Nuke

the biggest hold up on electric propulsion is always the electric part. solar is fine for the inner solar system, but we dont need electric propulsion for that.

you have a slug of plutonium or whatever moderated by heavy water. you simply open a valve, let the water boil off and your probe commences a fissioning. then just slacken the line. see: the china syndrome. granted there is a fair bit of nuclear engineering to do. i figure the bore would be its own section made as simple as possible, just a dumb slug of hot stuff. your sensor package could be on a small tether climbing robot that can ride the cable. and it could just be statically fixed a few meters above the bore, perhaps powered by a tec at the tail end of the bore between the hot metal and the boiling off liquid. but being able to climb lets you move samples to a more robust tester. and of course it would be full of cameras and other small sensors.

ever chug a beer so fast the can implodes? anyway in flight the pressure decreases and so this probibly doesnt happen, and also i do believe that the pursuant is heated by the engines also helping maintain positive tank pressure during flight. i think this is just a ground testing artefact. of course since its steel and not aluminum, i dont think metal fatigue is as big of an issue. i would x-ray inspect the welds in the area though.

not as big as the humidity in southeast alaska. were technically a rainforest, but on an archipelago.

my plan was to build a modest sff build that was better than my previous. that boat probibly sailed when i got the case. one of the last ncase m1s off the assembly line before it was discontinued. its a beautiful case, black anodized aluminum on all six sides. no windows, no leds. cpu was a ryzen 5800x. i normally build intel+nvidia, but intel was letting me down as of late and wanted to see how the other half lived. mobo was an msi "mpg b550i gaming edge max wifi". its the only one i could find with front panel usb-c, which i needed for vr (and ended up not using). this was cooleld with a nh-c14s. which despite being for sff builds is still a pretty beefy cooler with 7 heat pipes. this thing dwarfed the cryorig c7 i used on my 8086k build. i got 4 noctua 120mm slim fans (nf-a12x15 pwm i believe). and i also got a 92mm (nf-a9 pwm) for the rear of the case. the fans in the gpu compartment are positive pressure, the fans up top in a pass through configuration to get as much cross flow through the cpu cooler as possible (in back to side order). its a wierd config but i tested every permutation and this is the best one. psu was a corsair sf750. i was going to use my sf600 but the trend at the time was more power to the gpu. in retrospect im glad i did this. the case allows this psu to suck clean air from the intate at the side vent and blow it out the top, bypassing the rest of the system, essentially giving me 3 different cooling zones in the case. ram was corsair lpx ddr4 2x16 3600. i needed short ram and this was what i went with. system storage was a 4th gen corsair force mp600 2tb for the boot drive. im glad i did this because its bloody fast. data was on a sabrent rocket q 3rd gen 2tb. this doesnt need to be as fast. i run games off the other one. and the icing on the cake was the 7900xt. the xtx or anything from nvidia wouldnt fit. i ended up using its usb-c port for my vr headset, because its the fastest on the system. incidentally despite having 5 and 10 gig ports, i still cant get more than 2.5 gig out of any of them, except the gpu port does 2.7ish. either i got a counterfeit link cable or the hardware is lying to me about its performance, or there is a setting i haven't found yet. still haven't identified the bottleneck. traditional gaming performance is excelent though. monitor was a gigabyte m32u, 32", 4k, 144hz. its nice but developed a dead pixel some time before my gpu upgrade. i got a razor huntsman v2 keyboard and a logitech g604 wireless mouse. but they were christmas, birthday presents respectively. and im still using my 12 year old ch fighter stick, pro throttle and pedals (next upgrade perhaps). and the quest 2 of course. sound is just found on the side of the road speakers with a no name $10 chinese amp bolted to the side. i dont like modern speakers, these look like they are from the '80s, but they are full range with 8 inch subs. the amp is crap, i dont think half the parts are soldered down correctly. definitely another future upgrade (or at least open it up for a recap and reflow). all in all a ferocious machine for fitting in 12 liters (sans peripherals).

