Nuke

i tried something like this using kerbal constructs and a climbing part. just couldnt get the traction to climb vertically for very long or very fast. also i had my tether in 2km segments and only installed them to 50km. needless to say i had alignment issues.

i like the expanse strategy of shooting through drive cones with railguns. otherwise their consumption of ammunition for both missiles and pdcs seems like it would be prohibitively expensive. both in terms of mass expendature to move it about, performance lost for your ship, and in direct cost. the only thing missiles really seem to have going for them is extreme range and the ability to lay dormant and drift for years. ive seen features like that on spin stabilized asat weapons. get the missile up to closing speed with the main thruster, a ring of lateral thrust srbs is a lot more reliable than a liquid fueled engine. the thing i find facinating is that they sync the thruster firing with the rotation angle and they can nudge the thing in any angle. this one looks like its taking it to a new level, the charges all seem to be aligned through the same point along the center axis, which i bet is the cg of the missile (probibly after burning its main thruster). once consumed the casings probibly make excellent shrapnel with some explosive fittings. not sure what the red thing is. looks to spindly to be a thruster. antenna perhaps. but i suspect they use a compressed gas to spin up the missile prior to launching. "impeller" makes since if thats the case.

i had to reinstall linux again. i think i changed the wrong setting and broke my display driver. trying to configure the power system to start up and shut down correctly. told it to rotate the display into portrait mode, since the gui for the power board wouldnt fit on the display (really need to see if they have a newer one with more pixels). i think i screwed up the power settings and hard power cycled it when i wanted it to halt first, and that bad reboot resulted in the display not working. i could still get into ssh but i didnt know how to fix the screen from the command line. so reinstalling linux was the way to go. linux is like that. it works when it works, getting it to that point is a different matter. the next step i guess is to print the outer casing. but i wanted to install controls and speakers, which will take some modeling work, printing, and some code. ive already modeled the base panels, so it shouldnt be too much work once i decide what i want on the thing. joysticks, a trackball, some buttons. speakers are in pre-engineered enclosures and the dacs/amps are i2s. the mkIV had too much digital noise in the sound and this should clear it up keeping them away from the pi. i got some 12-bit i2c adcs for the joysticks, port expanders for buttons (though i may just use gpio for those, i2c bus is already pretty cluttered with power management chips). big problem is finding a layout that fits on my printer bed.

pi tablet mark VI is alive! no magic smoke deletion, no exploding lithium ion. still needs outer casement, but the subrame all the parts bolt to is all one piece.

found a github repo with a raytraced version of dxx. so i played descent until 4am last night. it was also pretty snappy.

artificial intelligence has to be better than natural stupidity. worry when they invent artificial stupidity.

just wasted 2 hours on the phone applying for a local streaming service. basic package with free streaming device promotion. the guy was clearly from another country, had a thick accent, could barely understand him, and he talked really slow. first half hour, confirming that i was who i said i was. second half hour, communicating what i wanted. at the 1 hour mark, he tries to sell me a phone and preaches to me about the glories of phone ownership and how its required for everything. cell phones have serious mark of the beast vibes, and he pushed it like a mormon trying to save your soul (which is already tied up in a previous agreement with satan). no. make a phone with a 32+ inch screen and we will talk. il leave it at home, in a shed, like the amish. an hour thirty in and now comes the part of the deal they did not make clear in their adverts. you have to stay on the service for 24 months, an internet plan ive been on since 2013 mind you. the words legally binding contract came up. mom was tired and went to take a nap half way through. i snuck off to tuck her in while i was on hold. and when i thought i confirmed enough things, he asked me to confirm more things, gave me his number so he could farm commission, and asked me to fill out a servey. just agree to the servey and hang up, it saves time. its sad when you try to give people money and they want more.

looks like bartertown is going to need new management. rip.

things can get pretty toasty before they fail. but at some point before that you are losing performance.

were talking maybe less than a few grams of explosives, as little as necessary, its just that starship needed a little bit more. steel just doesn't propagate cracks the way aluminum does. as for off the shelf, that seems to be the way things go for safety equipment. you want a tried and true design, and features more than a standard demo charge (telemetry and long range remote detonation are the big ones). whether they were left over from falcon testing or obtained by a supplyer of space hardware, idk. scott manly did a video on that not to long ago.

