Nuke

ads keep telling me im losing my hair. i actually think i have more now. that or products i neither want (cloud services) nor can afford (car ads, lol). really the last time i saw an ad for a product i actually use, it was coca cola. at which point, whats the point? i already buy the stuff in absurd quantities. then ads for pharmaceuticals. if i need those im going to wait for my doctor to perscribe the generic, and then never take them. i have strong doubts about the efficacy of advertising.

until they do something wrong, private division has done nothing wrong. this is a decision made by a 3rd party. it just may affect the end product in ways outside of their control. i can actually see that causing major lawsuits against unity if they force this on developers.

on one side i think unity is just adapting to modern trends in gaming. on the other side, i don't like modern games all that much with few exceptions (ksp being one of them). also just because unity has these features, i think it will ultimately be up to the studio to use them. needless to say i will be very disappointed if ksp2 goes "to the dark side". unfortunately i don't trust gamers to make the correct decisions. they seem to have been a frog in a pot for the last 2 possibly 3 decades, gradually giving into slightly more and more draconian policies. all made more problematic by the fact that many gamers are children and teens who are unaware of what they are giving up in the long term. games that dont respect your time, games that are financially exploitative, don't let you have control over your own saves and force reliance on cloud services, moderation that goes too far, game death when the company unplugs the servers. i dont like supporting a company or franchise i dont trust to not stab me in the back at some point, but so many developers give in to the temptation.

i think npp is the only near term option for manned interstellar travel at present. just be sure the crew is well trained in shock absorber maintenance, otherwise splat. i think we could do it in as little as 50 years of lead time. provided you get everyone on board, including reallocating 100% of the world's nuclear arsenals as rocket fuel. and you would need to get everyone to pony up their nuclear secrets for the best optimization of the pulse unit design.

the earth at that distance would be but a spec.

our school also had a full cnc machine shop, and they never let us use it.

i have always been disappointed by my lack of chemistry knowledge. most we ever got to do in high school is making co2. nilered has single handedly fixed that for me.

seems like you would just shift the frequencies over towards the visible part of the spectrum. you see rgb but what you are really seeing is 3 different ir frequency bands.

back when i was in high school my bus hit a pickup truck. truck was totaled, but we barely felt anything. we didn't even have to switch busses because the damage was minimal.

moms birthday was a few days ago and she freaked out when i made her a french vanilla cake instead of a white cake. frankly i cant tell the two apart and its certainly not worth a 68 year old acting like a 8 year old.

i think the primary use of the bones is more to transfer energy from the ear drum to the working fluid in the cochlea. so if it does produce any gain its not that much. changing its geometry may also alter its resonant frequency and mess with all the harmonics. i think the biggest gain factor is in the sensory density of the cochlea. of course im using information gleaned from posters at the doctors office and some basic knowledge of audio circuits from my electronics hobby. its very interesting the solution that evolution found. it goes through a couple transduction steps and gets over the lack of amplification with higher sensitivity. i cant imagine either the bones or cochlea having much gain where as audio amplifiers can have a gain of 10 or more. the most interesting feature in the inner ear is the bio equivalent of a mems gyro.

i figure a tail would come in handy in zero g.

there are plenty of critters in the world that have better hearing than we do. the outer ear i believe evolved to maximize omnidirectional hearing. useful if you are a primate living in a tree, where threats could come from any direction. a lot of the extra sensitivity that cats and some dogs have come from the big radar dish ears that can be pointed in different directions and can focus the sounds a lot better. its sort of like in radio if you want to use an omnidirectional antennae you get less range than a directional antennae. but with radio you can also amplify the signal. the bones in the ear provide a form of mechanical amplification. these could be modified for more mechanical advantage and thus a higher gain. the cochlea can also be modified to have a higher density array of hairs. assuming all things are linear, and thats a big assumption, doubling the hairs and nerve receptors should double your gain. but evolution probibly already figured out the best density for survival and maybe we are at the limit of density where improving it might come with diminishing returns or tradeoffs. if you want to change the frequency response, then the cochlea geometry can be modified. make it bigger if you want more of the low end for example. so better hearing with inner ear mods only is possible. modifying the outer ear would also help and also give you an opportunity for cat girls.

babylon 5. canada has some good actors but they have some terrible shooting locations that all look the same, and being in alaska i get the same scenery from my deck. hollywood is at least a couple hours distance from more varied biomes. its only down side is that it exists in the state of california.

i bought a cantalope on tuesday, and by friday it started deteriorating rapidly. so i had to cube it and put it on ice. i swear we get the worst produce ever.

seeing as i live not to far from a float plane dock, id say that water landings are pretty routine. i really wish they would bring back large format sea planes.

