Nuke

still not as cumbersome as the blue whale space program.

i figure they are well equipped for agriculture. they have a great ability to clear land. they might tend to grow crops like melons and gourd vegetables, tall grasses, perhaps corn. agriculture would eventually come with a need for food storage, so silos may be a thing that they would construct. possibly out of timbers and mud. while shelter may be something they can make use of, larger animals tend to be better at maintaining their body heat in cold conditions, and are well adapted to radiating surplus heat during the hot months. so i dont think they would have the same shelter requirements that we do. the construction of shaded coverings might provide them some comfort in the summer months, but would not be required to survive. moving into areas with colder climates would necessitate better shelters. wetter climates would require a different construction technology than mud and timber. stone construction perhaps or exploitation of natural caves (which actually is a thing wild elephants have been observed doing). mastering fire may be somewhat harder for an elephant as most of the techniques are two handed, so it would need to be a team effort. then again having a trunk means it would be fairly easy to stoke the fire, so perhaps a technique involving using the trunk to hurl flit rocks at each other in a pile of tinder to start it followed by blowing on it with the trunk. then applying progressively larger tinder until a steady fire is achieved. mastery of fire then comes with the ability to manufacture charcoal, pottery, bricks, and eventually the smelting of metals. the ability to forge weapons which can defend their young from predation will provide a boon to their survival and also open more construction methods. forward progress is within the grasp of their physical capabilities, only their mental capabilities hold them back. needless to say the elephant space program would be interesting, to say the least.

from the sound of it these only seem to work on radiant heat. but you probibly need to keep the cell cool just like any other solar panel. from the picture there seems to be a water block on the cell. this thing would be put in close proximity to a very hot thing and so needs more cooling than a solar panel. i dont think this is like a tec where you need a cold side in order to generate electricity, but you do need to keep it cold to maximize efficiency.

no but ive seen video of an octopus opening a jar, from the inside.

sometimes i wish i had ape foothands for those tricky soldering joints. i think it would be somewhat dangerous to hold a hot iron between my toes. foothands also seem like they would be useful in zero gravity. for navigating both in and outside of the vehicle/station.

you might need to give them some active components to condence their heat into a smaller area and then heat up a non-nuclear material. but that loop will probibly cost some efficiency. i believe you can also use white phosphorous to convert radiation into heat and light. but that stuff is dangerous and wants to explode under even ideal conditions. there might be a middle ground between an rtg and a nuclear reactor that one could explore. solid state nuclear reactor sounds like a nice technology to have. perhaps have a magnetically contained fission core surrounded by tpvs (now i need to go look up the magnetic properties of fissionables).

ive heard it said that some great apes actually have better evolved hands than we do. of course those hands are evolved for mostly arboreal use, so they are simply better at climbing trees. seeing aliens with less evolved hands in scifi makes me wonder how they ever developed tool use. we used to have a hamster who liked little cheese crackers. i liked watching him hold onto his food while he bit off pieces to shove into his cheek pouches (i like to think he ate some of it). that's actually way more evolved than a cat's paw, which are great at climbing, jumping, stealth, and killing things, but ive seen my cats try to hold objects in their paws, drop them, and try to pick them up again. thus i have my doubts about cats ever developing tool use. and i like to think the hamster stands a chance, so long as he doesn't get eaten by a cat. this particular hamster died years ago, of old age, so he escaped cat-death even though they always liked to watch him while licking their lips. and then i realize it does not necessarily be hands. the kitties can and do carry objects in their jaws a lot better than they do in their hands. in fact its their only means of moving objects, they can both bite hard and be gentle enough to say move kittens around, anything they do with their paws in terms of manipulating must be done in a stationary position. this got me thinking about elephants. some have been trained to paint for example (the alaska zoo up in anchorage used to have an elephant that could paint, and would sell the artworks to help fund their wildlife programs), and it takes some dexterity to use a paint brush. im not sure if elephants in the wild have been known for their tool use, but its certainly something they are capable of learning. whats more it can carry things, which cats are not so good at. they are a pretty intelligent species, and i cant imagine that developing agriculture is very far from their current capabilities. being limited to a single trunk is probibly not as big of a limitation as you would thing, as they are very social animals. 2 or 3 elephants working together could probibly weave baskets and make gardening tools. and being powerful creatures, would make plowing a field a fairly simple job. though they would need a lot bigger fields than humans given their appetites.

i guess rtgs just got a whole lot more efficient. i can see a move from pv panels to solar thermal. say using a thin film of mylar rather than heavier solar cells, pointing at a condensed array of these. it stands to scale up better with distance from the sun simply by scaling up your reflectors and using the same collector you would closer to the sun.

if shes yowling she is in heat. get your cat fixed as soon as possible. because once they start marking they never stop even after they are fixed. dont let her escape or you will have kittens. not that kittens are bad, they are quite cute and its nice to watch 'em grow up. if you end up with kittens wait till they are weaned and then you can usually hand them out free within an hour or two. could be worse. tracking in these parts drops off at seattle. then it shows up anywhere between 2 days and a week later. ups is the only service that drops it at the door though. anything else and i have to walk to the post office about a mile up hill.

