Nuke

i think windows upgrade can only step up to the next version. it would be nice if you could instal vista and upgrade to 8, but i dont think that would be possible. i usually avoid upgrade editions like the plague, just because of quandaries like this.

if used for interplanetary stuff, you are going to fly in one of two modes, frequent continuous low thrust (ion/plasma), or periodic high thrust (chemical/nuclear) or somewhere in the middle. if your acceleration is a tiny fraction, like a tenth or less of your simulated gravity, then you can probibly just ignore it. if its around 1:1 you might as well just spin down and stand on the aft wall, but this will be infrequent application of thrust. the middle ground gets trickey. you could have pivoting floor panels or compartments rotating on a tangential axis, or just have the crew strap in for the maneuver if the duration is short enough. mechanical issues are solvable, though spinning the ship is an option, i actually design ships like that in ksp. and its probibly possible to orient the ship however you like despite the spinning with computerized control systems (ksp plugin makers take heed ). advances in magnetic technology might make magnetic bearings possible on a large space craft in the near future. you can also design your way out of the problems of maintaining rotating seals, by simply eliminating them. take a ridged toroid hull suspended on fixed rails of a hub using magnetic bearing wheels. this hull would have its own airlocks, next to the ring would be a smaller car on rails. if you needed to move from the spining toroid to a fixed zero g hull, you spin the car up to the speed of the toroid, align and connect with one of the airlocks robotically. you could then move into the car. it would undock, spin down, and dock with a fixed airlock on the zero g hull, which you could then enter. there would actually be 2 cars at opposite ends for balence, and their smaller mass makes them easy to balence out with a torque wheel. to balance out the toroid you would need either another toroid (this gives you some redundancy) or a high mass high speed torque wheel. if for some reason you wanted only the toroid to be pressurized, an unpressurized spin down platform would be all you need to go eva. the other idea, which is used on discovery, is put a light centrifuge inside a pressure hull. this makes everything easier to maintain.

ping is a measure of time it takes for a sender of a packet to get an acknowledgement from the recipient. distance is just one factor, there are propagation delays in any device you go through. this is just an aspect of semiconductor design. you usually have to wait for a signal to stabilize to read an output of a logic gate. when the signal transitions from low to high or vise versa you get something called ringing, where the signal is still fluctuating and can be in error if you sample it too quickly. so number of routers your packet needs to go through plays a huge role. then of course the mediums between the routers, fiber, copper, microwave, whatever have their own quirks. we assume signals travel at the speed of light, but this is not actually true. speed of light through fiber or the speed of microwaves through the atmosphere is less than the speed of light in vacuum. different mediums have a different speed of light which is always less than c. its a convoluted mess so saying ping is anything other than a measure of time is a gross oversimplification.

if you got one of those winxp oem stickers on your case you can probibly legally download the image from ms and instal it. upgrade editions kinda suck. i always instal the psu first. plug it in, but keep the mains switch off. at this point the case is grounded to the ground pin of the outlet (and make sure the outlet is wired correctly), and no voltage should be coming out of any of the psu connectors. keep a hand in contact with any unpainted metal on the case whenever you are handling a bare board. these days there are so many heat sinks and spreaders on parts that its hard to touch any of the solder points or contacts on a pcb, and drives have always had little or no exposed pcb. wrist straps are more trouble than they are worth. ive lost more parts because they got tangled in the strap wire and fell on the floor than i ever lost to esd.

i think gcc can compile for arm which actually did exist in the 80s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#History iOS and Android werent around yet though (and i bet they were compiled with gcc). gcc is awesome.

i think id rather depend on a solid ring than a little bit of cable. i think it would also be difficult to do a maneuver without a spin-down.

i think they started me with c. no ++, no # just c. i learned c++ on my own. then a few years ago i discovered lua. those are my most fluent languages. did some vb too but dont remember any of it. i could learn others but i can get by with what i know. c# looks easy enough, but i dont like the idea of running not machine code (same applies to java, which i will not be learning). lua is kind of exempt because its usually used to extend a machine executable, though i do a lot of stand alone stuff just because its an easy language to use.

