Nuke

pretty sure you can do something with the aerodynamics to keep that thing flying straight. also its spun up so that should help spin stabilize it.

i think my solution is to dispense with the rest of the ship, put everything in the torus and either get rid of the hub or put your lander there endurance style. keeping things like engines and fuel tanks in spin gravity helps solve ullage issues. you might need to beef up the structural components though. but it seems like it would be a bit better than carrying bearings, motors and crew access tunnels (and all the airlocks and hatches involved). you can also put a big aeroshell on one side and use it for aerocapture maneuvers.

just use windows file sharing. put all machines on the same workgroup and share whatever folders you need access to, be sure you give yourself permissions and log on with that account. you might also consider upgrading the os on the old computer, 7 would be a lot less fiddly than xp. i routinely share with my win7 3d printing rig and ive been able to get at it with windows versions all the way up to 11, ive also been able to talk to xp virtual machines this way. there are probibly tutorials on youtube or whatever that could explain it better than i could.

saw it on friday. i thought it was pretty good. dont think ive had that kind of experience at the theater for a very long time. lately ive been leaving the theater wishing id just spent my money on beer instead. this was not one of those movies. im actually shocked our little non profit 1-screen 1-movie a week theater at the highschool got it so fast. it normally takes us 3 months to get movies.

i grew up with slasher flicks. back then nobody gave a rats left buttock if you let your 5 year olds watch "scary" movies. of course by the time i was 10 i was so desensitized to the horror genre that they were almost comedy at that point.

seems like rent-an-engine was more an evolution of the trend to make secondary income on the sale of an engine to a company wanting to make a similar game. then came the games that seemed to exist only as a tech demo for the engine, with the engine sales being the primary motivation. that happened with every ut, q3a, doom3, crysis, etc. game engines like unity, which as far as i know was not made with any particular kind of game in mind, but built as more of a framework. i guess there is a business incentive to keep the game development out of house where you can focus on the never ending job of engine development and maintenance. its also good for long running f2p or subscription games where you need to have a long term upgrade path to keep the game compatible with ever changing hardware capabilities.

ive done that twice and both times ended up limping for a week.

i have a cat that's heavier.

healthcare is stupid. so stupid i would rather die of something preventable than put myself in their care. whats more, healthcare is evil. it likes to cast patients to the four winds for the myriads of diagnostic tests, book flights on monopolistic airlines that skimp on the legspace, put them and their mandatory escorts in shadey hotels, grant them food coupons that can only be claimed in a hospital cafeteria, rip off cab drivers with their voucher system so much that they refuse to service them, pump funds into some of the most opulent architecture i have ever seen, all so they can do a 20 minute test that comes up inconclusive. granted this wasnt my diagnostic, i was the escort. but it seriously has me questioning whether its a good idea to go to extreme measures to enable humans to live to ages > 50. also our town wants to spend 200 million on a new hospital when they cant even afford to put doctors and equipment into the hospital we got which are capable of doing basic 20 minute tests.

didnt quite happen today. but i finally had to get out of town to take care of mom's diagnostic escort duty. the stupidity of the health care scheduling and the blatant ripping off of everyone involved will de discussed in the negative thread. but while we were in anchorage, i got to meet my new nephew. spent a few hours bouncing him on my knee until he leaked poo all over my pants. somehow i always get stuck with the members of my family who wear diapers.

alaska still told by federal government that they cannot drill on the gargantuan, desolate, reindeer infested wasteland.

season 3 opener was pretty good.

so far all the science has been done with small scale centrifuges. having seen a carny do the humpty hump on the wall of a spun up graviton (an excellent piece of showmanship mind you) way back in the 90s. i think the whole large centrifuge concept has legs. its really just a matter of design optimization. i like the idea of the ring ship, like the endurance from interstellar. centrifuge has other benefits besides crew comfort. for example you can solve a lot of tank balancing and ullage concerns. its easier to move fuel around when it has a down. this is probibly not on the timetable for a mars mission though. i do think keeping a couple tethered starships at roughly mars gravity would help give the astronauts their mars legs. you don't want to get to mars and find your crew cant get out of their couches and are unable to do essential mission tasks. not to mention the second ship gives you some redundancy and perhaps some extra cargo capacity, more emergency consumables and the like. the mars mission can be the beta test for future centrifuge concepts and gives the astronauts some science experiments to do during the long trip.

not if you have more than one cat. in that case both will become cluttered.

pessimism and optimism are two sides of the same coin, a currency for the delusional. its a sign that you need to get a cat. my desk always has at least one cat on it.

im not sure large counter torque wheels are even required anymore from building various large centrifuge ships in ksp. counter torque could be provided by rcs. once the centrifuge is spun you only need to counter any friction loss at the bearings (which can be very small with some bearing types) and losses from maneuvers. there is a point where the extra propellant requirements will make the high angular velocity rotor a viable alternative, but thats all a matter of the mission design. it may be just as viable to leave it at the space dock to save the mass. ive built some with rotors (usually an equipment bay with a motor and some ore tanks inside spinning at high rpm), some without and it can work either way.