^good. i read lots of things, i never bother to remember what.

i mostly worry that nuclear fear mongering is doing more harm than good. had there not been massive protests in the '70s forward, we would be a lot more ahead of the curve in regards to climate change. we would probibly still have had more growing pains when developing the technology if it was more widely adopted. but the thing is we would have solved the problems. gasoline was once considered a waste product because of its volatility, but we learned to work with it safely. rockets are a lot safer than they used to be. airliners as well, the list goes on and on. will there be long term consequences and risks, yea, but everything has risk. wow this thread is old, meh, i didnt write that for nothing. post.

so the os on my old rig (the one i replaced mere months ago) went completely tango uniform. i figure windows 10 pushed a bad update and broke my ethernet and bluetooth drivers. after spending some time trying to manually fix the drivers. i did some googling and some people were claiming that the probem may actually be with my nvidia drivers. so i uninstalled those. guess what, wouldn't let me reinstall them after than line of troubleshooting reached its terminus. so i decided it was im my best interest to dig up a very ancient pc repair strategy from my system integrator days. nuke the whole site from orbit. this allowed me to test out a couple of oses, that is after spending 6 hours trying to get my pxe boot solution working again. it all came down to windows firewall, which i didnt even know was enabled. this cost me hours and a dozen trips up and down the stairs. derp. theres much a hubub about windows 10 ltsc, a very stripped down enterprise edition that is designed for running less dynamic installations (like kiosks and signage). its popular because its a bare bones system that doesn't install a bunch of crap you will never need or even want to use (my policy is to use as little of the os as possible, i prefer to use 3rd party software as the computer gods intended). i downloaded an evaluation iso. the full version is actually very hard to get, they dont sell it to consumers, only volume licensees. you can (legally) obtain them through a third party however. rather than jump through those hoops, i just opted to try the eval. i actually kind of liked it, nothing in the start menu, no default apps. runs very fast. i think im going to try to obtain a key for that one, which usually entails throwing some money at a shady gray market website. i wanted to throw in a linux distro or two, but opted against it, as it was already late at this point, and evaluating linux usually takes more than a couple hours. i decided id evaluate windows 11 pro instead. seems all the horror stories are just fake news. os installed fine. i did not need an ms account, drive encryption was not enabled by default. everything i was concerned about did not come to pass. maybe that comes from home users who dont know anything. its got good bones at least, much of my dislike of it is cosmetic. its plastered with icons of cloud services and social media outlets that i don't use. one of the first tings i did was to remove them from the menus, idk if that uninstalls them or not, but im gonna look into it. the system must be purged of every scrap of stuff i will never use. the start menu for one, my tastes are more leaning towards win2k, though i found 7 to have a very usable menu. from 8-10 ive been using classic/open shell. it kind of works with 11 but its buggy (fortunately its still being developed so it might work out in the long run). i like just having a big list of all my stuff rather than having to search for everything. its still got schizophrenic options menus. the phone style settings still intermingles with classic control panel of yore, with some overlap and some settings exclusive to one or the other. i really think the pro versions need to be computer like and the home versions be phone like, or be able to switch between the two like installing a new de in linux. or at least make a decision about what interface to use. seems like it was in transition back in 10, but for some reason didn't follow through in 11. using both simultaneously just seems confusing. i only used it for 2 or 3 hours and i still had to dip into regedit once and the command line twice. good guis were always one of the big selling points to windows, and if they cant deliver on that, then id be better off on linux. that said i dont think im going to take the plunge one way or the other on my daily driver just yet. im still on a fresh install of 10 that hasn't been mangled too much just yet.

some of the larger hydrogen bombs can have a lot of stages. the previous boom starts the next bigger boom. all this starts from a fission primary. can we replace that with even a crappy pure fusion primary and continue to kick off more and more powerful stages?

a thread about blowing stuff up is worth spending an hour reading and enduring eye floaties (forum needs a dark mode) and neglecting sleep. may old boom boom rise again.

things get messy when the electric system meets the plumbing. i should have mentioned they had their own well. you would have to pump ground water through a filter stack and into a holding tank, which is pressurized with an air bladder. the whole system is a single unit and automatically turns the pump on when the holding tank is low. flushing is enough to set the system off. needless to say this requires a pretty powerful pump that would easily overload the inverter if too much stuff was running, the whole thing would have ran better with a higher spec inverter.

a couple forklift batteries and you can have backup power for your house. my sister's house was set up like that. the genny only came on four hours a day but there was enough power for some lights a couple gaming rigs, a tv and stereo. you couldnt use the microwave or any heaters, but the house had a wood stove. it had this quirk where you had to turn things off to flush the toilet because the pumps would brownout the system.