horrible approach paths to planets/stations/etc. you dont fly directly at the thing you are going to land at, you have to lead it.

if my computer were 2 inches thinner id have room for another cabinet.

see with a treadmill most of the mass just stays put, only thing you have to counter for is the torque of the rotating belt (and that could easily be handled with a carefully designed drive system for the thing that produces appropriate counter torque). doesn't matter whats on the other side of the ship so long as the mass is balanced. your body motion, since you are not actually moving anywhere would cancel itself out (a leg moved forward will come back), you might get a slight vibration, but that can be dampened. things like when you eat, where you work, what restroom you use, how many people you can hang out with at one time, and where you can take your belongings may all need to be accounted for (move a couch, you need to log it). crew discipline will be important. you might need to log equipment into your current section so the computer can account for its mass. of course this can all be done with technology. could be load cells in the floor measuring weight distribution, could be some kind of micro transponder that the ship can track, can be computer vision systems (everything is tracked on a camera network). lots of things you can do to measure imbalances. i think i said id hate to design the control system (this thread is kinda nekro and i dont remember half the stuff i wrote).

i was doing a thing trying to get a bit 32m circular launch pad to fit into a 3 meter tube. i wrote a lua script to figure out where to make the many multitudes of slices into a wide flat cylinder so it can fold into a triangular volume. frankly it was more math than modeling, mostly just an algorithm test. this model was actually based on a version that still had some bugs, but it worked out and since it was a pita to slap together i dont want to start over. i plan on also modeling a set of landing trusses that will deploy as part of the animation. this will allow you to build up a more substantial number of parts on the base without worrying about them hitting the ground and making the structure unstable. will also have a detachable center column to make it easier to attach a descent stage that you can jettison upon landing, though in this case there is about a 1.7 meter void in there so i may just have a docking port in the base that links up to a 1m dock. you can run a series of tanks through the middle. figure i can cheat on the collider and just use a cylinder collider that will expand to match the landing disc diameter as part of the animation. this means less clipping with whatever gets spawned up top. the other option is to just make all the panels colliders (they are all convex anyway), but i have a feeling that will wreak havoc with collision detection.

as long as ive been building my own computers i have maybe bought 3 cases. each case saw at minimum 2 sets of parts. my oldest case (that i bought, i had earlier ones but they were either proprietary or ones i got for free) is running an i5, it originally used to house an old athalon 64 (one of the earlier models), it was one of those microatx cubes. kind of a hard config to build (you have to be carful about part dimensions), but they have great cooling properties and are small. my second case was a behemoth (one of those xclio monstrosities that looks like it has a jet engine out the front), for a performance build on a core 2 duo, it got upgraded to a core 2 quad and has seen the most mobos out of any case of mine (i went through like 4 of them), not doing that again. the case is a monstrosity, my parts fill up a fraction of the case, but i suppose it would make a good fridge (if the door was easy to close, its not). its been used and abused and thrown. its been dremeled, hacksawed, glued, rewired and unwired. i hate the thing. id toss it if it didnt contain a reasonable backup machine. my current case is just a nondescript all black steel mini tower, it was very cheap. it had some annoying quirks, like the hard drive brackets, but it does its job. one thing i noticed over the years is how much empty space is in a modern pc case. i mean back when i started building my own machines, you had at least 4 add on cards and a couple drives, and most people had 2 cd (and eventually dvd) drives all strung together with ribbon cables. so its space you used. but over the years motherboards have been soaking up the cards, and optical drives are becoming less useful (death to 5-1/4 inch bays!). i think i only have a video card and a tiny pcie1x wifi card, i have a tiny ssd and an older hd for backup (which i can easily make external), i have a dvd drive but i never use it, and even my flash card reader falls to disuse. so my next rig will be a mini itx build. as much performance as i can cram into it though, just less cruft.