did it take you 20 months to build? mine did. got the case, the cpu, and all my cooling in may of 2021, the mobo in june, the ram in july. did a preliminary build with an old psu and gpu, ended up mining on it until i got the power supply in october, and the fast ssd in december. at which point i started using it as my daily driver. upgraded my monitor in january 2022 because upgrading gpu wasnt even an option. i didnt get my new gpu until a few weeks ago. it saw a whole new cpu generation come to pass before i called it done. money wise i sunk $2900 into the computer and another $800 for the monitor. i believe this makes it the second most expensive computer ive built.

the bad batch is back on, really liked the crosshair episode.

yea on saturday i made beer battered halibut. its a meal i like to make because there is always left over beer. unfortunately i dont remember how it came out. maybe next time dont buy a 24 pack.

anyone know how to get rated usb speeds or at least close to it? like i got a couple 10 gig ports according to my mobo manual which states usb 3.2 gen 2 with 10g speeds (one c and one a). i plug my quest 2 into it the c port with the official link cable and i only get 2.5gigabit. the cable is supposed to be able active and capable of feeding the quest at 5gb, and the quest2 itself is rated for the same. my new 7900xt has a usbc port (though im not sure what gen, but its meant to be fast enough for video) seems to give me 2.7gbit. the front panel port, which seems to have its own host controller, only gets 2.2.

id say that the drone control systems are so stronk that this is very unlikely. especially if you have a set coordinate system, say with a few tracking dots on the rover. drone control is so good they use swarms for displays during things like firework shows. but now that i think about it, just put a brushless motor in the center of the panel cluster, with an arm attached with some kind of wiper or brush. just give it a spin every now and again. the whole system could come in under a few grams.

today i almost bricked my mobo. it started when the machine wouldnt recognize my headphones. the battery died on my headphone charger again, so i plugged a wired pair into my headphone port. the computer then failed to recognize them. so i figured id try upgrading my sound drivers. this turned into upgrading all my drivers. i just used the msi update utility. it also indicated that my bios was out of date, so i updated that as well. computer rebooted to flash, and then the screen went black. i waited a good half hour before i figured something went wrong and tried to reboot. all was black. i had to auto usb flash feature, but i got it up and running again, spend an hour resetting all my bios settings and another just to calibrate fans. most mobos have an automatic fan calibration feature, not mine unfortunately. as for the headphone problem, i never fixed it. i did find i have to reboot to get it to recognize my headphones. but it doesn't seem to detect when they are plugged in and switch devices accordingly. a reboot is a workaround at least.

just something i was thinking of with regards to hydrogen as energy storage. as i understand it, hydrogen storage is effectively a battery with high self discharge. if by charging the interior it would create a local repellant force which would limit hydrogen loss through tank walls and reduce tank embrittlement, you could stop or reduce hydrogen's tendency to squeeze through things. perhaps there is something you can do with metamaterials. and in my experience some cats behave as if they are full of explosives.

can you improve hydrogen containment by putting a negative charge on the tank? just an idea i had. just dont create any sparks.

ask again when starship is flying. thats going to unlock destinations and fancy missions all over the system. a lander with a tethered ice probe (and it could be powered just with radiothermal heaters) seems viable. the more tether you got the deeper you can go. not sure if you could drill deep enough to get into the under ice ocean but you could get some good data out of it. id probibly also facilitate a system for collecting samples from the sides of the bore hole and winch them up to the lander for analysis.

i heard willie nelson has it. i guess he is going to have to stick to brownies for awhile.

many a song has been written about that kind of girl. the songs are usually better than the girls they were written about. relationships are something i burned out on a long time ago. i just come to the realization that i don't much care for other people. and now for my gripe. got the new monitor, the new computer, the new gpu. it took a couple years to build it and i think its the most money ive ever spent on a build. and just today a dead pixel appeared. fml. all technology is a scam.

