Nuke

i partitioned my 500gb 2 ways. 150gb went to the os, the rest was used for data. usage on the c drive seldom goes above 2/3. the idea is i dont put anything on c: that you will miss if it got deleted. things that need to be on the c drive, but i dont want to loose, are symlinked over to the d drive where they actually reside (i have batch scripts to set these up). this way if the os goes kaput, a format of c: results in no loss of data. i just re-install and run my batch script.

getting away from the wntsl one thing thats not on it: make an asteroid observatory part. this part will allow you to discover and track asteroids in a large radius around the ship on which its mounted, much like the tracking station, just less stationary. this gives you a mechanism to detect more distant objects further away from kerbin. then just add more asteroid spawning belts to the kerbol system. you just have to do multiple instances of an already existing system. you of course have to take the detector out to where a belt intersects its radius to find anything. this should add an exploration aspect to the game, you have the means to find things, but no idea where to look. you could throw in all kinds of weird belts with eccentric orbits, or high inclination to make things interesting. the same system could be used to spawn (sparse) planetary ring systems.

go with wired networks if you can. faster, less can go wrong, more secure. but only go that way if its practical. running a wired network in my house would be a disaster. too many floors, too many machines.

problem is in many areas there is only one option. so you are pretty much at the mercy of the local isp. id even take a lower data rate if it meant unlimited usage. of course around here the low speed accounts have even more brutal limits. higher caps are marketed as a premium service. its literally set up so that there is no way whatsoever not to get screwed, you have to pay a fortune and watch your data usage like a hawk. some places have unlimited connections, but i hear these are actually on the decline.

i think i would prefer to just solder flash memory packages right to the board. really what good is a socketed part on a space craft that will never be serviced by human hands. eliminate the weight of the socket entirely, and a point of failure as well. its ok for prototyping of course.

those are things i feel have no place in a desktop machine. maybe in a professional workstation or server perhaps. but most of what im gonna be doing on it is playing games, making graphics, programming, and circuit design. none of that requires any fancy hardware. sli costs more than its worth, and i back files up to an external drive, so i dont need raid. i also prefer not to overclock outside of spec (aside from factory overclocked ram and features like turbo boost). i also find that air circulation is better in a small case, as opposed to a sparsely populated large case. all im putting in there is the mobo/cpu/ram, a modest video card, and an ssd. i have an old cube case build and it has the best airflow of any of my rigs, and only uses one large quiet case fan. so i am comfortable with the tight assembly. one thing when building something like this is that you have to be really careful with part selection, just to make sure everything fits. ive always been somewhat disapointed with the trend of ever increasing case sizes while at the same time diminishing part count and dimensions. i have cases that are just a big empty box with very little hardware, and fans cooling empty space. you get a big, loud, impractical build. im trying to avoid that if at all possible.

some things: first off, you are going to need very big rotors, very high performance motors, or both in the thin atmosphere. second, you cant use off the shelf components if you want any kind of endurance. everything has to be rad hard.

my old isp just piled up charges on my bill without offering any way out. my newer isp emails me when i get to 80% of my allotment, but wont block me if i go over. i suppose cutting your access and asking you what to do is better than a large surprise fee at the end of the month. you could probibly turn it back on with a large price per gb, but id advise against it.

this is your isp telling you that you download too much stuff. i feel sorry for you when you get your bill. one time my sister came over and visited and watched netflix on her laptop the whole time. we got a $200 internet bill, she got banned from my router.

micro atx is compatible with full atx. you might run into trouble trying to get a full atx mobo in a micro atx case, but the opposite works fine. i usually do micro atx but my next build is going to be mini-itx. i dont like monster cases full of stuff i will never use. it just seems wasteful. i found this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811163231 it can accommodate a full size double wide video card (and not much else). im not sure what kind of guts will go into it, i will look into that when i get some money this fall.

tdp is on the decline if you go the intel route. thats an 84w cpu and a 170w gpu. i usually figure out what the core components will use, and double it (there are also power supply requirements calculators all over the internet if you want to figure it out in more detail). a high quality 550w supply would work great here. you could probibly make do with less, but ensure that your supply is of high quality. its still correct that more is better than less, but 900 is overkill.

i tend to lean that way myself. alcubierre drive has too many question marks right now to even consider what to do should it be possible to construct one (save it for the realm of science fiction). im more interested in the more physically plausible modes of interstellar travel and communications.

