Nuke

i think a direct conversion scheme for polywells exists, but you wont see it on first generation devices.

i think the reason for the smaller scale device was to come up with operational procedures prior to integrating all the subsystems into the full scale device. of course this is all sourceless scuttlebutt.

the indignation of airport security will ruin any flight no matter how luxurious. i mean if they gave me unlimited booze for free, unlimited snacks, they let me pick the in flight movie, the pilot let me fly the plane for abit, and i got to spend time in the lavatory with the female flight attendant of my choice. i think my experience would still be ruined by airport security.

unify all the things!

this would make managing multiple drop tanks alot less troublesome. also can we have action group defined fuel transfer?

orbits get funky towards the galactic center. though its not the kind of place you would want to call home.

you get a black hole inside a star, bye bye star.

theres no rule that says you cant do it manually though, mom and pop stores for example. of course that requires extra work. at the end of the year if the ins dont match the outs, you get audited.

five: STUFF

i walk everywhere i go. of course there aren't many places to go.

are either of these things capable of existing in our universe?

the problem is we spend 3.2 million dollars on a study to tell us the obvious. how does a study cost 3.2 million freaking dollars? murica needs to stop spending money on buffalo chips.

the thing i dont like is when a store shuts down because its computers are down. they wont even take cash like the cashiers dont know how to count money or do basic addition. my grandma's theory is that young people today are stupid. the real problem is that the stores buy this complete inventory control system that nobody a store can afford to hire knows how to fix. its almost always some kind of proprietary system on lease from a company that has its own repair men. the store employees are not allowed, by contract, to fix the system themselves, even if someone knew how. in any case the arrangement will be so inconvenient it will take hours to fix. the cashiers are only trained how to operate the register, not do all the inventory control tasks that the computer system handles automatically in the background, the store would have to hire additional employees to handle that in absence of the computer (which isnt practical). i worked in a pawn shop for about 6 months back in 2003. this was way beneath me, i just needed somewhere to work while i was failing to get a job in the it sector with my recently completed degree. of course one day the computer crashed, and nobody could do any work. it was this old dos software that was no longer supported by its developer, but it worked most of the time and they were too cheap to upgrade it. it took me all but 3 keystrokes to fix the error, recover the lost data and re-init the software. my boss gave be $200 cash on the spot. i dont think computers are making people stupid, i think that they are just removing the requirement for humans to be brilliant. but its ok, even in a world full of idiots you will find a wizzard or two.

i think that once we get the cost of launch down to sufficiently cheap levels, there will be money in operating orbital junk yards. especially out at geo and other high traffic areas. on site repair of satellites might be a thing.

hydrofoils might be possible, your hull and foils would have to be pretty damn robust structurally. they also have their speed limits due to hydrodynamic drag. i think ive seen some hover ferries, which would probibly give you the best speed. hovercraft have less interaction with the water and so are not limited by drag in the same way. even a basic catamaran can be pretty damn fast, we have a couple of them in our ferry system, and they haul ass.

i suppose so. problem is the ocean is so teaming with life i dont suppose such measures would be neccisary. unless of course there were a bunch of hairless apes on the surface stealing all the fish.

lots of people speculate on the intelligence of whales and dolphins. if these species had the intelligence of man, you would never know it. they would be unlikely to develop some of the technologies we would be able to make. lets see them develop electronics in their electrically conductive atmosphere. being predatory, they would never get around to developing agriculture. my brain struggles to imagine what kind of civilization such creatures could build if they had human intelligence.

sounds like the colombia. i was on that ship once when my mom dragged us to alaska back in '88. i dont remember it much because i was 6 or 7 back then. 10 days sounds about right. me personally i dont want to run out of gas north of the arctic circle. nuclear reactors are better than freezing to death. we might actually see an increase in sea travel when we get fusion reactors working, you are pretty much floating on your fuel supply, so it should make shipping many times cheaper.

airlines to day just run really fast buses. back in the 60s and 70s they may have glamorized flying. they would feed you and give you all kinds of free stuff. the first time i flew (in the early 90s) i got a pair of wings, a deck of cards, food that didnt suck, and a bottomless glass of coke, and there was a movie. but these days after you and your stuff are finished being violated at the security line, they herd you into that aluminum can, pack you in like sardines and send you on an all day roundabout route to your destination, and if you want any snacks you have to buy them from the overpriced vendors in the concourse. i used to love to fly, but they have completely ruined it. its more fun to take a bus or a train. but boats take the cake in the fun department. with modern ship designs it need not take forever either.

sometimes, i am not even convinced that there is intelligence on this planet. this is one of those times.

makes me wonder if the problems with betavoltaics can be solved. the problem comes from the fact that beta particles that are too energetic can destroy the semiconductor material that is needed for the device to operate, which limits them to very low power applications. i found this article: https://rt.grc.nasa.gov/power-in-space-propulsion/photovoltaics-power-technologies/technology-thrusts/alpha-and-beta-voltaics/ they kinda improve the device by using a photovoltaic configuration with a phosphorous layer. instead of applying the alpha/beta particles directly to the semiconductor, they add a layer of phosphorous which converts the radiation to light, the light then is used to generate power with a rad hard photovoltaic device. these will be able to get up to about 5 milliwatts, which is a huge improvement over previous devices.

round here in southeast alaska you take the ferry everywhere, its like a third of the cost of flying. depending on what boat you get, it can be fast. i can get to juneau in 4 hours by one of the faster boats. which considering the way airports work can be faster than flying. of course one time i spent like 30 hours on the same trip, because i caught a slow boat on a roundabout voyage. needless to say i spend most of it at the ship's bar. if you run into some gamers you can also get a lan party going. boats can be fun.

use tubes. most of them need to be heated to work anyway.

the point of an e-paper display is that it only costs power to flip a pixel. it doesn't cost any power to maintain an image, unlike most other displays. it also isnt going to be a very big display, a few lines of characters at most. its also going to have a really slow refresh. the whole device is spending most of its time sleeping, while its sleeping any unused power is used to build up charge in capacitors. when it needs to wake up, it uses the stored charge and goes back to sleep before they run low. you push a button, and the thing might wake up for a millisecond to register the action and go back to sleep. the greatest power hog will be the radio. transmissions will need to start and end without completely discharging the buffer caps. somehow you will also need to detect incoming transmission and wake up the device to receive them, this will require some standby power. a 1 micro-watt power supply (there are betavoltaic devices that can do that) could run this thing, but it wont be a very fun gadget to use. but humans seem to be easily obsessed about gadgets with horrible interfaces. now with advancements in both low power electronics and improved betavoltaics, who knows how far you can take it in the future.

you obviously aren't going to get top notch performance out of a smart phone running on a pseudo-eternal battery, especially when they keep trying to get higher cpu performance into them. that does not exclude the possibility of such devices if you can accept reduced performance. if you can handle that, and can wait for the process size to come down a little bit more, you can get the power requirements down as well. this year a phone's cpu might use 10 watts, few years from now maybe 1 watt and so on until we hit the process wall (where making the process smaller is physically impossible). miniscule process size plus low power architecture and you might have a chip you can run on a betavoltaic device or a micro-engine. thats just the cpu though. transmit and receive still cost some power. running a screen costs power. so a smart phone as we know it wont work on such a power supply. i kinda envision a device that would use an e-paper display and would allow you to send and receive text messages using low bandwidth burst transmissions. it would be of such minimal impact to cell networks that service would be free. the devices themselves would be dirt cheap and globally available. oh, and you never have to pack a charger.