, like gnats and skeeters.

i dont steal games, but i do like to strip out the drm from games that ive purchased, usually for usability constraints. for example the huge collection of cds for 90s games that i have, those have to be virtualized because my rig has no optical drive (which i consider obsolete). for some games which i can break cd locks with 3rd party patch, i use that so i can just run them directly from the hard drive without keeping a virtual disc on file (they take up a lot of drive space). in some very rare cases i will use pre-cracked versions of software (of which i own a disc) downloaded from irreputable sources, usually when the drm is excessively evil (like starforce). i believe this falls under fair use. i dont like having custom hardware and drivers being locked out (which it kind of is already, and is why i keep my system in test signing mode). there are some open source virtual drivers i like to use, but in order for one to create windows drivers apparently one has to pay ms for the privilege. this is one of those things i really dont like about windows. once again i find myself really looking forward to reactos beta.

they already ruined flying for me with tsa agents. i take boats now. them smurfs give me the creeps

learn the tga header. its only 18 bytes and can be used to generate tga files from scratch with a hex editor. you will of course need to convert your numbers to hex. 0x00, 0x00, 0x02, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, //no modification 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x00, 0x40, 0x01, 0xf0, 0x00, //last four bytes here are width and height, 2 bytes each (little endian i think) 0x18, 0x00 //these two are bit depth (codes, not actual values), 16 bit = 0x10 0x01, 24 bit = 0x18 0x00, 32 bit = 0x20 0x08 //follow up with width*height*(bpp/8) bytes of data, not sure color order but i think its something weird like BRG (for grey pick 24 bit and just repeat each value 3x) i was using this technique to dump the framebuffer on a software rendering engine i was working on. i just manually created the header for the type of file i was writing and stuck it in a byte array, then when i wrote the file i would just output the header followed by the raw data and close the file, you could then open it in photoshop or whatever. lots of graphics software that is not ms paint can open tga.

c++ seems to be the most versatile. its also good to know some c. i also like lua and think it is highly underrated. - - - Updated - - - "arduino language" is really just c++ with a couple of (sometimes annoying) transformations happening behind the scences. in many cases you can take the same arduino board and get a copy of avrstudio and program it straight c/++ without the arduino baggage.

never met a spider that my cats wouldnt eat.

alpha and beta voltaic devices exist, but these are very low power devices. as i understand photovoltaics, they only convert a very narrow band of the visible spectrum. id be more interested in technologies that can either widen the spectrum absorbed or divert the appropriate spectra to an array of narrow band cells tuned to different wavelengths.

oh great now i know what to name my variables in my guidence code. yay! now it can be less confusing than that video.

if you go with igbts dont forget to use a flyback diode in reverse bias, otherwise the energy stored in the coil can fry your electronics when you switch it off. you dont have to do this with mosfets since they have an intrinsic reverse biased diode.

little brainfart there, been spending too much time on other game forums where thinking is usually a bannable offense. of course i meant mass. going interstellar is nice and all, but i have a feeling we will be using fusion in space long before that happens. so an engine+reactor package you can stick on a single rocket and launch in one shot would be a great thing to have in order to bootstrap a more active human presence in the solar system.

i think something like a polywell or dpf will be better suited for space flight. tokamaks by their geometry tend to be rather large and heavy. direct conversion is a plus, but brayton cycle + radiators is also a viable option if your core can be made smaller.