Nuke

also it has an extra 2mb of cache, i love me some sram. dont ruin it for me, this is the one part of the year i get to splurge on computer stuff. i want this build to go a good 3 years.

i was under the impression that natural uranium could be used in a reactor. however if thorium turns out to be easier to process in situ i have no problem with one being used over the other. it also provides a solution for the reactor launch problem. if we can minimize irradiation risks by doing our nuclear fuel mining processing off planet then its probibly a good idea to do so. its one of the reasons im more of a proponent of moon base rather than mars landing. mars might be a stunt but moon unlocks the universe.

so the critters in that movie metabolize radioactive isotopes. explain that one.

and thats 4% less time thumb twiddling between builds.

agc simulators exist. its a weird beast to operate.

coal mine collapses and kills miners: cost of doing buisness nuclear incident leads to a 1% increase in cancer risk: disaster

then isru can move into the realm of uranium processing.

thing about nuclear thermal is it can run on a wide range of propellants. which might make it useful on isru capable spacecraft. you could refuel at pretty much every icy body in the solar system, and you also have the thrust to land at some of the higher gravity bodies. then its a matter of drilling, crushing, melting ice, filtering the liquid and feeding that into your propellant tanks. isp wont be great but propellant will be plentiful. ultimately we want a space equivalent of a gas turbine engine, which can run on everything from cooking oil to booze. there are versatile nuclear electric solutions too, mpd can run on straight hydrogen, arcjets can run on ammonia, hydrogen, etc. having a reactor on board means you have the energy to drive endothermic chemical reactions to allow you to reprocess whatever resources you may find into usable propellant. low thrust does limit what you can land on though. you could do a massively thorough kuiper belt survey with just a few isru capable probes.

russians seem to be pretty good with thermionic converters. less efficient than a brayton cycle, better than arrays of thermocouples.

everything i eat is home cooked. im getting good at fried chicken, better than the colonel. do my own sketty and 'balls, meatloaf too. ive been known to bake my own bread. did a lot of chili awhile back when i still had venison in the freezer. fresh fish, where the recipe starts with putting a worm on a hook. ive been known to dart squirrels and fry em up too, good eats then tree rats. chicken fried steak recently became a standard. i make my own tortillas, corn and flour, since i love mexican food. i can also do some asian stuff too, stir frys and fried rice. i make great corn fritters and onion rings. then anything that can be cooked on a grill. id say steak, but i normally just walk it through the kitchen.

engineering: where the thing you are working on doesn't blow itself up. i dabble in ee here and there but nothing at a professional level. too old and too in debt to go back to school and do it for real.

a naval reactor and a space reactor are two completely different beasts. a ship has a ready supply of coolant at its disposal. a space craft can only get rid of heat through radiation. the reactors that have been flown were only a few hundred kw. can we do better? i think so. but im curious how much better.

THIS IS OUTRAGEOUS! WE SHOULD LAUNCH OUR OWN NUCLEAR DEVICES INTO ORBIT AND SHOW THE WORLD THAT AMERICA WORKS! im all for another cold war.

butane kinda works because the fuel comes pressurized so you dont have to deal with much more than opening the valve. though the metal can doesn't help you in the weight department. you might be able to use liquid fuel with a atomizer nozzle. low pressure behind the nozzle might be enough to draw out the liquid on its own with the venturi effect. provide a bit of turbulent air to improve fuel mixing. you could eliminate the valve control at the expense of bleeding fuel at takeoff. you might also have a servo pinch the line closed (which would give you a small degree of throttle control on the burner). preheating the fuel no matter what it is will definately aid in combustion. what i would do is have a 2 stage heater, stage one would just be a low value resistor (quarter watt carbon outta do fine) wrapped with metal tubing and apply heat shrink, then do a second stage using heat recovered from the nozzel, power the resistor as part of the startup procedure, then let the engine waste heat take over from there. im also wondering if a tandem edf config would work, have a large edf up front and a smaller one in back, this should increase the pressure in the combustion chamber a little bit more, which combined with preheated fuel, will help your ignition. the whole thing needs to be in a sealed tube so that all the thrust goes out the tailpipe. all you need is some beer cans.

