Nuke

silicon carbide semiconductors may be able to give you a computer of sorts. it will be slow, and you will need ceramic pcbs with gold traces, so it wont be cheap. bigger problem is the camera. while you can use an old school camera tube, i dont think there is a transparent lens material that will last very long. power is another issue. you cant use solar, you cant really use batteries either. you might be able to do a cryogen battery, where you use the venutian heat to provide the hot side and boiling ln2 to provide the cold side on a silicon carbide peltier device (which im not even sure would work with that material) but i cant imagine that running for very long. a vertical axis wind turbine might work and provide direct mechanical power through a titanium gear train. not sure if you could make a generator, not sure if there is a material with a high enough curie point for a permanent magnet. assuming electromagnets still work (they work on the sun) you would need a gold coil induction motor. you cant even use the regular enamel coating, you would have to somehow embed gold wire into a ceramic substrate. at least ceramic bearings are a thing, but you would need to land in a way where you don't shatter them.

rivers in the desert are usually dry most of the year but they can turn into roaring torrents during the monsoon season late summer early fall. i actually rather liked that time of year, you can go outside in the warm rain and splash in puddles and the like. not like here in se alaska where you can get hypothermia fast if you get a little wet.

there are lots which i would call "toys", what amounts to single seat manned drones with no practical use beyond cruising around for a few minutes. probably classified as small sport craft by the faa. and many concepts some of which are show to be flying. but a test article is far from a large production run. i think what is really needed is a compact apu that can power the electric motors you would normally use in a large drone. helicopters can operate on as little as 100 horsepower or about 75kw. batteries really dont have the density right now for anything other than light sport aircraft. but a lightweight generator that fits the bill is far from an unsolvable problem and would give you a useful range. i guess everyone wants to build the air frame first and worry about a practical powerplant later.

type "vtol aircraft" into youtube.

been to sedona, that's where my brother married his second ex wife. damn nice place.

i expect a puddle of metal but with russian big metal ball construction that puddle is probably contained by the lander hull.

yea but we want a bona-fide space-big-rig. we can talk about space trains later.

oh yes, lots of great mexican food there. hands down. while a lot of college students live on ramen and pizza, i often found myself at one of the myriad of taco stands where it helps if you know a little bit of spanish. the city itself is pretty flat. easy to bike. that dry heat is a doozy though if you aren't ready for it. moving from anchorage to phoenix was a big change. these days i dont think i could handle the heat or the city. one of these days im going to live somewhere with moderate climate and no people. though i think a nuclear war has to happen first.

behold the feline master race. only nobody removed cats from power.

lived there for a few years, never saw anything of note.

how thick are your long underwear?

fix my lawn.

and then vomits in your shoe.

never get tired of these fake zztop covers i prefer his rendition of master of puppets.

strike 3 debian, youre out. after finally getting things working (and this is after 3 days fixing my 3d printer and then fixing the doorknob in the bathroom), the offitial debian package manager pushed a nvidia update and broke everything again. since i didnt break it this time, i dont know how to fix it. time to dig out that iffy windows 10 ltsc instasller. frankly i trust it more than i trust win11 or mainline 10. so yea. im tired of fixing things. after all these years of computing i never thought id get to the point where there is not one modern os i want to use. this weekend i was supposed to print joystick grips for my joystick of doom project, but instead i had to fix things. now the project is getting shelved for another week or more until im in the mood to reinstall the os.

there are entire youtube channels dedicated to this.

chrome is out, im fed up with the whole youtube situation and im dumping all my google services except gmail. not putting this in negative because its a good thing. when i originally switched from ff->chrome, chrome was lean and ff was getting sluggish, now ff is fast and chrome is slow and i don't trust it any more.

nuke vs linux 2: the wrath of the kernel turns out it wasn't really broke. failed to build and left a bunch of bad kernels in the bootloader more like it. apparently its a bug that is at this moment being worked on, a few purges later and my shop computer works again without using the recovery menu. there is some ambiguity about whether or not the nvidia drivers were installed. package manager says yes but some of the utilities say no. note i said some. i think throwing some benchmarks at the gpu and see if it works is in order, but then id have to figure out how to do that and i dont feel like reading another manual page the size of a phone book (some of you may remember those, they were used for interrogating crime suspects in the pre-miranda-rights-era and also for looking up phone numbers for people and businesses, they were quite large, especially in cities). as much as the debian user base insists on following the official instructions, they don't seem to work very well.

i think the retrofits would be such that you are better off with a purpose built lander. you would need extended life support consumables. i suppose you could install tankage in the trunk and use the super dracos as your main propulsion. strip out the heat shield for extra tankage so you can leave the trunk on the moon, this worked out well for the lm, except in this case you would use the same engines. because you would need fittings for the hypergolic propellants the craft would technically be refuelable, though with the trunk on the moon you wouldnt have the land and return capability (landing on the moon might be possible but without return capability, i dont see that being useful unless you have a moon base). two problems remain, if the changes are significant you will need to have the thing go through the man rating process a second time, and if you are going to do that you are better off making a more optimized design. spacex has a knack for being able to develop hardware fast. the other problem is this is just apollo redux, mostly done for political brownie points with science being a distant second. continuing to develop starship gives you a lot more capabilities and can help bootstrap rapid development of a moon base. its entirely possible that spacex could do this without sls at all, but i suspect spacex is relying on the contracts to pay for it, so it doesn't go to the moon without sls.

"really expensive fireworks" could have also been used.

how long will it be till new horizons is far enough out to take up interstellar space survey duty? in any case the solution is more outer solar system flybys are needed. MOAR! flyby all the things.

hydrogen airships? i guess with a big enough gas bag it would work. without an o2 atmosphere it wont hindenburg.

until it makes orbit its just a lawn ornament.

i was looking at my desktop wallpaper, some nuclear test footage for greenhouse item. the little angry fire ball. today i decided that the explosion kinda looks like a hamster. so i moved some icons around and now it looks like a hamster.

country music takes another step towards the grave. the modern stuff sounds too industrial. rip.