Nuke

the cool thing about developing a high performance heat exchanger is it has applications all over the place. a very wise place to start. space-x definitely wouldn't mind getting ahold of their water rejection system that keeps the thing from turning into a block of ice.

i think the general misconception is that focusing on one thing detracts from the other thing. you never know what kind of spinoffs you can get out of any line of research and some of those might be useful in other lines of research. you put x amount of resources into one thing and you get a new technology out of it. you put 2x into one thing and you get that tech a little faster, likely with diminishing returns. however if you put 2x resources into two somewhat related things, you might get both things faster but also a third thing. its multiplicative rather than additive.

the point was it was so screwed up they had to consult the doctor as to who to fix it. also timelines were pretty screwy by the time 90s trek came to its closure.

today, was hell. mom decides out of the blue that she wants to go out to eat for the first time in 3 years. so we pick a restaurant but they dont open till 4, but mom wants to eat now. so we go to a different restaurant. kind of an outdoor arrangement that's open in summer time. now when we were getting ready the sky is blue the weather is hot. but by the time we get there we got the kind of random torrential down poor that sometimes happen when you live in a rain forest. it was short and didn't last much longer than the meal. fortunately they have a nice leaky tent to sit under. mom is complaining the whole time. her buggy which was donated by an elderly man getting an upgrade is none too easy to control and her burger is too huge and a myriad of other complaints. its wet. she cant move. 3 times she almost ran over a dog (and not the same one). to make matters worse the other guests were very rude with the kind of language that is more suited to a brothel than a family establishment. meanwhile mom is complaining that her burger is under cooked. i'm not even sure the patties they used were 100% beef (i make a superior burger to any restaurant in this town). i rush through my dinner because im not far from having a panic attack and i want to get out of there. so as we are wheeling out, she decides she wants cake. so we go down to the grocery store and after spending a good 10 minutes just squeezing through the door. we spend another 10 minutes shopping ending up with cake and peanut butter cups. she complains some more. on the way home we pass by the dispensary and she keeps encouraging my bad habits, id already stopped by twice this month. stopping every six feet to reiterate the inquiry. finally we get far enough away where she stops asking, we finally get home, and what does she do, she invites the neighbor over for coffee on the deck. so now i got to play musical chairs, and dry them off. almost immediately the downpour starts again. just getting mom back in the house took more effort than id like all while im standing in the rain. she finally took a nap. i deserve a paycheck and a sainthood.

low thrust is fine if your travel time is like 18 months anyway.

arent you hurting your isp if you hold on to exhaust products from the turbopump. i guess its useful for margarita night on the iss. thats like a third of a skylon precooler.

they want you to train their ai for them. i feel like i should get paid for that kind of thing. this is why i shy away from game engines. sure it saves you 99% of the effort to lay down the low level stuff, but then you dont understand the low level stuff. its amazing what you can do with a very small number of libraries. gcc, gimp, and blender. though my most developed project is written almost entirely in lua.

i remember i did doctor who, all of it, and it took six months easy. even the ones where most of the footage was missing (in some cases it was just the audio). had i known how they were going to mangle the series later on, i probably would have not done it.

fusion propulsion might actually come before fusion power, as break even is not needed. especially if were just doing mars/moon for the most part and can use solar with next gen cells (multi junction or even quantum dot). further out and you need some kind of power plant, this can be fission. waiting for the next new thing you can easily miss opportunities to do stuff now. like if i applied that to my computer id never upgrade and id still be playing '90s games. there is no reason not to pursue intermediate technologies.

i think fusion is coming but the process of getting there is expensive and begrudgingly slow. most of the delay is just putting the ginormous puzzle together. even just building up the highway infrastructure to make it possible to ship the coils was pretty impressive, not to mention a huge delay and extra cost. the always 20 years away seems like the amount of time it takes to build a massive tokamak. from first funds to first plasma. then we have to do it again for demo, unless they can perhaps do a retrofit of the existing reactor. focusing mostly on iter because i dont think the startups are going to pull this off. most of the updates are in the form of "fusion can save the world but first we need money". iter has at least solved the funding problem.

as someone with a questionable past and uncertain future, i like to live in the present. sometimes im alarmed when my predictions are true, until i think of all the other predictions that were not. then i realize they are in proper proportion and that i focus on now and forget about later.

im in one of those weird moods today where i want to do something, but dont know what. games, projects, feeding the gnats, ive started six different things and didnt get beyond looking at it and saying meh. i even took a walk around the block before coming to the conclusion that it was too much excitement for me.

i beat world six of smb3 on the steam deck, while sitting on my actual deck. world seven tomorrow if it dont rain.

news is like "its freaking hot". looks at calendar its summer. yep that checks out. sometimes its easier to get an idea of what the weather is doing if you look at the sky rather than the tv. my sister used to have this weather forcasting system at her place in the bush, it was in the form of a peice of rope with googley eyes and a little hat. it had a little sign that read: weather forcasting worm if im moving its windy if im wet its rainy if im dry its sunny if im stiff its really cold if im missing, ive been stolen photo ommited because i dont trust cloud services i trust that worm more than any hot and well dressed weather girl.

