Nuke

i sometimes find my lack of empathy disturbing. sometimes.

had a guy zooming around here, gunning his engine, and grinding his clutch. i can cross the town on foot in 10 minutes, idk why he is in such a hurry.

im convinced that hospitals are designed to injure you. the one we got never salts their walkways in the winter time. when i had to take mom to anchorage several times to get her arm mended, i damn near had a heart attack pushing her the mile and a half between her appointments in her wheel chair, without leaving the building! she is not light. it used to be a lot smaller, now its a complex of buildings connected together by tunnel walkways, some of which are on an incline. and because of covid half of the building accesses were sealed, so it was a damn maze. and doing all that while masked blocking my airflow and having panic attacks because of being surrounded by ninjas.

the best analogue for elon musk is howard hughes. you need someone who is a little bit nuts and obsessed about one thing, but good at many. such an individual comes around about at 60-80 year intervals.

it was a hemispherical array of srbs pointing inward with the command chair placed at the epicenter of thrust.

they must play kerbal like i do, i cant remember the last time i killed a kerbal, unless it was on purpose. one paige kerman comes to mind.

never had any of those.

if you want to make an omelet, you need to break some eggs.

50% if you want a test and not a launch.

its just disturbing how little i know about cars. you think learning to drive would be a right of passage. but how the hell can i be 42 and have the possibility of vehicle ownership turn into an existential crisis. im gonna have to talk to my shrink about that.

seems like you would want to take engines that failed or performed poorly back to the shop for a post mortem. in order to help improve the design.

its something to live in when mom keels over and my caregiver gig ends. sure as hell beats plan b.

i too was thinking about getting wheels. neighbors 2 doors down are moving and want to sell their minivan for five presidents, and i have the funds. its stirred up kind of an existential crisis. i can get it, but i dont really know if im up for this kind of big change. id talk to my shrink about it but the car might be sold before then.

to vehicle or not to vehicle. i have an opportunity to buy a minivan from the neighbor 2 doors down for $500 smackers. ive never owned a vehicle nor have i a license. let alone im probibly gonna have to spend another $200 on a title and who knows how much for insurance. i think i may be too stupid for vehicle ownership.

finally saw that b5 cartoon, they zoomed into the command deck above the dock rather than below, counter to the direction of spin gravity. also im getting fed up with blatant misinterpretations of quantum mechanics in movies. otherwise it was not terribad. if anything for re-uniting the remaining cast. i remember when i was learning quaternions. idk what i did but i rendered my scene correctly in 3d, but projected on a plane that also ended up rotating, total inception. to this day i have been unable to recreate the bug.

one of my cats has at least 2 doppelgangers in the neighborhood. since she likes to wander around we gave her a collar with her name on it, so we can tell which one is ours.

i always figured thermal pollution would be a problem post fusion. rather than climate change being driven indirectly through messing with the insulative properties of the atmosphere, you are just pumping in heat directly. earth would have limited carrying capacity for industry, so at some point we are going to have to offload a lot of that to space colonies, lunar bases, etc.

a radiator is effectively a photon drive powered by waste heat. provided only one surface is used for heat dissipation. you usually use both because twice the surface area for the same weight. but over interstellar travel times waste heat from power going to things like life support can provide trajectory trim control, reaction control, and maybe a bit of dv.

the bowels of hell's inferno.

second iteration of my hat switch looks good. i havent put the microswitches in yet, but it looks good. the first iteration was a little bit loose. it was really complicated and that led to nasty print quality, so i simplified the part. originally i wanted the part to be symmetrical so you could print 2 and orient it in any direction, but i realized i could cut out half of the wiring tubes and make it a little bit more compact. i also was able to offset the screw holes so they only partially intersect one of the wiring channels, but thats for clearance and the screw should stay out of the space. before i had crossed into way too many of them. according to my lame calipers it came in at 16.6mm which should fit well within the alloted space.

more entropy, i had to fix her mouse this morning. she slams it into the desk every time her computer "doesnt work". its held together by duct tape and bailing wire. the pcb has so many bodge wires and repairs. every component has been replaced, except the sensor. its pretty much the mouse of theseus. and before i finish that job one of the bearings on her wheel chair ceases. i repaired the bearing last time but it was a temp fix while i ordered bearings, which showed up a week ago. il fix that when she stops using it.

most of that stuff should be plasma, which will be directed out the magnetic tailpipe. perhaps a magnetic mirror. you can probibly just shoot the fuel capsules (they need to be cased in non-magnetic materials) at each other at 45 degree angles so they collide in the middle of the nozzle with net rearward momentum. design it so that the projectile path is aimed at dead space in case something happens and one of the targets doesnt fire. until they collide and turn to plasma they wont even see the nozzle. the guns themselves would be outside of the "combustion chamber" shooting through the lattice work. a bigger problem might be that if there are bits that dont ionize, they might turn into shrapnel and rip up your coils. probibly put a blade-edge non ferous wedge armor in between the coils and the planned epicenter, so that those bits get deflected away harmlessly.

i threw away some old usb cables. they were full of splices, too short, lacking data lines, or were not functional. mom decided that they werent broken enough and commenced cutting them up into quarter inch pieces. creating entropy is one of her passtimes. she said she wished she had some strippers. after the obligatory stripper joke, i went and got mine. a very expensive set of razor sharp strippers with wide array of gauge options. i figured she would just stip the jacket and use her scissors to destroy the rest. i then cringed as i watcher her strip quarter inch pieces off one at a time dropping them several times in the process. if they come back dull, im never letting her borrow my tools again.

it would be stupid easy to turn this percussive fusion method into a pulse drive, just replace the vacuum vessel with a magnetic nozzle. then we just need to make a light gas gun go brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt. its probibly a lot safer and less destructive than using fission pulse units. you probibly dont even need that much of a shock absorber, the magnetic nozzel would handle that for you.

i think they are more about designing the fusion targets. metal disk hits what looks like a block of acrylic with bubbles of deuterium embedded with it. the light gas guns are just the same kind they use for testing asteroid impact models. inertial confinement taken literally. but if they can come up with a geometry that focuses the shockwaves on the fuel bubble just right to cause rapid compression. it sort of seems familiar, this was done to focus explosives onto plutonium cores because reasons, you also see similar in laser weaponization (pulsing to create shockwaves which do more damage than the laser itself). its possibly one of the most interesting "dumb" methods that ive seen. does compression heating even work once the electrons have been stripped? the problem with laser methods is the laser part. lasers are really not the most efficient gadget in the lab. even if you have a lot of really big ones. making a power plant by this means might work if you can get lasers north of 90% efficient, and i dont think thats even physically possible.