with nuclear comes the possibility of reusable deep space vehicles. it would likely be cheaper and safer to top off a nuclear engine's propellant tanks with a robotic mission than it would be to launch a new one. and with a good 10 or so year reactor life, it could likely pull off a number of round trips before its power output starts to falter. of course this means close to earth operation for in orbit refit. then there might be the possibility of recovering nuclear fuel already orbiting the earth from the handful of soviet and american space reactor test flights. so you might be able to have a space reactor without having to launch any fissile material at all. though that would likely require an ion tug and a nuclear fuel reprocessing module.

its nice to hit compile in visual studio with the task manager open, and watch all 8 graphs at 100%, while you were admiring them you long since failed to notice that its done compiling already. money cant buy that.

having 8 threads instead of 4 means compiling of large code bases takes noticeably time. each cpp file and header gets its own thread. its one of those things easily made parallel. it might hurt gaming performance, but id rather be more productive at programming.

he mentioned that it was only like a 15% increase in thrust. it definitely does need a better nozzle. that would increase the combustion chamber pressure and facilitate better combustion. the fuel preheater is a nice touch. but i think id run it just to start the engine, then wrap the tube around the end of the nozzel, so after ignition engine exaust takes over the job of preheating. tazer for ignition was probibly also overkill, you could have probibly gotten away with an electric bbq igniter and save some weight (id build my own boost converter).

its pretty much a jet engine with an electric compressor.

engines aren't the limit, its power. you can throw out hundreds of square meters of solar panels and still only be able to scrape along with engines that can only put out only a few newtons (if that much). then you got to haul than monstrosity and its support hardware everywhere you go. then you also only get enough juice out of it in the inner solar system where none of the cool stuff is. im sure at some point the panels get more massive than a fission reactor would be at similar power level. its not that we dont know how to build space rated reactors, its just everyone seems to be a negative nancy when it comes to putting reactors on rockets. fusion reactor might work if you can make it work (we cant at this point) and assuming its not a massive reactor design like a tokamak, which is too massive to be useful. for the time being the most we can hope for is an rtg and a battery/capacitor bank. things will get interesting when we can take a 1+ MW power supply with us wherever we go.

if i found that and discovered it was a required part of windows, id switch to linux. unfortunately i dont read polish and dont know what any of that stuff is. there is one way to find out. put the science into computer science. kill it. if your system starts acting weird, turn it back on. if you dont want to live boldly, ask google.

id try to hit the gimbal hydraulics. that would lead to some major control problems. that would likely be hidden behind fairings so you would need prior intel about the rocket design.

some ww2 warbirds could break the sound barrier in a dive, though this usually involved running into the ground since the control surfaces weren't designed for it. science requires evidence, and things that happen during war tend not to be perfect science experiments. evidence is anecdotal at best.

usage case, some gaming, programming, graphic design. its pretty much an everything box. one day im playing ksp, the next day im compiling things, the day after that im designing pcbs. gaming performance isnt critical, im in my 30s after all. i think ive made up my mind to move up to a 4790. both of those processors are on the mobo's qvl (to work with v1 of the bios). im also going to move up my psu to the 450-500 range to compensate. will post my new wish list as soon as it clears. still looking at power supplies too, so few good rated supplies in the 450-500 range. bearing type is critical to life span of a fan, i have an unusable gtx560 because they decided to use a sleeve bearing in the gpu fan. no sleeve bearings. that leave fluid dynamic and ball. ball bearings are durable but loud. so that leaves fluid dynamic. if i have problems with it i can always swap it out with something better. silence is a factor but not a huge one (especially with fans, id rather have something durable than something slightly quieter). current rig sounds like a fuzz buster, i dont want that again. if it comes out better than what im using, then yay. also large fans tend to spin slower while producing considerable cfm and less bearing noise, so moving up to a 140mm will help a lot. aftermarket cpu cooler might be a later upgrade. given the tight confines of the case, im not quite sure what will fit. some of those after market coolers are big honking things. this aint my first rodeo. i used to do this for a living you know. an update http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=26407986

im thinking about it. might need a few extra watts from the psu to compensate though. if i can move up to a 450w without too much extra cost it might be worth it. that cpu is only about $5 more. that pushes my peek power up to 290w. so a 450w should allow for some capacitor aging and still be able to deliver the required power. i know from building smps devices that you dont want to load a power supply over about 65-75% of its rated capacity.