Nuke

i remember back when i was in high school they cracked down on our doom lan parties because columbine. to protest we all got black trench coats.

humans are capable of surviving in iceland. we know from our own geological record that introduction of photosynthetic lifeforms will eventually lead to a snowball earth, but we also know that it will thaw out eventually. this may not be the case for other planets, for example ones on the warmer side of the habitable zone. settlers would need to adapt environmental protocols early on to steer the evolution of the climate under its new oxygen rich atmosphere.

id love to see avx support, but i bet its one of those things that needs to be supported by unity. sse2 has been around for awhile and that is probibly what unity currently is using.

just a nitpick, you would probibly do this as a quaternion operation, but thats pretty much it. no sane game programmer uses eulers internally.

i was about to say cloneship myself. but ninja'd. once you get your ship to a reasonable cruising velocity (say 75% c) you dont really need to slow down. what you do is send an autonomous lead ship far enough ahead of you to give you the space neccisary to slow down (and enough time for the signal to travel). the lead ship has the advanced sensor equipment and sends telemetry back to the clone/sleeper/generation ship. if a planet with the correct parameters is found then the data is transmitted back to the colony ship. the lead ship's job is done at this point, it wouldnt need the capacity to slow down from relativistic flight and would just keep going, transmitting data about each new system as long as it can and eventually eject itself from the galaxy. the other ship can begin deceleration and colonization efforts. otherwise you slightly tweak your course for the intercept of the next system. it would be kinda foolish to slow down without confirmation that you have a habitable location to colonize. likely a course would be decided on long before the mission was launched using extensive exoplanet surveys. so all the systems you go through would be high probables anyway. also by the time we are technologically capable of doing this our capacity to colonize more hostile worlds would be greatly improved. take it a step further, given the time neccisary for long term space flight, you could send probes out to collect extensive data about potential habitable worlds and to drop a single cell ecosystem, life forms like bacteria and algae, on those planets. then send colonization efforts. this way all the question marks are gone, you have a pre terraformed planet which should have an o2 atmosphere when you get there.

we need a serious breakthrough in space reactors to pull it off with a vasimr engine (or better yet an mpd thruster). were talking something like a polywell with at least a 100MW output or greater.

i thought about doing something like this for offworld linear accelerators, where track lengths would be less than 1km. ladders work having a box collider. while on the ladder the kerbal will climb up the y axis of the collider. to do a linear accelerator you would do something similar. the kerbal would be replaced with a sled type part that could be connected to a ship. you position your ship in the accelerator and when the sled lines up with the track (detected by colliding with the box collider), you can then couple with the track which would cause the sled to levitate. then you could start the accelerator. track would come in straight sections about 20-50m and would dock up with integrated docking ports, and there would also be optional bits like modular pylons (to set the grade of the track), a loading platform, capacitor banks, and things like that. from a physics standpoint you would only collide the sled with the box collider when loading the sled on the track, or during acceleration when it is no longer engaged with the current piece of track (to either re-engage the next piece, or enter flight). you also need to check that the sled collider is intersecting the box collider for the current track segment every frame, but this is a check between 2 known objects, and not an n^2 kinda thing to try to find out what you are attached to. its a nice idea, but i dont want to delve into code at this time.

we could probibly get pretty fast with a nuclear-electric ship. we have flown nuclear reactors in space and we have flown ion engines, we just have never flown both in the same spacecraft (i may be wrong about this though). you would probably burn up your reactor fuel (not to mention propellant) before you made any significant progress on an interstellar mission, but you would be going pretty damn fast.

i always tell people who want to learn to play ksp to read orbiter's manuals.

people will eventually go to space just to take territory. its as simple as that.

i have a feeling the energy (not even sure delta-v is the relevant term in this case) required to get out of that few inches form the event horizon orbit will be quite significant. you are orbiting at a very high percentage of c, and since you cant go c, you would have a lot of trouble doing a prograde burn to get out of it. you would have to burn along the orbital radius, with a little bit of retrograde to allow some leeway to perform an orbit raising maneuver, which will of course cause your orbit to temporarily intersect the event horizon. lets just say it would be a really bad time to have an engine failure.

the problem with going mach 10 in a confined area is that you would need to use insane tolerances in order for the system to not suffer catastrophic failure. even if you manage to do that comes the issue of turn radi. the sr-71 had a problem of being able to turn around in the airspace over 3 states, and that was only mach 3. your track would need to be very straight, turns would have to be the size of entire continents. as for boarding and servicing, i believe they call them airlocks.

the tipping point will be when its cheaper to farm a crop in a large farm building than it is to grow it outside, in terms of cost per unit. more so than the land becoming unusable. this is of course on a per crop basis. some crops will move over at a faster rate. its probibly good that it will go indoors before the soil becomes completely unusable. since it allows for the land to be reclaimed by nature at a much faster rate. it will be one of those things greatly enhanced by fusion. that will likely be the thing that drops the cost of hydroponics into a competitive range.

we have the capacity (technology, industry, money) to switch over to large scale hydroponic production should things go south for us. only reason we dont is its cheaper just to use the land. on the other hand i know some people who do hydroponic gardening who say its just as cheap as using soil it probibly just doesn't scale up well.

no we wont, p-b11 is better (and abundant on earth).

