Nuke

looks like a poor mans skylon. the first stage only gets you to the edge of space and around mach 2 (so it doesn't do a hot re-enter), but is completely reusable. after which you require an expendable booster for the rest of the orbital insertion. this looks like a reasonable cost reducing approach to putting things into space. its not as sexy as skylon, but it is a good intermediate design. and they painted it black so im all in, any space plane can fly if you paint it black.

does that pierce the sulfuric acid part of the atmosphere? if so you would need to add more robust corrosion resistance. still it could reduce the design tolerances for the rover by a large factor. from my very rough guesstimates were looking at 1/4 the pressure and about ~100c less temperature. which will certainly let you get more power out of an rtg. the low pressure, low temperature compartment can be made less robust, reducing total mass to venus. also the power requirements for the needed refrigeration can be reduced.

my computer is a freezer. many times ive owned laptops. and many times i realized that i never took advantage of the fact that it is portable. so these days i just stick to desktops, which have some room for some cooling hardware that doesnt suck. id also be somewhat concerned with condensation.

i completed a 2 year it degree back in 2003. i was going to go for 2 more years but i was somewhat disillusioned with the education establishment. ive never used my degree. needless to say after i completed it i decided that i didnt want to have anything to do with the it world. ive got better things to do than to babysit a bunch of servers.

7 rtgs? damn. at that point just build a nuclear reactor. and refrigeration is well understood. its the same technology that keeps my beer cold

we have thermodynamic processes that can actively cool the components. i imagine keeping everything in a low pressure freezer. id actually take advantage of the thick atmosphere and not use a rover at all. put the whole thing on a quad copter platform. this could hover for sample collection. high temperature brushless motors (replacing copper with high temperature alloys with good conductivity and corrosion resistence) on "air" bearings should put up to the punishment. to take samples you would need to land, and then cool the samples, bring them into the cold zone for analysis. problem is i dont see this rig being very light. the pressure chamber alone would be the bulk of the weight. and refrigeration hardware isnt light either. you would probibly need a nuclear reactor to power the refrigeration cycle, as well as the motors, and good luck cooling that. so this is going to have to hold out for better power tech, especially ones that can work in a hot zone. this would have the advantage of being able to retreat to a colder altitude if neccisary. so only small duration hit and run sample grabs would be possible.

doesnt venus have really brutal cloud cover?

2.9/pi cool graphic.

what about a drone aircraft of sorts? keep it high up in less dense/hot parts of the atmosphere.

lasers need to be pumped with energy to work. this energy is usually in the form of light or heat. diode lasers tend to be really efficient so it makes sense to use them as an energy source to feed a larger laser. especially since you can connect an array of low power diodes to fiber optic cable, melt the end together and deliver a lot of energy to a small area. enough to pump a bigger laser.

well the only games i never could get run were put out before google ever existed. modern games seem to be a little bit more likely to function thanks to more consistent graphic apis. privateer 2 was one of them. you pretty much had to roll your own distro of dos to get it to run, then scrape every last bit of ram out of the system to get it to run, it was that close to the 640kb limit (it used an emm but you still have to initialize the executable before you can ask it for memory). another one i had trouble with was a descent clone called forsaken. it was a great game but it did not like my video drivers. it took upgrading my video card to a voodoo banshee. this was a horrible graphics card, back then you needed a separate 2d and 3d card, but i only had one pci slot. the banshee was one of the first combo cards i remember seeing, i grabbed it up on the spot and it let me play forsaken. it was a great game i though. the irony was that this game still works on a glide emulator, and will run in a 64 bit windows. a lot of games from the 90s were very sensitive to driver versions. some games would only work on a particular graphics driver.

its actually somewhat reminiscent of the 8 bit era. there were a lot of horrible nintendo games that cost a lot more than $3 a pop (google avgn).

msdn's list of the means of interprocess communication on windows. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365574%28v=vs.85%29.aspx#base.using_com_for_ipc problem is all this stuff only works on windows. there may be a *nix equivalent for some of those, but as i said earlier good luck finding a cross platform library. im 100% in support of using tcp/ip and defaulting to localhost.

does such a laser currently exist or would it need to be developed? i figure some of the waste heat from the laser would get recovered along with the heat from the fusion reaction. of course what comes out of the power station from that needs to be enough to fire off the next shot. i like to point my finger at the laser because it sounds like the least efficient part of the whole concept. not to mention that laser technology has historically been slow to develop. i dont see this as a system that can beat iter/demo to the punch.

have separate construction and storage hangers.

the problem with true ion engine is that it manuvers take days/weeks/months. which is totally unacceptable from a gameplay point of view. you can get a 4x physics warp, but this is still too slow to accurately depict ion engines in a tolerable way (hence the buff). id love an ion warp feature which would be a 10-20x warp with partial physics when using ion (and other low thrust) engines exclusively. the idea is that ion engines exert very small forces on a space craft which are incapable of breaking it. this allows you to get buy without doing any structural simulation. your ship would need to conform to some very strict rules about mass, power to weight ratio and a limit to the amount of force that may be exerted on any particular part while at full thrust.

im all for a vehicle service, storage, and refueling facility. of course using the facility would cost money, but not nearly as much as building a new one would.

so whats the plan for making the 1% efficiency of the laser closer to 100%. are we going to need to wait 50 years for a laser that can handle the efficiency requirements of a power reactor?

i dont much like how app stores in general encourage horrible development practices. ive always said that apps were half assed applications. you just cant create a well designed piece of code on a shoestring budget. you see things of the caliber of high school level computer science classes being sold for $3 a pop. its not a game im going to play, ever.

i want to say named pipes is what they go by on windows. its pretty much the same thing as whats used on *nix. good luck finding a library that works on all platforms though. tcp/ip beats it out in this regard. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa365590%28v=vs.85%29.aspx ive tried to use them before for other projects but i was never satisfied with the results. its just so much easier to use the loopback address (127.0.0.1) under tcp/ip. i kinda like the idea of being able to use network assets if i want to (like being able to talk to a tablet or a raspberry pi). you might want to keep the loopback as the default address though. it should be pretty secure since it will never leave the local machine.

ford pinto.

this thing is all in the application layer of the osi model. encryption and most of the other security features you need are usually handled further down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osi_model

seems everytime somone conducts a survey, they only ask the opinions of the obnoxious loud mouthed idiots and not the introverted nerds that have better things to do than to fill out survey forms. also this. im declaring today febuary 12th, national key a newsvan day. you know what to do internet!

you can emulate pretty much anything on an fpga. just need some specs, assuming they havent thrown them out too.

i think most network hardware these days has hardware encryption built in. no need to do it in software or put any burden on the cpu. your firewall will likely prompt you to set up rules for a new connection as soon as its detected. its pretty much the same for any network enabled application. if you want to leave your local network, you will likely need to set up your router to do that. im not really that concerned, my network fu is strong (and i have an degree in that field).