doing maneuvers on a rotating space craft is pretty straight forward mathematically. im pretty sure nasa already uses it on spin stabilized space probes. rcs thrusters perform differently while in a rotating frame. say you want to do a pitch moment, and you get a yaw instead. its sort of like how burning normal/antinormal rotates your orbital plane along the axis from where you perform the burn, to the center of the thing you are orbiting. and its pretty much the same thing, just replace gravity with structural binding and also are constrained to circular orbits by structure. there is some vector math for this kind of thing but it escapes my memory.

i think the choice really depends on how good your engines are. if your engines are going to be on most of the time and providing low thrust, id go with roll. if you are mostly doing intermittent burns with chemical engines, you are probibly better off with the tumbler. the difference is that the tumbler needs to be reeled in for each maneuver, barring some really complicated and failure prone control system. if you got a torch drive, you don't need either.

people who say that star wars has sold out just aren't paying attention. its been doing that since the late '70s. early star wars toys were extremely popular even before the empire strikes back came out. people who come into the series for the prequel trilogy came in at the tail end of the merch craze and didn't see some of the blatant cash grabs that came before. of course the prequel trilogy restoked that fire and its still burning pretty well. the merch sales feed back into the franchise and allow more stuff. star wars really wouldn't be what it is today without the merch. it would have tailed off into increasingly lower budget films, sort of what happened with the original star trek movies. but unlike those i dont think that star wars can stand on the merits of its story telling alone. it needs the visual spectacle to work. that is expensive and the merch helps fund it. anyway i just watched the first four episodes after several weeks of listening to people complain about it on youtube. so it turned out better than i expected it to be, yet still kind of felt meh. at least they try to connect the dots with its pre-established lore a bit better than the current iterations of the trekverse does. but they both tend to have the bad habit of trying to undermine well established and popular characters in favor of new ones. if they could stop doing that, maybe i can appreciate the newer shows better. just create, and flesh out, a new character rather than try to turn an old one into something they are not.

im honestly not sure it doesn't apply. its a distributed computing problem after all. crypto works by making sure all the miners have a copy of the complete ledger or at least a piece of it. with currencies that's miners, who are incentivized financially to hold this data. all the data is backed up and constantly checked for data integrity and to integrate new transactions on the ledger. it is intentionally inefficient as everyone needs to check each others work and watch out for maliciously mangled transactions. which is why it uses so much power. that kind of thing is on its way out soon. different use cases have different requirements. nfts use the blockchain as data storage and drm. for the purposes of storing large amounts of scientific data you would want to store the data, with parity, and keep that data in as many places as possible while also trying to keep the number of copies out on the participant nodes more or less the same from block to block. this avoids rare blocks (those who remember the early days of peer to peer file sharing may remember the situation where your file is done, expect for that one block that nobody seems to have). people complain about the energy costs of the blockchains, but long term, reliable, bulk data storage is not free energy wise (nor cost for that matter). you need big drive arrays that consume a lot of power just to have plugged in. and you constantly need to be checking the data for bit rot. failures are a regular occurrence on these systems just because they have a lot more moving parts. those errors need to be tolerable and recoverable. even cold storage has its limits. part of the reason the data may be lost is that some of the tapes are corrupted. you need to periodically check their tapes and see if they match their hashes of them and make fresh copies to ensure the tapes produce a good signal when they pass the read head. a tape thats been sitting in a warehouse for 10 years might produce a weaker signal and at some point the drive wont be able to tell a 1 from a 0. on a large enough data set, you will need to have a guy who's full time job it is to maintain those tapes. i kind of think that is where seti screwed up or simply did not have the budget. i wouldn't be surprised if storage oriented data centers spend most of their power on keeping the data legible, or at least keep the hardware that does that cool. as for the tapes, you can run them really slow over a very sensitive head with a really high resolution analog sampling, and some top notch signal processing. maybe a neural net that can sniff the patters and find problem areas. that would probibly take a couple orders of magnitude more storage than the contents of the tape itself. not to mention non-trivial compute power and data recovery specialists. again aint no budget there.

paying a positive amount of currency for a video card in this day and age is absurd. my 2070 super cost me -$1500. an aside: ksp uses so little gpu horsepower that my framerate doesnt stutter at 4k with the miner on in the background. another aside: moneies are wierd. on the outside they seem to follow the same conservation laws as the rest of the universe. yet its possible to make it generate more. becoming wealthy is the physics equivalent of making an em drive hover.

when you have non-trivial amounts of data, hardware and data become synonymous. the lhc needs supercomputer level storage and processing. so much data that its cheaper/faster to make a hard copy on a storage array and air lift it to another lab than it is to transmit it over the internet. its insane the kind of data some of these science installations can generate.

everyone has their hobbies.

why not use LiFePO4 batteries. i think they are ideal for power wall scenarios, and dont explode as much as lithium ion.

this reminds me of my last pc build. it was on the shelf for months before i decided to start using it as a computer.