tokamak fusion in the 3rd world, hell no. too big, too complex, too expensive. polywell fusion, maybe. bussard was pushing p-b11 fusion, an aneutronic reaction capable of direct conversion. but polywells are cheap enough that you can just replace them after they take a certain amount of neutron damage, so d-d reactors will likely come first. he also discribed a plan involving retrofitting coal fired plants with a polywell heat source, using the existing thermodynamic hardware. with fusion brings things like water desalination and with it better agriculture to the developing world. fusion will come and it will have a huge impact on the world. im pretty much convinced that polywall will beat iter/demo by several decades.

i think the main reason for using gyros in these cases is for precision tracking of celestial objects. things like hydrazine thrusters are a bit too clunky for that kind of precision. perhaps the possibility of using feep drives, which are very good at precision throttling (throttling probibly isn't the correct term, i think these kinda thrusters use pwm switching to fire off small poofs of thrust really fast).

both semiconductors and composites use some pretty nasty chemicals in large quantities. chemicals that have to be produced in chemical plants, and im not sure what kind of byproducts result from that (likely nasty ones). not so much worried about the issue of bird strikes (house cats kill orders of magnitude more birds than wind turbines ever will, and im not giving them up any time soon), but its there. solar panels of today will be the tech trash of tomorrow, and we cant even deal with that in a sane way (our current solution is to send it to china for "recycling", with a blow torch). the problem with green energy solutions is that they are all for the short term. they dont bring energy to everyone on the planet, only those that can afford it. space based solutions fall into this category as well. its to expensive to be viable for everyone, its definitely a hard sell to the first world. none of it brings fair global power distribution. the 3rd world will eventually rise to where we are now, and will spew coal fumes into the atmosphere like we have done to get here (much like china is now). they will have to tech up the way we have to get their own space based solar generation system. this will surely keep the world pumping carbon into the air for decades or even centuries to come. so i think fusion is the only long term solution. the problem with fusion research is we always dump the cash on the most expensive method with the slowest results (anything involving a tokamak). the 50 years away comes from the fact that it takes 25 years just to build a fusion facility, thats before you do actual science. the iter plan is to build 2 reactors, iter, the proof of concept, and demo, an actual net power producing reactor. theres your 50 years. if you use bussard's yardstick fusion is only 10-20 years out, and his polywell concept will be producing net power for the us navy in no time. they know how big it needs to be, they knew how much power it would need to operate. the only thing left to do is build a full size reactor. and this is a reactor that can fit in most people's living room and cost a tiny fraction of what a tokamak based powerplant would cost to manufacture.

the trick is to play around with timing till you can find something that makes all the ram chips happy. its a lot of tweak, memtest86, tweak some more, memtest86 again, wash, rinse, repeat. when you can find high performance settings and pass memtest86, you are done. i think i spent several hours trying to get the most out of my ram when i built this rig. now when you stick two differently speced sticks in and try to run them together, you usually have to cripple your highest performance ram so that you are not demanding too much from the low performance ram (which causes errors). if i had to choose between lower memory latency and more ram, id choose the lower latency.

i just try to keep my texel density uniform for the model, and go for maximizing use of uv space. once thats done then just pick the right texture size for the part. some modeling programs let you measure the surface area of the mesh, which is a really good gauge to tell you what size texture you want to use. i like to texture in a larger resolution that what will be released, for future proofing, but i usually pull a lazy and forget to scale them to more appropriate sizes before release. i keep hoping that one day the game will move to dxt* compression to save memory and to eliminate internal conversion operations (in turn allowing for higher resolutions with less cost in memory).

you could probibly turn a piece of firewood into a rocket engine if you bore a hole through it, attach a nozzel and inject pure oxygen. im curious if the tar would hold its shape under heat. at room temperature the stuff is practically a solid. but warm it up and you have something thats more or less a fluid. this is probibly going to be undesirable in a hybrid rocket, as large clumps of fuel would be expelled out the back without actually being burned in the combustion chamber. but im curious to see what your actual results will be. thats why its called rocket science.

i prefer to use parts found by the side of the road. i wonder where i picked up that habit. im also the type that doesn't like kickstarter. it goes against my inner redneck engineer. its only on the breadboard for 2 reasons, to make it stand up for the photo, and to provide power. its in test mode waiting for an i2c master to tell it what to do with itself. the board was etched with the toner transfer method, using the peroxide/vinegar/salt cocktail (it works but is not very fast). the things ready to be panel mounted, it would work with a hub board that provides a usb interface, switch mode supply, and would essentially be an i2c/spi hub for multiple devices (i haven't designed this yet). 74hc595, 74hc238 (active high, as opposed to the 138), and an attiny2313 runs the show. the mosfets are 2n7000, and i only used them because they were lying around, and would drive with enough juice to power a fully lit display. there is probibly a mux chip that has the drivers built in, im sure ive seen them before, just not in my parts heap.

if you had an apollo 13 type scenario where the rocket was a single multipurpose vehicle, the crew would have died. one of the benefits of having a modular vehicle is it allows for contingencies that would have otherwise not been possible.

this is worth a look: http://hackaday.com/2012/09/26/hybrid-rocket-engine-uses-acrylic-as-fuel/

look at all those chips, i did this with 3: