Nuke

in addition to keeping the rtc ticking, batteries on older mobos were used to preserve bios settings on a ram chip. these were later replaced with flash and this has made the batteries last much longer. the rtc was also later moved off of its own chip and onto the south bridge. the smaller process had also cut power consumption. frankly im surprised we still use batteries, a supercap could do the same job and could be recharged while the computer is on. i guess its a matter of if it aint broke dont fix it.

i have never owned a computer where the rtc battery had died. i have a 11 year old computer and its cell still works.

wheres a tibetan monk when you need one?

way i see it, no demo, no sale.

my train runs on disappointment. i dont care if its bad for the environment, its a cheap and abundant source of fuel.

no matter how advanced we get i have a feeling resources will be finite and thus some form of rationing will be neccisary. the star trek lifestyle seems somewhat dependent on a whole lot of handwavium technology to be a viable economic model. i dont think that we will ever get to a point where we can break the second law of thermodynamics (infinite energy for replicators). i dont think its a good idea to throw away the finer points of capitalism. you dont want everyone to succumb to apathy and kill progress. instead you need a system that rewards hard work, but does not force people into the do or die mentality (and force the wrong people to do the wrong jobs out of personal necessity). work must come with rewards or no one will do it, and i doubt that robots will be able to take over all the jobs. the best way to incentive this is with more money for those who partake in productive activity.

if this includes a source code release then the game could go on for decades. look at what happened to freespace.

there are actually two versions of the freetrack interface. the old one which came with the most recent version of freetrack, and a newer one (freetrackclient 2.0) that the facetracknoir devs rewrote from scratch (in c++ instead of pascal). im pretty sure the 64-bit version is a build of the latter. its probibly a good idea to import the getDllVersion first, check the version, and then based on that either throw an error or do things differently based on which version you are using. im still trying to find the source for the 2.0 client, but i did find this: http://sourceforge.net/p/facetracknoir/wiki/FreeTrack20/ i believe this is the source: http://sourceforge.net/p/facetracknoir/codegit/ci/master/tree/FreeTrackClient/

this thread isnt about practicality. in my opinion the only place for the ultimate space plane is for surface to leo transport. id rather have a flying fuel tank and nerva that i could dock to a mission package and refuel for each new mission so long as the reactor remains viable. the only role space planes have in that scenario is as fuel tankers. i suppose just doing it the old skool way would work. you could use the oms for ullage to get the main engine going again. that still leaves the refueling problem, the way i do that in ksp is to build a massive tanker rocket and dock with it for refueling. the results are worse than apollo. i was thinking doing that with a nerva main engine upgrade and moar boosters to offset lh2 consumption during launch. these would be repositioned for balance of course. external tank would need to be much larger since it will all be lh2, which takes up more volume. you also need more so you dont use it all on launch. you might also have an air augmentation duct attached to the nerva to provide more thrust from burning the hydrogen exhaust with atmospheric oxygen. this would be ejected when it no longer provides any useful thrust. the nerva needs to have a wide vertical gimbal range to deal with the larger external tank. you could also throw out the oms to save weight. but we have already done a major refit to the shuttle at this point. since you are hacking up the cargo bay anyway you might as well throw in a fuselage extension to make room for more tankage. then do a half length cargo bay for the lander. since you already did all that why not throw out the shuttle and build a new ship using all the knowledge we got operating the shuttle and other vehicles.