1. carve out a sphere underground. 2. line sphere with reinforced concrete. 3. under the sphere install a heat exchanger, with the other side being a steam loop. 4. apply lead blankets to the surface (i imagine spraying on a layer of molten metal, building up a few coats, but i suppose you could just install panels). 5. suspend nuclear warhead from ceiling holding it in the center. 6.detonate nuke. 7 pump pool of molten lead through heat exchanger, the out put could either go to a spray coat system or to a lead panel molding facility. 8. redress sphere with lead. repeat 5-8. it might work better if you evacuate the sphere of atmosphere, but that might prove problematic being underground. but you wouldnt have to design a sphere that can handle directly applied nuclear shockwaves. not sure how fast you can cycle. nukes are also kind of expensive. if you can generate a pool of metal that can stay molten for a few days, it would give you plenty of time to reset. then can you supply nukes fast enough? you would probibly need the plutonium from a lot of different fission plants to keep it pulsing. perhaps instead of pumping down the chamber, replace air with deuterium/tritium mix. then you just need a basic fission core to set it off. thermonuclar desing usually focuses the x-rays on a smaller volume, but if you could reflect the x-rays back into the sphere and let it bounce around long enough, it may impart fusion level energies, you could also pressurize the hell out of the thing being underground to get the density you need. but i dont know enough about nuclear weapons design to know if that would work or not.

they were using a tougher material than any previous rocket. as i understand it the fts was more or less an off the shelf model that was designed to rupture aluminum tanks. solving the problem seems just a matter of using a bigger explosive device.

bureaucrats always overvalue their existence. ultimately they just want a job that involves no real work and no need to create anything, and they are willing to make life miserable for everyone else to get it.

intel wants to drop 32-bit legacy cruft from the x86 architecture. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisioning-future-simplified-architecture.html

i always love crude fixes to complex problems. i hope an engineer came by and marked it with a sharpie first. "cut it off at the top of the line, we didnt factor in the weight of the ink."

been here since november 2011.

sometimes i want to throw a significantly bigger rock.

i used to visit my sister out in the sticks periodically. space is more interesting when you can see it. i once sat on the roof all night on a warm summer day, much to the appreciation of the local mosquitoes giant bloodsucking helicopters.

this year its all oppenheimer and dune. no other movies have caught my interest, and cocaine bear was less interesting than it should have been.

recently binged sean connery movies. outland came up. splat. incedentally this movie was inspiration for the expanse, on what not to do. still totally worth watching though.

hypothermia isnt for me.

incidentally the coast line is less than 50 feet away from where i live and this is subsidized housing. a lot of these southeast alaska towns are long and skinny, barely two roads in from the coast, so live anywhere and its oceanfront property or pretty close to it.

no. i thought about ordering custom gpu cables. shorter, thicker, higher quality wires and connectors. shorter runs should give better airflow. i could do just the gpu connectors to save money but the mobo power cable is way too long. none of these runs are longer than 6 inches except the cpu power cable. i got a work around, and thats just to supersample from 1440p. keeps the temps somewhat stable. granted i havent ran the game since then, hoping a few patches of optimization will fix it in the middle term. also its a new model video card model so a few driver updates should also help.

best tape decks in the known universe.

i had to get up at an ungodly hour when hulu decided not to work and interrupted mom's morning news show. i got an unspecified error where the chrome app tried to launch. some digging and it turned out to be a corrupt cookie. i had to clear those and when i went to log in, the captcha system kept demanding that i train their ai. i did 4 of them before i got mad and hit the kill switch to reboot the machine. then i remember a video i watched a couple months ago how captcha can detect if your mouse is behaving as if controlled by a bot. of course to simplify things for my mom such that the whole contraption only uses one remote rather than a remote and an unreliable media center mouse/kb that never works and loses connection all the time. so i put an arduino pro-micro in the case with an ir sensor to receive scan codes from unused buttons on the universal remote, and provide emulated mouse movements with the numpad and remote start. its crude but functional, and allows my disabled mother to have a modicum of independence. except when the services you pay a substantial amount of money on every month decides that you are a bot and decides to corrupt your cookies and lock you out without so much as a useful error message.