Nuke

i think modern imus have gone to solid state mems devices. though you might still see mechanical ones used in aerospace because reasons.

i dont think using super conductors/insulators in capacitor design would be of much use. super insulators may decrease self discharge rates of the device, meaning that it would not have a tendency to loose charge when not being discharged. however there will still be self discharge at the terminals. insulators used in wiring in the circuit, pcb substrate, even the air, all will allow a self discharge path (all be it a slow one). it might help out-of-circuit energy storage, but almost nobody uses capacitors in this way. doing so would also raise safety concerns because capacitors like to discharge themselves as fast as they can, so dont lick the terminals (damn it jeb) or you might die. super conductors might increase discharge rate and reduce heat generated from rapid discharge. this might help high energy applications like capacitor banks for rail guns and fusion reactors. you might use super insulators for this application as well, since caps, switching circuits, etc, may all be held at cryogenic temperatures anyway. but then again its not going to cost you a whole lot of extra power to keep those banks topped off. its a similar problem to boiloff in lox tanks, its going to need to be constantly topped off to keep up them full, but this is drops in the bucket when compared to filling the tank. so either way, its not a revolution in capacitor design. not so much as nanomaterials has been. denser packing of the layers in a capacitor helps to improve capacity vs size at a given voltage. so you can get more out of smaller devices.

three of those have been done so far so at least were on the right track.

i thought this was common knowledge for awhile now.

stop celebrating holdiays like new years.

and you thought you had lag problems now.

its such a 1970s way of doing things. i attempted designing a video card from 7400 series logic and ultimately gave up and bought an fpga dev board. i still havent built that video card one way or the other.

cinnamon rolls are too hard. its either buy them, get those crappy canned ones, or spend 3 hours in the kitchen.

if you just want a launch vehicle it would be better to keep the reactor on the ground to make fuel for a chemical launch vehicle. but if you want something you can take off from earth, fly to mars, and land there, and make the return trip all with one engine and no propellant usage while in an atmosphere, for a general go everywhere ship, then that would be totally awesome. i think a molten salt type reactor would work best here, you have your closed fuel loop isolated from your coolant loop. where the coolant loop is open, taking atmosphere from an intake or hydrogen from a cryotank and spewing it out the tail pipe, or to a closed radiator loop for offline power generation. that is a lot of heat exchangers which are heavy, not to mention the shielding for the fuel loop. you would need a high temperature version of the sabre precooler to provide the hundreds of megawatts in heat transfer. but then you get the problem of embrittlement caused by neutron damage in all those tiny tubes to deal with, so you might want another coolant loop in there or compromise with a less efficient, more robust heat exchanger. either way its going to cost you thermal power. i have a feeling it would be very difficult to get an engine with a twr > 1. bring in a small fusion reactor with direct conversion, maybe you can power electric turbine engines in the atmosphere and mpd engines in space, but that is probibly centuries away and just as theoretical as the fission hybrid.

i might swing for a solidoodle next fall if i dont have any unforeseen expenses in the near future. i believe its called another chicken and a rooster. i wont go into how it all works, its very complex, but you put corn in and out comes chickens.

there is a huge difference between owning a cell phone and wasting resources when you dont have to. cell phones are a horrible example. they dont use a lot of power, and mass production means that individually they dont carry a huge carbon footprint (unless you start getting into things like forced obsolescence, which is downright evil and should be illegal). things like running engines and heating water (or anything else for that matter) are where most of the resources (sometimes literally) go down the drain. as for rocket engines, its not like everyone takes a saturn v to work. a few launches benefits many (through science, technology, communications, etc), so its both justifiable and practical. an suv only benefits its owner. launching a rocket is more like taking the bus.

we probibly get all that material replaced by incoming natural space debrits (not our space junk). while small, it still a great many tons more than we put up there. and likely much of it replenishes our limited resources, all be in in a shotgun sort of way.

best christmas display ever. (contains much metal and the user comments will probibly be nsfw, its youtube after all)

last version i played through the tech tree without hiring additional kerbals at all. all of the extra ones i had were rescues. i didnt kill any of them.

its useful for unmanned test flight contracts. i usually build those to the bare minimum needed to accomplish the mission goals, then i just return to the space center when it destroys itself. its not really useful for any space manuvers at all. it has its place, but its a very small niche.