i dont see money disappearing. it would still need to be used to ration resources. especially when its a system involving a large number of idle individuals. those people need a disincentive to avoid uncontrolled reproduction. so you take the mincome idea, give everyone a no questions asked base income. this income is inversely proportional to the population (more people means less to go around) and so restraint in reproduction results in a better quality of life for everyone. it is also proportional to the gdp, so this provides an incentive to work to improve the quality of life for everyone. since their aren't enough jobs to go around, this promotes strong competition in the job market, so the people filling jobs in theory are going to be the best suited for the available positions. you aren't going to have a bunch of misplaced workers, and you aren't going to have a bunch of workers who dont care about their jobs degrading productivity. you need an aggressive tax curve to pay for all of this. base income is never taxed, only earned income is taxed. you also want to avoid creating a welfare gap, so a job needs to be guaranteed to provide more than base income after taxes. so the tax curve needs to on a fairly shallow slope for the working class. this gives incentive to move from the idle class (those just collecting the base income) to the working class. as incomes move into the middle class tax rates start curving up more aggressively. this might culminate in a steep but linear slope into the upper class incomes. other than that you can maintain mostly free enterprise so long that its not allowed to tweak the laws to suit their needs with lobbying. separation between buisness and state is essential. government also becomes less expensive, since your agencies can focus on their purpose and dispense with as much bureaucracy as possible. for one you dont have nightmare entitlement systems like in the us, you just have basic income. you can kill off social security, welfare, disability, food stamps, etc, because everyone has money to live on by default. you might get rich people complaining about high taxes but when you really think about it, even idle individuals have disposable income, which goes back into the pockets of buisness owners (presumably middle and upper class) anyway. so long as money is moving the economy remains strong, and rich people keeping most of their assets in a vault is bad for the economy. you give the surplus to the poor and its a win win no matter what. you might argue that this subsidizes laziness, but the desire for more will always trump that notion for most individuals.

i rather like pressure fed systems like hydrazine engines. they are vastly simple compered to something like the ssme. you only have a valve to the combustion chamber and likely a second for an inert pressurant. then you have a simple bladder in tank design. you inject pressurant into the tank to compress the bladder, and then open the valve that sends the contents of the bladder to the engine. comes in contact with that platinum catalyst and boom, ignition! starting the engine likely entails flipping a switch or two (though this kind of engine is more likely to be seen in a space probe than a manned vessel).

it would be the most impractical moonship ever. and the only way it would be possible is to swap out the oms engines with arcjets or perhaps vasmir engines, and you need a lot of solar area you can deploy from the cargo bay. im not sure if the propellant would fit in the remaining space. but the ship is designed to accept an external tank (which you would need to launch on another rocket). you might also swap the main engines with a nerva engine, and you might need more boosters to get that to orbit without irradiating the launch complex. you might also cook the crew while crossing the van allen belts, but im sure you can convince the astronauts its "worth the risk". tldr: build a new ship.

my current rig chugs along fine in a $30 case. it doesn't have any fancy (unnecessary) things like liquid cooling or more than one video card. of course there will always be performance geeks out there who will pay 4x as much for a system that is only is 10% faster. next build is going to be a mini-itx case with a bare minumum of hardware and a low tdp cpu.

this will happen mostly in purely capitalist countries like the usa. especially with the anti-entitlement crowd slashing social services. the more socialist countries might be happy to have a mandatory basic needs policy in which everyone is granted enough money to live on. food, shelter, education, and healthcare would all be supplied to everyone. if you simply had a job you would be considered middle class. this kind of thing would be impossible in the usa for cultural reasons. beurocracy would simply be added to give people work to do. back in the 70s they tried a mincome experiment in canada: http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100 it had nothing but positive outcomes. rates of crime and vagrancy was reduced. it also increased productivity because people were finding jobs that actually suited their personality and skill set, rather than being forced to take any job just to get by (most of the jobs ive had have just been ones i could get, not ones i would be good at). so we know this kind of thing can work. but probibly not in the usa.

i have several ideas none of which can be mentioned here.

perhaps entering a binary system where it passes by the first star, is decelerated, and enters orbit of the other.

simply, we become a race of bureaucrats. there is no real work to do, so we invent ways to keep us busy. we have already started doing this. every time a politician claims to have "created jobs" what they really have done is create a new agency to overly complicate a simple problem, so that it absorbs a good chunk of the work force.

you got to start somewhere. my first programming experience threw me into the deep end with c. this was in the mid 90s and up to that point i didnt even own a computer. later when i finally got a computer, it was a 120mhz processor with 8mb of ram, i dont think you could have run a graphic programming language very well. you would be constantly out of memory. its rather nice that you have things like scratch to play with. it takes an otherwise steep learning curve and flattens it out to the point where a child can do it.