i guess their collection system is a guy in a suit.

i think they inherited a lot of stuff from the military wrt connectors. these are highly standardized and domestically produced by a number of contractors to ensure constant supply. at least thats the way it was. we might be using a completely different set of connectors now. i cant imagine the old connectors having very good characteristics for high speed digital information. not sure if civilian (including spacex) craft use the same connectors or not. seems it would make sense, its just a connector and if you got the bread you can just buy one (milspec so probably expensive).

had we discovered fission at peace time i think things would have been a lot different. even the manhattan project was more about execution (manufacturing weapons grade nuclear material) rather than figuring out how. they knew that part going into the war. having not developed enrichment before viable powerplants would have changed things a lot. people would be building reactors left and right and since nobody would have made a weapon out of it, they wouldnt have seen it as destructive. the technology would have propagated like wildfire all over the world. eventually someone with an eye towards world domination would figure out how to weaponize it. perhaps many nations developing the enrichment steps in parallel, and not sharing it knowing where it can lead. when questioned they could pass it off as a way to make a better reactor (eg a breeder). those nations would start secretly manufacturing stockpiles. with no concept of deterrence they keep them in secret in case of invasion. they are expensive and untested so there is some restraint in their use. the little spin off wars resulting from the end of wwii, eg korea/vietnam, start conventional enough, but when the heat is on the nukes come out (they are of the pure fission variety). also no nuclear deterrence stunts the development of rocketry. shooting for the moon may tip your hand, so its mostly strategic bombers that are used. so nuclear war is not as instideath as it is in a post icbm era and small scale nuclear wars become somewhat viable. us influence in the world is going to be less as well, a more costly battle with japan, resources are consumed, quality of life goes down and war becomes very unpopular. so we may revert to pre-war isolationism. korea/vietnam may not be americas problem, but probably someone else's. its still likely to be the tinderbox that lights cities aflame. environmentalism is stunted because its hard to notice the earth going south when its ravaged by war, some of which are nuclear. of course thats not a problem because everyone is on nuclear power, and electric cars become a thing in the '70s in response to opec. assuming there is an opec, or a '70s. us isolationism should help that happen while the eastern hemisphere burns. i think i prefer our current situation as its showing the power of nuclear war in a much more controlled way, and establishing the deterrence doctrines early. the profound effect this has had on war is probably a good thing. i figure the fear mongering will go away as climate change worsens. the delay to get people to flip on the issue of nuclear power is still going to be significant but not viable fusion significant. we really need the stopgap.

i renumber burt rutan's tech talk about how fast we went from shoddy gliders to landing on moon, and that the past few decades have done nothing nearly as impressive as that burst in development. with spacex and others pushing the envelope again, this slump seems like its to come to an end. these kind of development cycles seem to happen in bursts. we just get to the point where we dont feel like barking up the same tree even though there might be juicer fruit on the higher branches. nuclear is in a similar situation and because of a couple bombs and 3 accidents at powerplants were afraid a coconut will land on our head and we leave that tree alone. based entirely off the half a paragraph i managed to read before my eyes wigged out. also i do kind of like the idea of winged boosters. its kind of the role skylon should be designed for rather than ssto. it doesnt even need to go to orbit or even build up enough speed where reentry becomes a hot mess. it just needs to loft stage two high enough so it has time to complete a circularization burn. of course the end result to that is an overcomplicated falcon that can take off from any airport. what we need to do is figure out how to make that kick stage recoverable. but it has to deal with the same issues that starship does. so again it feels like a hard way to reinvent the wheel. still the landing part of reusable second stages is going to be a huge problem both here and on other bodies (heat shield is still an issue but it looks like we have made some headway at least, eg move the flap roots leeward as planned, even make them retractable, eg on linear bearings). think we really need to start looking at lateral engine mounting, except now the turbopumps have to be able to move propellant half way up the ship under thrust gravity. as a second stage this can be reduced depending on whatever loft time your first stage (winged or otherwise) gave you. also fine for lifting off of moon/mars and keeps the regolith out of the engines. but then your structural loads from thrust need to be handled and more mass required (possibly also from a slightly bigger turbopump) again less of a problem at low gravity (real or otherwise) but you must also support the weight of the engine. and losing one of the two pods would be bad. multiple engines per pod would be better but then you need to isolate them better so you dont get a cascade failure in the pod. complex geometry like this also makes re-entry problematic (see starship's liquid metal flaps). heat shields like to be simple.

star trek's timelines are too screwy. everyone wonders what the antique police box is doing in section 31.

thats not the fatman tail though, i think the original had box fins.

seems we got nuke tech right on time, and being humans and having the perfect solution to all our energy problems we decided to ignore it, fear monger against it, and use wind turbines and solar panels instead.

the cat is the real hero of that story. even the alien didn't want to mess with it.

you haven't lived until you've been climbed by a whole litter of kittens at feeding time. it hurts but its worth it.

its not something that could evolve naturally. perhaps a hive mind or an ai or some other construct designed specifically for that purpose.

i still have my lego but i cant exactly crawl on the floor and dig for parts like i did when i was 12.