Nuke

definitely full of kittens. you can tell by the lumpiness. normal fat cats are less lumpy.

given the way we have our planet arranged, nationally/politically/climate speaking, i would want an entirely independent ship that can function without external support, if need be. if after a century of receiving beamed power it suddenly stops. perhaps to a war or a change of government. perhaps the climate collapses while you are away. perhaps the earth has a run in with an interstellar comet. you may find yourself in a situation where your 200 year voyage becomes a 1000 year voyage, or it becomes impossible to hit your intended target at all. its nice to be able to at least have control of the situation. "houston, we have a problem" is not gonna save you this time, houston might not even be there anymore. beamed power is ok for an unmanned mission though, or missions within the solar system where you have redundant beaming stations.

i like the idea of using accelerators because its all existing and well understood technology. old boom boom for the same reasons. fusion (propulsion, not power) is close but not quite there yet. propulsion is less of a problem than your power plant, which you need for life support. both need to last for centuries. while nuclear reactors have flown before, there are some in orbit now, none of them have ever been very exceptional in their power output. i feel like this is holding us back on the space exploration front. gonna need it for manned exploration of the outer planets, and perhaps colonization of the moon/mars.

some wikipedia research seems to indicate that you really dont need a lhc-scale accelerator, a linac may be sufficient, and a lot easier to lay out in a space craft. most of the ship would be prefab truss sections with accelerator bits in the middle. these can roll off an assembly line and launch on starship. much of the mass would be up front, reactor, hab and tankage.

lots. im curious about high energy particle beams for propulsion. particles of boosted relativistic mass spewing out at 99 point several 9s of c. it would require some fancy rigging and would be a spindly thing. with plenty of room for a large spin hab and a fission reactor with plenty of dead space to help shield. hydrogen and ln2. im not sure how tight we can bend the curves, lhc is 17 miles across and would be hard to shield from dust and debris. you don't need the scientific gear, just the accelerator, or several. a linear design might be better, or an ovoid or figure 8. but im not really that familiar with accelerator design principals. i just assume more bigger more better. more radius more c.

best tape decks in the known universe.

i think the most disturbing thing is that i have not had a cold or major virus in over 3 years, not since the bout with rsv i had right before the pandemic started. this is not the way germs are supposed to work.

my birthday was a week ago. i dont remember it happening or anything since then. there are more kittens taped to my speakers, i guess that was my birthday card. the cheese cake i got is gone, there are no presents, and im missing a week. i found an empty jim beam bottle and a tupperware container full of brownie crumbs in my desk. getting old is bad for your health. makes you forget things. dont do it.

definitely a feedback loop between the scientists, the science media, and the general public. scientists post video to show their colleagues, people get excited and start jumping to conclusions. once the media gets ahold of it all bets are off. they get the people excited and the video goes viral, the scientists see all the commotion, mistake the public reaction for actual peer review and then get overly excited about the as till now inconclusive results. real science is slow, good science is glacial. besides if it actually works, it will be patented, ignored until the patent expires and then you might see it on a flying car sometime in the late 2070s. scientists trying to get patents is usually a red flag though.

all laptops are fragile self destructing pre-emptively generated e-waste. last laptop i had got replaced by a superior desktop as soon as i had the funds, then it lived on the night stand for 6 months, as an alarm clock. one day, about a week after the warranty expired, it wouldn't boot. i guess asking it to keep time was too much for it. if this were a desktop pc id be changing the power supply or swapping the mobo, or reading out post codes. but since it was a laptop it just got chucked in the salvage pile. laptop repair is possible, to a degree, but the success rate kind of sucks. anything wrong with the mobo, or anything not behind an access panel, is major surgery. and that's assuming it was designed to be non-destructively dismantled in the first place.

now if only we could get a guy to stand on top of it while holding a banana. should totally be done for the scientific value of having one standard banana in frame.

sure it wasnt one of those quick deploy prefab tiny houses. truck pretty much dumps a shell which is mostly complete on the outside. you can get it up on some pre-installed concrete footings in no time. set it up, trim it, install plumbing, and then pour the floor, exterior paint. from there on its all interior work. so yea you could make a house appear in a day or two.

in the end we do not go out in a bang but in a pleasant little plop sound.

every other day id strip the bed, find a couple victims, squish, squish, squish. they go in a satisfying plop, like a blood filled water balloon. after a month they were all dead. unlike other household pests, they dont breed very well. sex requires the males break through the carapace of the females with their sharp stabby bedbug pickle. this can lead to death before the female lays any eggs or during feralization. the eggs they do lay have a very small success rate. so all i have to do is tilt the natural death rate slightly to collapse the population.

i once ended a bedbug infestation with my thumb.

