Nuke

2014-2064, same thing we have been doing 2065, fusion works, viable interplanetary engines are made as a result 2066, ??? 2067-sun explodes, profit! sun explodes-heat death of the universe, conquer universe

if you retrofit it with a nuclear reactor (not an rtg, vasimr needs more power than that) and some vasimr thrusters. you would also need a small amount of conventional fuel to speed you through the radiation belts. the only question is why? idk. id rather just have a space only reusable transfer vehicle with similar hardware, minus all the atmospherics and dead weight engines.

inb4 Buzz Aldrin falcon punch.

i would have nothing against part wear and eventual failure if it was possible to repair them with an eva. however i would limit what kind of parts can degrade. id say engines (especially ion engines) anything with electronics (sas, gyros, sensors, antennas, etc), and tankage. and this would not be a catastrophic failure, it would be something you can go out and fix. if anything just to give evas more of a purpose. i see you getting paid to service/upgrade communication satellites and space telescopes, which would have wearable parts that need to be fixed.

sign language of course.

i dont think the storage capacity is sufficient for mains power so i just assumed it would be used for smaller things. crystals are mostly used as clock sources or reference frequencies. other piezoelectric devices include buzzers, inkjet nozzels, and bbq grill ignitors. for former 2 use electicity to generate motion. in the latter, motion creates a short high voltage pulse, enough to create a spark but not very much current. in other words its just a transducer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezoelectricity

this is sorta like how a crystal resonator works. from what i know the size and shape of the crystal determines what frequency it will resonate at. to store energy as resonance you would probibly need to increase the amplitude of the resonance, which will at a point fracture the crystal. so i dont think you can store much energy in a crystal lattice. you would need a material which would resonate at higher amplitudes without fracturing. also should point out that such a battery would actually be an ac source and would need rectification to use in dc devices. i dont think it would be a very useful battery. id rather just use an ultra capacitor.

^reminds me of my analog keyboard concept, where i put pressure pots under the membrane under certain keys so that i could detect key pressure, best part was the key still worked as a button, but the pressure sense was less than liner on the oscope. by biggest gripe is i think throttle needs to be moved to free up modifier keys so we can have things like more action groups.

compressed texture formats.

minmus sample return is worth a lot. was able to get both batteries and solar panels unlocked with that one.

ive been rather lazy with my mod since i released the .20 version, iv'e modeled some stuff and tweaked some other stuff, but its not like its on a fast dev cycle. add to the fact that this isnt the only game i mod, and modding is just one of many hobbies i have, and you get slow as hell update cycles.

well i unlocked 2 research items and i already have jeb stranded on the mun. i dont think its a grind at all.

the general idea was to exploit gradient torque for alignment purposes to increase efficiency and there for operational life of satellites (i was thinking geosynchronous, not stuff scraping the atmo in leo). it seemed obvious like it would be something already in use.

needs a hamster. other than that looks awesome.

i wonder if they design satellites to be bottom heavy so they have a natural alignment tendency. seems it would be easier/cheaper than just doing everything with reaction wheels and thrusters (you would still need them but their power and fuel draw would be noticeably less).

anyone else think the thread title is an oxymoron.

i think using a temp file is a horrible idea. you could do it, but it would actually make things slower. from the developers perspective this is a big no as it would require sweeping changes to the code base for very little gain. switching to compressed texture formats only really requires a few tweaks to a single subsystem and idk why this wasnt done a long time ago.

the guy who tried to build a polywell in his garage (http://prometheusfusionperfection.com/) had a bunch of visits from men in black suits. at the very least you have to tell certain organizations what you are doing.

i own one of the first amd 64 bit machines that came out close to 10 years ago. it stands as a permanent reminder of how slow the software industry have taken to the 64 bit architecture. it doesnt have an os because i am out of hard drives, unless you count the old linux live cd its running. i really dont know what to do with the thing, its too slow to run a modern os, but its still in working order. maybe i can install baremetalos to a flash card or something. all my older machines got scrapped for parts.

a basic fusor isn't that hard to build. its really not that complicated. its also one of those concepts that wont go anywhere for a number of reasons, but it is good in an academic setting to learn about fusion research. you wont ever see one doing breakeven but they do make fusion happen. so i wouldn't be surprised seeing one at a high school science fair. though i do doubt it would have been one that was fired off (which requires deuterium, a capacitor bank, a vacuum chamber, and a license to operate it, which i have a hard time seeing a high school student acquiring).

nothing prevents you from opening a temp file and writing/reading arbitrary data to it. you would kinda need to wrap it into your references though, so a reference could refer to something in ram or an offset into the temp file. just use a 64-bit integer that you cast to a pointer if its less than equal to 0xFFFFFFFF, otherwise shift it 32 places to the right and use it as an offset into your file. this would of course slow things down a lot, because there would be some extra operations every time you used a pointer.

damn it spacex, thats cheating.

power is equivalent to energy/time (1 watt = 1 joule/s) so they are related.

i dont think so. a 32 bit application only has a 32 bit virtual address space. so you can have 4gb of memory, no matter where it is mapped to (real memory, virtual memory, etc). most people have more memory than the game can use, so there is no reason to dip into the slower page file (unless you still use <4gb ram). a 64 bit program on the other hand will have more virtual address space than your machine has memory, and so if you have 8gb and the game wants 9gb, it will map the extra 1gb into the page file. only things that can be done are: 1: reduce memory usage 2: 64 bit builds #2 is hard to do and requires the unity people to fix 64 bit in the engine, so that leaves #1 as the only thing that can be done so far. this is actually easy, adopt dxt* compressed texture formats.

its usually used to power internal medical devices from external battery packs, just because its the only option for transferring power through the skin. transdermal implants are prone to causing infections, have to be kept very clean, dry etc. they are not comfortable, and can be painful, its equivalent to constantly having open wounds. they are still used when absolutely neccisary but are not practical for long term use. so inductive implants are preferable despite their inefficiency. i dont have any data for how much power can be extracted from the human body, even if you could source 10 watts of power (more than enough for usb) it still wouldn't be worth it to get power harvesting implants. especially with electronic components capable of running at much lower power levels and battery technology always improving. eventually devices will just have a few solar panels built in so you could just charge the batteries by sticking it out under the sun or in any lighted room for a few minutes. or you can use thermoelectric devices to harvest power from body heat, so you can just stick it in your pocket and it would recharge. you can also convert motion to power. they actually have chips out there to manage this stuff. batteries may even become obsolete for very low power devices in the not too distant future.