Nuke

weeeeeeeeeeeee! i doubt she was the only one that wanted to test the slide, there was probibly a line behind her.

i actually believe that fusion drives are closer than fusion power. but since its not break even you need an energy supply, eg solar, rtg, or reactor. same problem most plasma thrusters have. there are so many that are stuck on the drawing board or in a trl rut because testing in space is simply not possible (the space station power grid may allow for some thruster testing, that was the plan for vasimir, but as far as i know that is not something that has been done before, since the grid is mission critical, eg life support). we need better space power.

early fusion drives wont be break even, they dont really have to be self sustaining. it will be nice to eventually tap them for electrical power, say for life support. that wont be until were at second or 3rd gen fusion power. but for now you just want fast charged particles. thus it has the same problem as any other electric thruster. its going to require some wattage. wheres do you get the power? we presently can get a few hundred kw using a really heavy bit of kit that doesn't work too far from the sun (the solar array on the iss). or we got rtgs which last decades on the order of half a kw and decreasing with age.

dune2 was up on the high school sign, so that's what im doing friday night. i re-watched part 1 a couple days ago. ive read all the books but decided i dont need a reason to watch a worm movie.

cat videos are important damn it. though i have a suggestion: delete anything thats not a cat video. we should be transmitting them into the cosmos. so that other civilizations may have access to cat videos.

on todays stuck on repeat: heres the latest doomsday anthem from primordial.

damn gremlins.

i think whats happened is that you are hearing about the usual aircraft wear and tear that always happens when you operate an airline. things that wouldnt be noteworthy by those inside the industry. but because boeing is under so much scrutiny it gets reported as more qc issues when its really a maintenance issue. this does not help their situation any.

i think elon may be jumping the gun here. i dont think we even are close to producing the perquisites for an interstellar mission, even an unmanned mission. you need: 1. propulsion, no engine no sane transfer duration. you need to get there before the ship is a broken down mess. see voyager 1. so you cant just use a really big fuel tank. 2. power. rtgs simply do not cut the mustard in either duration or power output. this also feeds back into 1 because you may need considerable power to say operate a fusion engine or plasma drive. if you have humans, increase power demands further. 3. systems with proven long operating life. humans have produced machines that in a good state of repair and with regular maintenance can last decades. but every part of the ship must be designed thusly. parts must also be shelf stable as you may need them to work flawlessly after a hundred years of waiting all without humans to do regular servicing. 4. a really stable government. administration 0 may be willing to pump billions into an interstellar spacecraft, but administration 100 may not want to spend millions building the dish to receive the telemetry later on down the line. as for the private sector look at how well pan am has maintained its fleet in 2024. pan am who? were they a thing? you see my point. you might have to do some religious engineering to make sure people get the payout down the line, because that's really the only institution humans have ever created which has legs.

control issues seems to be the major problem this time. im not even sure its strictly a thruster problem. it kind of looked like a calibration issue with the control loops. remember this is the first time we re-entered with starship and the first time the grid fins have been tested at low altitude. i saw a lot of over correcting going on. either they picked bad pid values or they were sweeping as many different values to see which ones performed the best.

WE NEED TO MAKE DUNE METAL!

cool.

i suspect they will want to test relight in space capability before they do that. also the attitude hold issues and any other problems would need to be fixed first. you would want to fully orbit the vehicle to deploy satellites (thrust on the sats is too low to orbit them in time). and still be able to re-enter the atmosphere at this early stage of development. all orbital trajectories have been intentionally high for a passive re-entry. but you might see that on ift5 at the earliest if it works on ift4. of course thats the lower threshold. they might want more than one successful test first.

i already use a vpn, and its not really that expensive either. its advertised as a security service but its really just to get around local regulations region codes and to obfuscate piracy. i dont know anyone who uses it in always on fashion. tiktok would just be another use case.

im going to be careful not to buy any consumer products or services that require phone ownership or some kind of activation step which is used to fix your identity to a specific name or address. i dont need to be in evereyone's database. i dont like hardware that requires a cloud account somewhere. the point of buying hardware is to own hardware, and its not owning the hardware if i need to ask permission to use it. smart phones totally have mark of the beast vibes. tech companies are the real identity thieves, because they love to stick credentials in a centralized server with lax security, its like putting up a neon sign that says "hack me". when you have to change your password because the password hashes got out, its easy to brute force a block of hashes if you have a few high end gpus. even 2-factor is more about farming personal information than it is for account protection, sms codes in particular are known to be weak and susceptible to man in the middle attacks. i generally don't like tiktok but i don't think congress knows what its asking for. how do you even do that from a technical perspective? firewalling the entire country in china fashion is the only thing i could think of. this is not a good idea.

now that's good merch. would be better if they were catnip toys.

from throwing chunks to spraying shrapnel. i say its an improvement. im going to bed.

judging by how fast it was losing altitude/velocity i think it would have splattered by now.

looks like they had a strip of metal floating around in the payload bay. anyone note the fishtailing on the booster when it went into the drink. pid controllers need help.

i was curious about those. i saw one at the anchorage airport a few years ago, i think it was headed for adak so i guess they are using it as a village hopper. i was like, huh whats that? not an aircraft i was aware of up to that point. i guess if this boeing situation gets bad i might be seeing more of those. alaska has mostly flown 737s, they used 272s (my first airliner flight was on one of these, stranger things actually nailed this not only did they use the right plane for the era but also the right flight attendant uniforms) earlier and i think tried to replace them with the md-80 and those also were phased out. dont know when they picked up the embraers but i thought it was a cute little plane.

whether or not it was staged, it paints boeing in a bad light. since most of the planes i fly on are made by them, its what alaska airlines primarily flys (though the planes actually used in alaska tend to be the older ones where boeing meant quality), i dont think im going to fly again any time soon. i have my suspicions about the decline in quality control at boeing, but since they get political i will keep them to myself. and now boeing caught deleting maintenance records.

its a team effort.

i havent seen it yet so idk. also some of that stuff isnt fleshed out until dune messiah so you may still get to see it.

in the books she was carried in a planquin (i think thats what they are called). its sort of a basket for passengers who are not worm trained. they show this in the previews for part 2. sayadinas (really bene geserits) are considered holy and are usually transported by others as a sign of respect, young children are also carried this way (they learn to ride the worm at 14). any other fremen who is not able to ride shai hulud (too old or disabled) go out into the desert to die.

post of the month imho.