still there is only so much im willing to take from an employer. but it my experience, relationships are harder to find than jobs. so if you hit it off. i mean like seriously, not some fling, some wham bam thank you ma'am situation, actual long term relationship like where you move in together or get engaged. then you might consider changing employers. do it gracefully, be transparent about it. take your 30 days with the caveat that you are unwilling to relocate, keep it business as usual during orifice office hours, and what you do in your free time is not their business. this is important, get a new job lined up asap. if its important you should persue it, but do one or the other, if you try to do both you are in for some misery. its not like you dont have options. also you must consider the possibility that she is the one that pulled the strings to get you transferred. perhaps because she didn't have the heart to let you down herself or perhaps she was protecting her own career. there might be less there than you think there is.

well you could always quit. id quit if they told me i had to move.

so much this. the latter does everything i like to see in a war movie. mainly showing both sides of the conflict. what was your opinion of ad astra? i think that movie was kind of disappointing, thats one i definitely felt like i wasted ten bucks and 2 hours on. lost me at exploding monkies. ended up having a really nihilistic message. felt like they should have just made a movie about moon pirates.

the tv show could have been better with respect towards the books. the books were excellent. but because the show had so many bumps along the way. syfy dumping it, then amazon picking it up, alex getting canceled, and covid causing the final season to be way too short. it suffered from pacing issues too. spent way too much time on book 2 and not enough time on book 3. the books fleshed out the characters pretty well, and i would have not bothered to read them if the first couple seasons didnt wow me.

i mean it is a movie, and i did enjoy the movie. though its fun to go back and deconstruct it for realism. we all did the same thing with the expanse, and we still love the show. you can hit perfect science accuracy in a few things and end up missing a whole lot of others. they need an existential crisis to drive the plot so combined dust bowl and potato famine kind of does the trick. only in retrospect does it feel a little bit contrived. is there like an extended cut or something that i didnt see?

render brick installed, and now putting it through several games (all at 4k). still havent found one that drops the fps below my refresh of 144hz. except doom eternal, ended up dropping down as low as 120 hz. i played starcraft 2, which i got to run like a slide show, granted using a mod with unlimited unit cap, i had 1k supply and spammed carriers. i think sc is cpu bound with that many units on the field. 170 in mwo (though i didnt turn everything on, to stay competitive). maybe i will do some scorn and stray, as those are the newest games i got and maybe il see if i can turn on rt shaders in minecraft. im not sure how to make ksp spam my gpu, i always find its cpu bound and never really does anything to the gpu. i was mining with my 2070 super while playing and didnt notice so much as a hiccup.

have you ever tried embedded development? socs and microcontrollers and the like. very few resources to work with, requiring very low level (or at least close to the metal) programming. i tried playing with fpgas but they broke my brain. i also didn't know what to do with it, they are usually used for integrating larger systems, but it was hard to find an exciting application for them as a hobbyist and just seemed like a solution looking for a problem well outside of my capabilities. i suppose you could also get into ai dev, that's currently cutting edge and could very well turn into a lucrative career. so get in on it early. there is also quantum programming if you want to be on an even more cutting edge.

on the way out i was handed a shopping list and i jarred my knee on the way up, so i just took a cab home. i haven't installed it yet, i was really tired and went to bed as soon as i got home. after 5 hours of sleep i decided to take care of internet things first and will be installing it in a couple hours. also after holding the card in my hand and realizing its one of the smaller ones, i will hence forth call video cards "render bricks". the thought that a component of this mass is held on by 2 tiny screws on a flimsy bracket and a pcie slot certainly gives me confidence in its structural integrity. i really want the forward bracket to become standard issue, or better yet a 4 point hard mounting system. im honestly even willing to use mortar at this point.

we seem to have a really good track record for stretching the mission on these things. but if every mission ends in "er... not enough power" and provides scientific value to the last. it seems you could get more science/$ through longer duration missions and more robust rovers. everyone though sending helicopters to mars was stupid, until they did it and it turned out to be a resounding success. launch a rover (for collecting samples), base station (with science lab), swarms of micro bots for recon and no fewer than 2 helicopters for recon and dust removal and ferrying samples back to the base station for analysis. i think it could work if you could get it all to fit in one launch (potentially cheaper launches in the very near future).