i prefer real programming. visual programming is great for learning, but not that useful for creating big projects. lego rcx/nxt was nice for getting the basic concepts of programming robotics down, but i quickly switched to nqc/nxc programming and found it much easier to work with for large projects. i dont think i would want to go backwards and use something like scratch. i do a lot of c/++, much on embedded platforms. my most recent project was a software renderer i wrote in c++ for the raspberry pi, which is loaded with bugs and still not working right, but it is drawing shoddy 3d graphics in a pitft screen. i do a lot of arduino projects too, sometimes on custom boards, and sometimes i even ditch the arduino ide and do everything in winavr. i also do a lot of lua, i have a more complete game engine running in pure lua, and i also use lua to build quick gui apps (usually to talk to an mcu over a com port). but i dont do scratch. one thing that is interesting to note is that textual hardware descriptor languages (such as verilog and vhdl), which are used to design and simulate microarchitectures, replace more traditional circuit/logic diagrams. because when a system gets significantly complex, diagrams become very confusing, very fast. code is just very easy to organize. so for simple little apps scratch might do well. but i wouldn't want to design an os or game engine with it.

i think that survival in the iceball scenario is much more plausible. you dont have to go off planet to survive (though your best bet is probibly to shoot for jupiter and colonize its moons if you did). there are a lot of underground areas which would be perfect for habitation, old mines, cave systems, nuclear waste depositories (the irony). anywhere where you have access to geothermal energy. you might even be able to survive on the surface with nuclear heaters, though i doubt that would be of much use. having the earth snowball would help insulate against loss of core heat, which would prolong the earth's capacity for heat retention. im actually somewhat interested what happens to the rest of the solar system, would everything just kind of scatter out into interstellar space or would jupiter capture some of the bodies. earth looked like it was headed in jupiter's general direction. i doubt earth would get captured because of its greater orbital velocity, but other bodies might. i also wonder how long it would take a rogue earth to pass through another solar system, perhaps humanity can survive that long on core heat alone. at some point you need to abandon ship and go somewhere else. then again, who knows when you live in a universe where starts randomly blink out of existence.

we certainly know how to tunnel that deep into rock. i think the record here on earth is 12km. though that was a vertical bore hole. im not sure how deep a tunnel boring machine could go. one feature is they are capable of adding tunnel reinforcement as they progress. on earth this is usually in the form of prefab concrete sections, that are bolted together and injected with concrete to fill in any gaps between the segments and the wall. i found an old study of tunnel boring machines for use on the moon, where instead of prefab sections, waste heat from the nuclear reactor is used to glassify the material surrounding the tunnel. it has a rather interesting way of disposing of waste heat, which it does by heating up the removed material, and simply trucking the heat away with the rocks. http://www.boomslanger.com/images/lunartbm.pdf it would be a clever idea for creating an emergency habitation on the moon in the event of such a cataclysm. i suppose to survive any secondary debris, it would be neccisary to have many colony sites. you might improve your chances doing a bore on mars as well, which would likely avoid the debris all together. you might have curricular tunnel loops a few km in radius to build train centrifuges to get a 1g environment. you also need a means for creating airlocks in the tunnels, but that should be a fairly simple thing to do. the nuclear reactors from the tbms can be used for powering the colony when the tunnel boring is complete. then to pressurize the whole thing would require processing the oxygen out of the regolith. subsurface ice provides water. a separate nitrogen source would also be needed to bulk up the atmosphere. then hydroponic farming provides the food supply. its not the kind of thing that would happen in the absence of impending doom (politicians wouldn't let you launch massive nuclear tunnel boring machines aboard gargantuan rockets otherwise), but it can be done in a pinch.

i kinda think the best bet for long term lunar habitation would be several meters underground. send nuclear powered tunnel boring machines to etch out a complex tunnel network. enough to give you appropriate levels of radiation shielding. underground centrifuges may also be neccisary for health reasons and successful reproduction. needs more science.

i picked f2 and d1: nuke all the things

alpha/beta voltaic cells are a thing, but they tend to be very low power devices. it might be better just to recover the fuel, but that requires digging up the core, which would likely be a very hazardous and expensive affair. and what you get out of that is essentially high level nuclear waste, you might be able to feed that into a modern reactor and use it as fuel. but its probibly better off staying where it is. there are much safer/cheaper ways to get nuclear fuel.

i dont like droid either.