this is just a quirk of having a public alpha/beta cycle. ive seen similar kinds of relations with free open source games (and mods) and their communities before. i mean i can understand an open beta, the game is in place and its direction is set in stone at that point. but a public alpha is just a pr nightmare, and i seriously have to give squad kudos for having the manifold of two oblate brass spheroids fortitude to pull it off.

you cant put a wad of turkey, ham and swiss cheese between two waffles and make the best sandwich ever invented. you need french toast for that. last time i made a monte cristo i even used real french bread hand sliced to about an inch thick. the eggs were whipped to a creamy froth the bread dipped such that it would spring back to its original form when squeezed between your fingers. cook one side, flip, apply cheese and ham or turkey (half and half of each) then fold them over once the other side of the french toast is cooked. then let em sit on the griddle on a low setting and let the second law of thermodynamics do its job. for a side dish you can have a second sandwich (in a restaurant the would give you fries, but i find it distasteful to put such a glorious sandwich next to the peasant side dish that is fries). its just the best thing ever done with a breakfast staple (excluding bacon of course). a waffle can only be a waffle, no matter how much syrup, jelly, and whipped cream you try to put on top of it.

i dont think avatar had any physics, they might have taken some hard scifi pointers in the ship design, but i dont remember them talking about it in the movie at all. to me it was just oooh spaceship, now lets do pocahontas with some greenie propaganda thrown in. i didnt think it was that great of a movie.

also population is not really so much an issue as 'western lifestyle'. a majority of earth's population lives on a bare minimum of resources. earth could support a much larger population if nobody owned suvs and we didnt take 2 30-minute showers a day and dont set our thermostats to 78. but this is 'murica.

i think thats kind of backwards. alpha was about implementing systems, content was limited to what was neccisary to test those systems. so i think we might actually start seeing more content now that were in beta. new content will be tempered with bug fixes and minor features, but i dont think they are done just yet. only time will tell.

i bet rocket makers pay less carbon tax than car makers. if our power grid was nuclear, then we could really cut down on the cost of lh2/lox production. but i think its sufficiently more expensive to build cryofuel rockets than anything you save from the reduction in fuel cost.

it looks like the blades are free swinging on their axis. i dont think any more than any other rotor blades do. carbon fiber blades are really tough, flex well, and also really cheap. you might tear up some of the less flexible blades though. i think i would be more concerned with vibration. torque is being pulsed at about 1-4 times the motor frequency depending on which direction of cyclic is being applied. you just have to make sure all your materials have resonant frequencies outside of those harmonics, and i dont think that is a major issue for composites.

you left out xenon, but thats just something you can spew out of the converter when handling compressed air. just assume the converter has a fractional distillation plant in it (which is the usual method for extracting inert trace gas products from atmospheres). but otherwise i think its pretty good.

now you can get by with just 2 rotors. linky: http://hackaday.com/2014/12/16/uav-coaxial-copter-uses-unique-drive-mechanism/ its rather clever. yaw control comes from the usual mechanism of varying torque between top and bottom rotors. but the top rotor uses a very clever hub mechanism. blade swing as a response to changes in torque can be used to vary the pitch of the blades at each of the cyclic points, and it does it all without a swashplate and servos. instead it does this by pulsing torque in phase with the motor hub rotation. damn clever if you ask me.

i like to draw a line between launch vehicles and space craft. the former are rather interchangeable, so long as the launch vehicle can deliver your required tonnage you are fine. things like ssto, space planes, and rockets all belong to that category. their job is simply to get things on the ground and haul them to orbit. space craft currently have to be very mission specific, designed with specific tasks, delivering rovers to mars or landing things on comets. eventually we will get to the point where we have a standard probe that has the best technology you can get all crammed into a tiny package, just attach whatever size fuel tank you need and you got a ship. problem with that is that technology is always moving forward, so a probe you launch last year is obsolete the next (and add 10 years of obsolescence on top of that for making the technology rad hard). when the required technologies reach their optimal point, then doing a standard probe becomes possible. id love to see reusable transfer vehicles but that would likely require better power systems, so you can drive power hungry electric propulsion (on the order of megawatts to gigawatts) with really high isp engines. but that kind of thing is decades away (probibly requiring breakthroughs in fusion, or offworld nuclear fuel production for fission reactors). for the time being its better to just do a custom build, then strap on as many off the shelf components that your mission calls for.