worst thing that can happen is you die. no actually thats probibly not the worst. there is that thing where the anesthesiologist gives you the paralytic but not the pain killer, so you can feel every slice and dice. that would suck. also flesh eating bacteria. look on the bright side, if the latter 2 happen to you, you can always file a malpractice suit. another thing you can sue them on.

i think the centrifuge is capable of .3g (really its more of a vomitorium, the only part of the design that wouldn't work, aside from hal of course) and about 1/20 g acceleration from the engines, so it should be tolerable (if by tolerable you mean constant nausea).

or perhaps cats

aerodynamics is complicated. its not really something that can be fixed with a few simple hacks.

i want to say its a direct (vector) sum. averaging doesn't work because that would only give you the drag of a single part where you want the total drag for the whole system. though they may be able to toy with coefficients such as giving any parts behind a nosecone a cd reduction. it would be effective if its set up so you could never get to a cd of zero. you might do a hard cutoff at %50 of the original cd, so if a cd of 0.4 and -0.5 of cd bonuses it would cut you off at a cd of 0.2. though it might be better to smooth it out on a curve. though thats fudging it, i have a few ideas about drag models but its too late to get into them.

this sounds less like a flight model improvement and more like a dirty hack to me.

looks like i plucked the wrong number from wikipedia, my bad.

i can see p-b11 only being used in terrestrial applications. in space you got to use whatever you can find. aneutronic fusion reactors would be preferable in space, since they reduce maintenance requirements and will likely have a longer operational life. it might also be easier to boost boron to orbit at this point. or we could fall back on he3-he3 reactors, not because of the qualities of the reaction but because we can refuel at the moon. he3 is still pretty rare, so it might just be an initial supply until we can find better fuel sources. p-Li7 might also be an option, lower cross section but larger output than p-b11.

i wouldnt mind having a pre-launch action group. anything in the group will triggered once, when the ship is spawned on the launch pad. or tweakables.

4x just doesnt cut it for me. id rather build a massive nerva ship than a ion ship (with a fraction of the mass) just so the maneuvers dont take 2 hours. its the structural simulation that really ruins things. perhaps if your craft meets certain requirements, low mass and low thrust for example, those can be just switched off. it would be very difficult to cause a structural failure with the thrust output of an ion engine (even if you were trying to). you essentially have a warp mode that welds the ship together while its running (but you are only allowed to use it in certain situations).

technically yes (you have to be a videophile to notice, i certainly cant), but practically no. especially considering the fact that you can go up to the next power of two and still come out with a smaller texture. its actually an amazing format, all colors are encoded as 5'6'5, but thanks to floating point interpolation and range reduction capabilities of the format, it can achieve output colors at greater depth than an 8'8'8 uncompressed texture.

biggest problem with ion engines is power. you would need to handle scenarios when solar panels get blocked by an object causing your engine to spew you propellant uselessly into space. depending on the angles your solar panels can turn based on the orientation needed for the maneuver and the position of the sun, it may not be possible to get 100% performance out of you engines at all times. so throttling and power management and roll control (to better expose your panels to the sun) would have to be done automatically. i dont think doing it in the background would work because of all the extra factors involved.

i kinda think the p-b11 reaction will be the pinnacle of fusion reactor design, the fuel is abundant on earth and produces no neutrons. but we will be using neutron spewing reactors for decades before we get there. also have to agree with satellite refueling services. though i have a feeling the propellant wont be lh2/lox (especially lox which likes to boil off over time, less your tanks rupture). satellites usually use hydrazine for station keeping, and ion station keeping thrusters are replacing those rather rapidly. there are also exotic means, like feep, which are perfered on space telescopes for their control resolution, and those run on liquid metals. you will probibly need a wide variety of fuels/propellants to bring to market. and eventually radioactive materials will be desirable to refuel fission powered ships.