usually for these kind of quandaries i have to ask, why would you want to do it that way? anti-gravity in star wars is just so ubiquitous that i think in this case "why wouldn't you want to do it that way?" seems more appropriate. though hovering a star destroyer over a planet like that is not going to be free. it might be negligible, it might be in the ship's capabilities. but you still have to move your ship into position and you still have to slow down. but when your moff wants to put up a show of force, so to speak, over that one city on a planet with presumably other cities on it. they can hang it directly over whatever else they want to have in frame. i think directors like to have people on the ground see the ships in space above them, even though its completely wrong. so when the show with the bucks does it, everyone goes "cool", and the ones who can rush to copy it. i feel like we should force these directors to film the iss from the ground before they are allowed to do it in movies. now its just going to be yet another trope posing as a stand in for proper world building and a substitute for abstract though. i felt this was out of place even when they did it to the heighliner in dune, even though the universe has anti grav tech, and who are you to tell a steersman how to park his heighliner. but its wrong later on when the harkonnen use it to launch their landing craft. last thing you want to do is launch an attack from a ship pinned in one spot by a suspensor network. the guild is totally in on the whole invasion of arrakis thing (as per book) and can park their heighliner on a more appropriate trajectory where you can do a faster re-entry in less time. dune really isn't about the space stuff so i can let this slide. i have the same thing about inertial dampeners in star trek. just because you have them, why wouldnt you orient your decks rocket style? that gives you a backup for when the inertial dampeners break and you dont have to waste a ton of power on gravity plating at various levels of impulse power.

if were talking the original trilogy, they were very consistent.

star trek is a good example of setting the rules and sticking to them. there are even subtle starship design rules which have added a lot to the franchise and are responsible for some of the most beautiful spaceships ever made (heres looking at you d'deridex). of course more recent iterations of trek tend to ignore those rules or fail to interpret them correctly. magic mushroom drive being the most egregious sin. i think this was done so they could have faster ships than star wars, however the reason star wars has the fastest ships, is because no one bothered to figure out how long transit times should be. instead of having a rule of thumb (which star trek did) ships went as fast as the plot required. id rather sci-fi acknowledge that space is big and treat it accordingly.

even the mars helicopter found second wind without an "essential to flight" sensor.

i find its often more important that sci-fi be consistent. give the universe a set of rules to follow right away, and then stick to them like glue. they should make sense in the context of the universe in which they exist. if they align closely to irl physics, thats good too. but i dont think its required to make a good story. just remember that your audience tends to be nerds, and they will find every plothole you commit to paper or screen.

there are just too many things now. i still haven't caught up on the clone wars yet.

i had a dream where i had a pet giant isopod named podrich.

i stopped spelling things correctly when i lost faith in educational institutions.

having ships with very large reactors, something like the iter tokamak, i think would solve this. there is likely a lower band for fusion, especially when using magnetic confinement. you require minimum reactor volumes on the order of meters due to scaling laws for the reactor design. these would both be very massive and would represent a lot of capitol. so it would be impractical to use these drives on missiles (barring long range planet killers, but thats a whole other can of worms). missiles might instead depend on chemical engines or beamed power thermal engines or a combination of both. two stage missiles where the first stage is beamed power, the firing ship gets these things up to intercept velocity with power from its own reactor. once out of range of its ship, it would rely on the chemical engine for the terminal phase. ships might fire swarms of these things to maximize the kill probability (this adds the interesting scenario where the ship is a sitting duck while launching swarms since its using energy required by its engine). you might also use gun-missile hybrid weapons using multistage guns or linear accelerators to get a lot of initial velocity for intercept. then use srb charges for the terminal phase (some spin stabilized asat weapons do this). these ships could use their engines while firing but would be more massive. this would be the option for npp as you have replaced a big fusion reactor with a giant pusher plate. the limit here is not velocity but the delta-v of the terminal phase. ships cannot outrun missiles, but they can out burn them. so battle is like a cheetah vs an impala. missiles can accelerate faster in their terminal phase, but its delta-v limited. a target can be thought of as an expanding radius. a target ship will engage in evasive maneuvers the second it detects incoming ordinance, and this radius will depend on how much space the ship can cover during the intercept phase, we can call this the evasion radius. so you fire your missiles in a pattern that enables it to cover as much of that radius as possible. the delta-v of the terminal phase limits how much space each missile can cover. each missile will have an assured destruction radius from the point where it exits the intercept phase, any target in that radius is effectively dead. combat doctrine would involve firing enough missiles so that their destruction radii (think of it as a sphere) completely fill the target's evasion radius sphere with enough overlap to deny survival. this is not always possible, you might not have enough ordinance or you might be too far and the the ship would have too much time to escape. you could have dialog like: "sir, firing solution is at 60% coverage with the full magazine, do i engage?" "negative, if we miss they could turn and swamp us". that could be interesting if you plan on having a lot of tactical dialogue. multiple ships can also converge their firing solutions for maximum kill probability but requires the light delay to be significantly short enough. use of stealth and concealment can add additional tactical flare. think you are in a 1v1 battle, fire your ordinance. then a ship pops out of a sensor shadow and unloads its missiles, while the target ship launches its missiles to fill the gaps. this makes sense if the things being fought over are immobile like big space colonies or planets/asteroids/moon systems. you could intentionally build in messy locations and hide corvettes among the space debris.