ftl might very well turn out to be impossible. when you look at the alternatives, you really dont have much choice. if you send a generation ship (or a sleeper ship, or a relativistic ship, whatever) to set up a colony somewhere, it would be useful to maintain lines of communication with those colonies. it wouldn't really be communication as we understand it. it would be more like transmitting everything you could possibly send (for example news, the entire contents of wikipedia, scientific papers, music, movies, software, etc), as fast as you can send it, and let the other side sort through it all. there wouldn't be much in terms of dialog. i figure before we have working ftl drives (in the event they do work) we will have sent relativistic probes all over the place doing flybys of nearby star systems, and laser communication is probibly the only way to relay the data back to earth. then when we have ftl, flying hard drives.

i kinda disagree here. since the engine has good characteristics in all parts of the atmosphere, that it is rather wasteful to stack it at all. its usually the first engine lit and the last to be shut off in all my designs. they make a good core engine cluster in asparagus launchers, and this would be greatly improved with thrust vectoring. i would only give it marginal thrust vectoring capability though (give it the worst gimbal range of all gimballed engines in the game though), and give it slightly better twr.

this thread reminds me of this: https://what-if.xkcd.com/4/

if you have enough foam to make a planet, it wont maintain its foaminess for long. it will collapse into a liquid or solid (depending on the composition of the foam, you can make foam out of everything from soapy water to aluminum) near the core. you might have a sea of foam near the surface though.

you could probibly reinforce a soda bottle with epoxy and fiberglass/carbon fiber. the bottles are thickest towards the base and also around the opening, but paper thin around the cylindrical part. wrap from under the ridge beneath the cap to the tail end should be sufficient to contain pressure. i think the typical way you lay out fiber composites is to lay down a layer of epoxy and then lay down a fiber mat (for a bottle you might want to wrap the bottle, overlapping once, and alternate your seams). repeat while rotating each additional layer 30 degrees from the previous one. give it a final macro coat of epoxy. you then vacuum seal the finished part in a plastic bag and you can use heating pads to accelerate the curing time.

what if an antimatter star collapses into an anti black hole, then you collide a regular black hole with it?

like those diode pumped solid state lasers, i figure you could switch such a laser fast enough to be useful in communication. i think another part of it is picking a laser with a wavelength in one of the host star's dark bands to make pickup and filtering a lot easier.

as soon as one blows up they are going to be declared unsafe. nasa will use them for a few more years, and then can the whole line. a few years after that the government is going to want a new ship. they are going to spend billions to re-develop 1960s technology. the project will get canned right as the last screw is being turned, and a cheaper even more sloppy project will take its place. meanwhile in russia, they will be launching a mars ship.

id go with a small lipo battery over a cap bank due to size constraints (if you want lots of capacitance, you are going to need a large bank). some of them brushless motors eat power like it was nothing.

you need solenoid valves to regulate oxidizer flow to each of your engines. cycling the valve open and closed will regulate the oxidizer flow to your combustion chamber which turns the engine on and off (you need an ignition source too). you do this at a fixed frequency but you vary the duty cycle (this is called pulse width modulation). the duty cycle is the ratio between on time and off time, this is what you change to control your throttle. but remember you are controlling a valve, and this will limit your frequency to the maximum cycle time for the valve, i figure tens to hundreds of hz. ignition is a problem. you could use like a glow plug or something like that, but you need an initial ignition source. you could also use a boost regulator to make a spark gap, running continuously during operation (good luck keeping your electrodes from vaporizing). i think the hardest part would be machining the nozzel. of course thats because i dont have much shop experience. an ardupilot board should work for the control side, though you are going to need to tweak the firmware to handle your engine control. they normally work with hobby servos and escs, but you are going to need different timing than your typical hobby servo to make it work. you are also going to need driver transistors because your mcu wont be able to push enough current for the valves, and you are going to need flyback diodes across your solenoid terminals, because inductive loads play havoc on semiconductor devices. if you ask me it sounds like a lot of work and money for a high school egg drop.

just compile planet factory to 64 bit when the time comes. i will be happy with that. if they can solve the problem with kerbol needing to be the center of the universe that would be great.

engines aren't your problem. control logic, thats your problem. you need to control your descent and then at the last moment, kill your momentum and soft land your egg, then take off and go land/crash somewhere. you can always use pulsed operation hybrid rockets. changing your duty cycle gives you control (pitch and roll, id just damp out any yaw with big fins). then you need to run an inertial measurement unit and some kalman filtering to give you a good enough reference to keep your ship level. you can use an ir or ultrasonic range finder to give you a good landing solution. an arduino would probibly give you sufficient computational power.

thats easy. pull of your f9 key, and throw it out the window.