i finally assembled those damn magnetic rotation sensors. they are damn nifty. i say damn sensors because the dev board i got was so freakishly small i had to forgo a more sane header and use magnet wire to solder it to something i can connect to. i hate magnet wire. its hard to strip, hard to solder, puts out horrible fumes when you do, and on top of that you have to make it a flux mess because the solder will refuse to stick to it. once i wired up the six pins, i lined them up in parallel and stuck them to some kapton tape, wrapped a few times turning them into crude kapton ribbon cables giving the thing a bit of a spaceage look. to think, a gimbal unit that probibly saw service in the vietnam war, its that old, connected to 3d printed housings for modern sensors hooked to an arduino which would probibly beat down every ounce of computing power they had back then. and its just an avr based board. still need to make wireing harnesses that dont look like a jumble of loose jumper wires. i also completely refurbed 4 sets of gimbals, i was expecting to have to scrap some of them, i have 9, but some were damaged during disassembly but i think i can restore 2 or 3 more of them. as for resolution about 12k ticks across the full axis range. way better than the basic hall sensors i was using. its 14 bit, but there is still some unused portion of the axis range. id need a different gear ratio to use the full range, the sensor can do a full 360 rotation (its actually intended to live in a motor housing to provide accurate feedback about the orientation of the rotor). its spi, so its fast as hell. it can probibly keep up with my monitor refresh if i use a newer arm based dev board. im also very angry that my wireless microscope doesn't work wirelessly with my pc, requiring a phone or tablet for that feature due to bad software (honestly it defeats the purpose if i have to use a tiny screen, my near vision is trash). if i wanted to squint id have just used the double stack of magnifier glasses i had to use. granted i could hook it up with a usb cable, but thanks to a certain cat, my longest micro-usb cable is 2 feet.

meh, both use the same shift register.

featuring 2 kinds of tape! and presumably controled with an nes controller.

titanic 3: melting flesh. "titanic 2: the hull is fi*squish*" kind of bombed at the box office. couldn't get james cameron to direct.

it could just be as straight forward as having a magnetic combustion chamber, where by steams of protons and antiprotons are fed. its the same kind of magnetic nozzle configuration often found on fusion engine designs. this is actually the straightforward part. the less straight forward part is that you need to plumb that engine. but where all the pipes are magnetic conduit. with magnetic valves, and must feed in only one direction. when one looks at the complexity of regular old rocket plumbing, then realize you have to accomplish the same feat entirely with magnetic fields, one realizes the magnitude of the problem. sure the hydrogen can be stored in tanks and ionized on demand (and it would probibly be safer to do so, since this makes it easier to control), but the antimatter must be 100% handled with magnetic fields. simply tanking up at the gas station becomes a potentially world ending ordeal. magnetic fields are actually force fields, and they are very well understood (not witchcraft). gravity is another force field, less well understood. but for the sake of an antimatter reactor, em is all you need. mcf is teaching us everything we need to know about controlling plasmas with force fields. and frankly containment times are barely enough to conduct a shot let alone a continuous burn. thats the thing fusion needs to solve, and its mandatory for am systems. so the notion that am is somehow easier than fusion is completely bonkers. you got to walk before you can run. thats ignoring the fact that no sane means of am production exists. we can create a few positrons for scientific and medical purposes, and a few tens of antiprotons for science purposes. and im not even sure if we ever tried to combine the two to create unionized anti-hydrogen (at which point you can no longer control it with magnetic fields). building an am engine is like building an internal combustion engine before the invention of gasoline or oil refining. so there is considerable way to go. the path to fusion is at least visible and will give us some of the technology we will need.

im talking single particles escaping the system. the design of your bottle will need to be such that small numbers of particles escaping over time wont cause a massive cascade failure resulting in a massive release of gamma rays and heat (think hiroshima, not chernobyl). antimatter tech is definately for a post fusion world, by then all the containment problems should be solved. when a fusion reactor leaks particles, they take the heat with them, and so you replace it with a cold particle, it needs to be heated back up. so lost particles represent a huge energy loss and are an efficiency hurdle to fusion power generation. the loss rates will get ever smaller, but i very much doubt they will hit zero. hot particles are harder to contain than cold ones, since they have enough energy where they can zip right on through containment if the conditions are just right. so take an extremely robust containment system spun off from fusion tech, run it with a colder plasma, and you could get the loss rates way down. but not zero so you are going to have to deal with a lost particle every now and again.

i view antimatter more as an exotic form of energy storage than a power source. so creating it just to immediately burn it is kind of pointless and will cost more energy than just using that energy directly. you are going to want to make the antimatter at a facility and fill up a portable magnetic bottle for transport. its going to need a multiple-redundant battery pack and liquid nitrogen supply to keep the superconducting coils charged. i also very much doubt you can get much antimatter into such a pod, a ton of equipment to store a few milligrams of antimatter, storing at any kind of pressure is going to increase the chances of losing particles. and presumably this would be transferred into a larger pod more suited for long term storage and utilization. if you wanted to take the whole particle accelerator with you, you could probibly use the particle beam itself as a high isp thruster and forgo antimatter production entirely.

i suppose you could shield the components such that the anti-particle will annihilate with something useless that will absorb the energy before it gets to your superconductors. but you are going to have to periodically shut down the reactor to replace these as they wear out. i really dont think a single annihilation event will destroy a properly designed reactor, it might generate enough heat to cause a quench event in the superconductor though, and if that happens say goodbye to your magnetic bottle. so just be sure it hits something else first.

it occurred to me that one small advantage to containment in antimatter over fusion is that you could keep the antimatter at lower temps. it still needs to be a plasma but significantly cooler than what you need for fusion. its harder for cold plasma to jump containment than hot plasma. you will still get the occasional wayward particle and my previous post still applies.

cant have an external fastener, and you cant bolt them on from the inside either. so you end up with a one way snap fit. though i wouldnt be surprised if they didnt have a reversible fastener design on the drawing board. such an invention would really speed up turn around times.