i got one to work on my current save. it works, the other buildings work. it was very hilly in the location i picked and the decal flatened it out pretty good. what doesnt work are the spawn locations (runway and rocket pad). they get flung to the next hill, or floating 50 klicks away and above the atmosphere (which sucks if you are trying to take off in a quad copter). its stable and doesn't crash though (hard to do with this many mods). been trying to setup a base in the grannus system. i like to set up a foothold base once i make an interstellar transfer. i got a torch ship buring at 5g so im gonna try to set up a base on a different planet. been reading through the thread though looking for ideas. found a couple im gonna try out when i get there. current modlist:

i always figured an under ground centrifuge on low grav worlds would be optimal for a colony. all you need is a tbm and several kilometers of maglev track (or even conventional rail would do). the colony would exist on a bunch of train cars, more or less, though somewhat bigger. the track would be angled such that the centrifugal force adds to the gravitational force to a magnitude of 1g. perhaps the hab modules would be on trunions. its probibly better to pressurize the tube than the cars themselves, though the cars could provide secondary atmospheric containment in an emergency. a smaller spindown rail could be used to enter/exit the hab, as some people will need to venture into the tubes for maintenance and can provide emergency gravity in the case you need to spin down the main ring. aside from the investment in casement for the tunnel and the track itself, the hab cars need not all be installed immediately with the installation, you can add cars as your population grows until the full ring is used. beyond that build another ring concentric to the first one, with the spindown rail acting as an interchange between the rings. being underground provides ample radiation protection. this would probibly be of better use just outside the habitable zone so you can groundsink the surplus heat. you would still be fairly dependant on some external nuclear power of some sort. insulating the tunnels would be critical i think as the warming from the interior environment could cause them to shift. the trans alaska pipeline has a problem with the hot oil melting the permafrost and you need a combination of ground sinking the surplus heat over a wider area and flexible pylons that can handle expansion. you would have something similar especially if you set up shop on an ice moon.

more bigger is definitely the way to go.

well the idea is you get rid of the slag and keep the good stuff. rather than iron ore, the have steel hull panels that can be scrapped and recycled at the destination. steel is very easy to recycle, and you dont have to carry a bunch of dead mass (only a fraction of the ore is iron). having a lot of steel ice compartments and storage bays for consumables. when i say a manufactured asteroid, i mean something asteroid scale but made with refined materials. life support experiments have had their share of failures. the whole biosphere 2 experiment i think was far too ambitious. it was a bad experiment because what it tried to do was far too broad. the whole thing was plagued by unforseen consequences, concrete eating up all the oxygen as it cured, bug infestations, and a low biodiversity ecosystem prone to various cascade failures. the goal for long term life support is not to maintain an engineered ecosystem but to keep the crew alive for an extended period of time. all you really need to do is scrub co2, provide oxygen, heat, water, food and recycle waste materials. the ultimate life support experiment is actually the iss, which has thus far been successful. we probibly need to get our consumable consumption rates down low enough before we do an interstellar colony mission, try to maximize our recycling and really start developing space agriculture technologies.

thats always bugged me. you need a mechanical contraption to sit idle for hundreds of years before you use it, and if it doesn't work, you liquify your crew during a critical breaking burn. i always figured a practical way of asteroid deflection would be poor mans orion drive. rather than ablating the pusher plate as your main source of remass, you ablate the surface of an asteroid with a non-contact nuclear detonation. this would apply a uniform force to the surface of an asteroid and can in theory even work with rubble piles. this could be used to build an asteroid ship, though i think this would be inefficient. i think a better way would be to construct an artificial asteroid entirely out of the materials you need for the colony to be used at a later date. you would have a core hab module (hab centrifuge, industrial area, the works). this would be surrounded by spherical insulated double hull pressure vessel. outside that you would have water ice storage, other ices (like ammonia or hydrocarbons) separated by bulkheads. within the ice can be storage containers for various useful metals and other materials, cold storage for biologicals like seeds and embryos. also this would be your warhead magazine and nuclear reactors. another pressure hull would surround this, followed by insulative material and then an armored outer hull layer. out side that would be remass material to be ablated by warheads. such a craft could be relatively large, support a healthy human population, and be self sufficient for some time in the target system in the event that any suspected biosphere be unviable. this maximizes colonization options, you could set up terrestrial colonies and/or use the ship as a permanent station in an astreroid belt or moon system. at the destination the bulk of the ship can be cannibalized to kickstart colonization.

i got an electric guitar, practice amp, and a diy crunch box made with junk. i dont play it all that much, it kind of sits around and collects dust. sometimes i play some thrash riffs or some blues. i think i spend more time hacking on it than i do playing it. put in a couple hotrail pickups and i want to add a preamp.

cool thing about fusion for spacecraft propulsion is that it does not need to be break even. the point is to vector high energy particles out the tail pipe, not to make electricity. solar panels or a fission reactor can provide the input power.

this is usually determined experimentally during the initial wind tunnel testing and later in the test flight stage. computational models can aid in initial design efforts. but you still need to prove the design experimentally. once the envelop is established then you can specify what is optimal (and safe) for the operation of the craft. for a space plane a high aoa is preferable as it exposes the biggest cross section at re-entry. this spreads out the heating over more of the surface and aids in deceleration. however you don't want to put the wings into a stall condition either, as that limits the controllability of the craft. you might also limit the aoa to reduce g loads or to save energy for a later phase of flight, like subsonic approach and landing.

brownie points for mentioning seaquest.