Nuke

its all about wavefront propagation. check out huygens optics channel on youtube. lot of really cool info about lenses, telescopes and everything. he even makes monolithic cassegrain scopes out of a single piece of glass.

once they get the maker hooks in you dont have to worry about roll, and you can just toss ropes. lynch dune still has some impressive worm scenes. with how little they showed sandworms in part 1 the jury is still out as to who has the better worms.

we don't get it for 2 more weeks.

its one thing for your cats to go out and kill something, its another thing for him to bring pets home and let them loose in your house.

i like how for every update in starship launch prep, 3 falcons go up.

il agree that its in a different ballpark. but a quench of your superconductors would be the primary failure mode im concerned with.

points at the state of fusion. if we cant contain deuterium for long enough to fuse what makes you think were ready to be storing antimatter?

or dont, its cheaper.

you mean technology which has already been demonstrated on mars. you just need to upscale it. there are of course more than one way to do this. you could launch from earth and refuel in orbit, then you dont need a moon base at all. the ship on mars would require landing a return vehicle, empty of course, and refuel it over the course of years in time for human landing. only thing im not sure about is the return aerocapture. we have done that manuver before but never on a man rated craft. and the risk of either burnup or getting flung out into the greater solar system with no hope for either rescue or survival is kind of a big risk. im only making the point that we dont need anything fancy in the way of propulsion technology to go to mars. so many videos with something like "this new technology will get us to mars in x days" are just clickbait and the tech is either so far down the technological readiness ladder that it would take 10 years to develop, are so theoretical where we cant even be sure it would work at all. its a terrible metric. cost and risk mittigation are the real killers to a manned mars mission.

i think the important question is what would a few milligrams of antimatter do to the earth if it got away from you. you could probably do a fast transfer on chem engines, but you would need a lot of fuel. i dont think the real hold up for mars is a faster engine. hydrolox from moon to insertion (one burn so you dont need to worry about long term storage), hypergolics for insertion burn. methalox from mars back to earth, culminating in aerocapture and reentry at earth. perquisites include a moon base with fuel production capability and a return rocket landed on mars tanked up and ready to go.

https://www.andreinc.net/2024/02/06/the-sinusoidal-tetris flatten that curve.

modern games in general annoy me. especially ones that are over moderated and predominantly played by children. this is actually why i no longer do multiplayer minecraft (that and normal "server maintenance" destroying my builds). mechwarrior online in comparison is a game inhabited mostly by aging grognards where players tend to be in their 30s or 40s and is barely moderated. the game is of poor quality (i dont think the engine has been recompiled in over 8 years since it has some long standing game breaking bugs, most notably a crash happy fullscreen mode). yet they still have the gaul to charge $40 for a mechpack. then most aaa games tend to be overly simplified or have strong political messaging (keep the politics out of the product). nobody makes a game i want to play anymore really, and since i got my steam deck im playing old 16-bit platformers (many of which are japanese games).

boom boom mean go space, and maybe boom boom.

i did live in anchorage growing up and yes its a completely different beast. on a road trip to fairbanks i was amazed at how hot it got there in the summer time it had to be over 90 freedom degrees there. of course i wasn't about to winter there. as for fresh food in the grocery stores, lol, nope not any more.

were blowing over a hundred bucks a month in cat supplies.

yea it is. im in southeast and we more lean towards rain that snow. there are parts of the state than never thaw out, but ive never been that far north.

we hardly had any snow this year.

its worse then that, we get one movie a week, usually. its run by the high school to pay for student sports programs. assuming the school doesn't need the auditorium or has the operators playing ball in another town.

ive always had this idea about snowball ships where your vessel is really just a large sphere of ice either artificial or using a natural body that is mostly ice. ice is mined on demand, cracked, and fed into an engine (which could be chemical but might be some kind of plasma, nuclear thermal or even fusion based propulsion). hab is in the center and is shielded pretty well from nasty space stuff and neutron flux coming off of the reactor. sublimation control i think is the big issue. may be suitable for long duration slowboat generation ships, given sufficient size.

this is where i complain that it takes us months to get movies here. it will probibly be up for streaming before i can go see it. the rest of this month seems to be booked up (with more super hero hogwash), so april maybe.

seeing as i have never been able to play that game for more than a couple hours a year, idk. fuel and life support consumables are going to be the primary commodities. orbital scrapyards are going to be a thing in the fairly near term once we get fully reusable craft and scale up orbital habitation significantly. salvage is going to be a lot cheaper than launching a new part, even with daily, even hourly launch cadences. these of course get more important the further out you get. as for monetary systems, we will probably just inherit existing earth currencies at first until the space presence is such that you start seeing entirely space borne governments emerge.

idk, i kind of like the shotgun approach to space exploration. why launch one deep space probe when you can fit 3 in the fairing. there is also no rule that says superheavy can only be used with starship. a disposable 2-3 stage config, recovering the booster of course.

a buck fiddy for a can of friskies. a 3.5 pound bag of kibble is about ten bucks. consistency is also a problem as they never seem to have the same brands in stock at any given time. many cats would be angry with this but mine don't seem to be picky eaters, especially lizzie.

stray is awesome. i just wish they would add some dlc. me and my kitties would like to thank you for your service. if catfood was cheaper here, id have 10 of them.

a one pixel cameras can be used in a scanning mechanical arrangement. it might take a long time to scan a frame but it will give you some images.