Nuke

if you want to figure out pressure at an arbitrary altitude the math is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Density_of_air#Altitude also the pic was from this article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Atmosphere

a more realistic model of earth's atmo is this:

its probibly a higher memory address than what your computer would typically use during non-game use. for the cpu, you might not be able to regrease it, but you can at least blow out the vents with some canned air. im not sure if this is your model but a quick google serch for 'Dell XPS 17 service manual' turned up this: http://www.insidemylaptop.com/how-to-disassemble-dell-xps-17-l702x/ looks like the memory is accessible from one panel. so you can spray out any dust in the ram compartment and reseat the modules.

when something like this happens i usually just run memtest86. 9 times out of 10 simply reseating or wiggling (im quite fond of the wiggle it technique) the ram fixes this. this is especially true with a laptop. sometimes your bios settings get reset, and the memory parameters needs tweaking. ram normally doesn't up and fail on you. you might also want to eliminate the software side as a point of failure. check for viruses, or backup your files and restore the machine to factory default (usually with a restore disk). if you dont have a restore disk, just pull the iso for your version of windows from ms and reinstall it yourself.

we would simply turn our efforts to murdering aliens.

i figure the bulk of it is bureaucratic nonsense. what little actual subject matter there is will be only a fraction of the data base, and most of that is going to be first hand accounts with no one to back up the story. there might be a handful of multiple-report type cases that you cant explain. but it will just be, these people saw something, and that would be it.

the soldering is not bad for a first go. id check the wiring on that limit switch, make sure you have it connected to the right 2 pins. if its a single pole double throw, then it will work backwards if one of the pins is wrong (closed when not pressed and open when pressed instead of vise versa as you would expect). not sure about the pinout on the pcb so idk if thats connected right.

you still want to use flux for better results. many novice solderers would burn up all the flux in the solder before completing the joint and the resulting connection would be unreliable. especially if you are using one of those radio shack fire starters and not a proper temp regulated iron.

the notion that the environment is an unchanging thing is rather foolish. it is something that is dictated by a large number of variables where changing one or two of them will have drastic consequences. on the other hand we do know that we can change the climate, and thats the first step to engineering one.

flux is your friend. a thing that looks soldered could be just a big blob of nonconductive oxidation.

the lm machine seems to employ a lot of lessons learned with polywells. the coils are of similar construction. cusps are closed up better. its inline configuration seems like it would make direct conversion easier (though it would need to burn something other than d-t to do this). the weird thing is the coil diameters are not uniform. you still have a quasi spheroid plasma ball at the center. what i like about their machine is that it looks really expensive, all the coils are mounted on rails and it seems like they are trying a lot of different coil configurations to see which one is better at hearding charged particles. one thing i noticed about test shots in tokamaks is that the plasma doesn't look like its being controlled very well at all. its always drifting about to the bottom of the toroid or jumping around wildly. then you look at a polywell and you have your plasma in a nice little ball of awesome. dpf is a different beast in that it really lets the plasma do its own thing and doesn't try to control it at all (if anyone knows a technical source for dpf that isnt 98% greeny propaganda and that isnt behind a paywall* let me know). you cant really do fast test cycles on a tokamak either. its always 'we need a bigger one. this multi billion dollar rig that took 10 years to build wasnt big enough, we need another one' as opposed to 'we need 200 million and six months to build a new polywell'. i think much of that 50 years away nonsense is construction time. * e

if the atmosphere would solidify then you just need to build large mass drivers and start throwing chunks of iron into space at escape velocity (or any other engine with exhaust velocity > escape velocity). you might not be able to go on a galaxy cruise but you might be able to set up an intercept with a potentially habitable star system some thousands of years in the future.

idk about se but orbiter uses moving frames of reference to keep the precision within tolerances. you can also do some kind of large fixed point format such as 95:32, which would give you 29 orders of magnitude on the integer side to work with. i think ksp only needs 13 orders of magnitude. newer instruction sets could make short work out of that math. but i think floating point units might be faster than the alu.

you could probibly maintain habitation on an ejected planet for some time on core heat alone, just not on the surface. many would die in the transition yes, but the species could continue for some time, perhaps enough to evacuate to another star system.

much of those tubes are insulation so their flow rate is miniscule. it probibly takes hours to fuel up a rocket.

eventually your your floats run out of precision and the kracken starts eating things.

i found some pics of the lm fusion machine here in this article: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compact-fusion-reactor-details and here, this one has a video: http://aviationweek.com/blog/high-hopes-can-compact-fusion-unlock-new-power-space-and-air-transport and thread from talk polywell which has some real nerdtastic posts about said reactor. http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=5643

i wouldn't be surprised if we find another class of object which turns the definition over again. i really dont like the current definition, we could have come up with something much better than 'its round and it clears its orbit'. 'clears its orbit' in particular is really hard to define, earth has a lot of objects that cross its orbit, so by the current definition earth isnt even a planet.

i like my ch fighter stick, had it for 7 years so far. its started to get a tad sloppy in the middle a few weeks ago. its probibly fixable. its been great though, plenty of functions, good spring tension, hardware trim, great software, lasts longer than most of my computers do. of course ive had at least 3 saitek hotases and they all were unusable before they were a year old.

they probibly wouldnt fit the current definition of 'planet'.

my advise is probibly against the forum rules. well i do have one that isnt: dont. avoid relationships at all costs.

i know uranium is chemically toxic, but not sure about plutonium (though i think all trans uranics have similar chemical properties, in which case it would be).

actually i was thinking more for its raw resources. but if you get the nasty stuff out of there it helps the environment. mining usually processes a lot of rock to get at things that only make up a fraction of a percent of the material. i have a feeling that the landfill is much more rich in materials but the diversity of compounds makes separating them into marketable materials a serious engineering challenge. older landfills, the ones that were covered up before recycling became big buisness, are going to be the most rich in resources. right now i think its still cheaper to get new resources, and so no point in recovery of stuff we have buried. eventually this will change though.

you are better off recycling it. have a feeling at some point in the future we will be mining long covered landfill sites.

k so here are my answers -either direct conversion or a thermodynamic cycle. former is better, latter is easy and well understood. -toroidal reactors lol. they pretty much just confine plasma. you heat it up and then you cross your fingers and hope the particles slam into eachother. there is a tiny chance of this happening and if they fail to fuse then the particles go flying into the walls of the reactor. because how far the particles jump is known and how many failed fusions need to happen before a successful one happens is also known, you can figure out how big the reactor needs to be to get a fusion rate that makes it self sustaining. this is why iter is so frickin huge (in the world of fusion, bigger is better. need citation? well then go look at the sun). -the fuser will never work because of energy lost to the grids. its a great tool for education because it explains how to make fusion and the problems you need to solve, its also cheap. people have built them in their garages. however the solution to the grid problem is the thing that the polywell reactor is trying to get around (its essentially the same thing, but the grid is replaced with a magnetically contained electron cloud). -laser based ignition is limited by the efficiency of laser technology, which sadly is very poor. you will never make a laser based fusion reactor breakeven. -fusion research of the classified well funded kind, because murica. -making fusion is actually easy, its making things break even thats the problem. i dont really like the iter/demo plan, because the end result is a reactor than nobody can afford (where fission is cheaper). i kinda think the smaller scale reactors like polywell and dpf might be the ones to look at. -if a small reactor is possible, then it will revolutionize spacecraft power supply. you would then have the juice to power some really high isp engines with thrust that is actually respectable. a big reactor on the other hand wouldnt do much for propulsion, but it might be useful for offworld colonies. there is also direct fusion propulsion which would also make space travel a lot more fun.