Nuke

basking in the earthlight.

so where we at in terms of deployments? distance to its lagrange point is pretty much the least of its problems right now. its got to make it through a long and intentionally drawn out series of deployments before we know if the thing they are sending is actually a telescope and not a half assembled ball of junk. nasa can get pretty creative when major systems on an interplanetary probe stop working. wonder what they would come up with if they encountered a mission breaking glitch or permanent damage to any of the mirror elements or their deployment systems.

i think you end up getting a lot of light bouncing off of the day side. sort of like how a bright moon can provide some illumination for night vision. the moon has a lot of area but is far away, the halo dayside surface is a lot smaller but a lot closer. so id guess that it would provide comparable illumination, if not more. i think its an inverse square thing.

im a stones throw from the water where im at, but im up on a hill. if down town ever disappears under water, i know its time to move.

just dot buy ocean front property without some plan as to how you are going to sell it to some climate change denier when you start having trouble with erosion.

death by snu snu!

i think it would be a lot less dangerous to mod the main line human than to do an offshoot. but inevitably some people will not like that idea and refuse the mods for various reasons, and pass that attitude to their children, and eventually you will have two lines anyway. its sort of like gattica where people without enhancements are considered inferior stock. as for uplifting various cats, i dont think id do that to anything larger than a serval or caracal. can you imagine a thousand pound hyper-intelegent death tiger? humans would be reduced to cat food in no time. its interesting because in this case, the tiger species would probibly want to keep humans around as a food supply,

this is fundamentally just a biological equivalent to asimov-derrived robots/androids. the laws of robotics exist so that robots will never take over. applying the same thing to biological constructs would work, but then you have to consider that biology is significantly more flexible than mechanical systems. and that flexibility leads to the rules being interpreted in strange and unforeseen ways (even asimov robots did that). another scifi trope exists where an engineered race will view their creators as a god figure. the jaffa in sg1 or the jem'hadar in st:ds9. thus the use of an engineered religion can be used to keep the race in check. if you get an individual or group of individuals that suddenly have a crisis of faith, the others of that species will seek to quell the heretics. religions tend to last for a really long time and is a tried and true way to keep a mob of individuals under control. religion also comes with other baggage as well, so expect to waste a lot of time carrying out rituals who's only purpose is reinforcing the religion of the offshoot. and you might also end up with a religion so good you are converting your own people to it. then you got chemical dependency. this is what they used in jurassic park as a fail safe so the dinosaurs would die if not given a supplement (the lysine contingency). the aforementioned jem'hadar were also made chemically dependent in addition to their engineered religion. in either case this did not work very well. the gem'hadar frequently had logistics issues with their ketracel white. and the enemy could easily cut supply lines and the soldiers on the front would die from withdrawl. this made their race very disposable. you also have the problem of what if they can come up with their own supply. or wean themselves off of the dope (this happened in one episode). engineered emotional imperative is another approach. the mammalian brain evolved to make better means of reproduction possible. the emotions evolved so as to make early mamals invest a lot of energy into caring for young, which they would not have done otherwise. most life before mammals used the scatter technique to increase the number of chances of successful reproduction. lets say you engineer a derivative species and give them an emotion that motivates them to preserve their creators. if they get a feeling of disgust every time they do something that goes against their creators, or a feeling of joy or fulfilment if they do something to benefit their creator. this is probibly not the best approach for a warrior race, perhaps a worker subspecies. of course you still have to treat such a race well, if you traumatize them then their emotional imperatives get distorted and you lose control of them. so you need to keep them in a good state of mental health. it makes a good story, they work out for hundreds or thousands of years, but then humans start treating them poorly and all the sudden are dealing with a mob of crazies that will fight you with reckless abandon. i think a better question is: why let them reproduce? using laboratory produced clones might be a better option, as they would be unable to reproduce without our direct intervention. so any revolt could be fought off through attrition alone. the details of the cloning process would probibly become a state/corporate secret. no one worker would hold all the secrets, its sort of like the eye guy in blade runner.

mwo isnt that bad, they just put out a new map a few days ago, and its pretty good. balance is getting really good, some mechs that have long since been power creeped over have become good again. im now up to 380 mechs. there has also been a vr mod for mw5, and thats been really fun. been thinking about getting battletech even though i generally dont like turn based games. i wish game stores would take crypto.

there is only one space sim i can recommend, and that is freespace. its not realistic, very ancient (use one of the source ports), but its good.

too many thursdays. i think we just need a third day in the weekend and replace wednesday with a day where it is ok to have 3 beers for lunch. especially in lieu of legalization of other substances, where you need an extra day of recovery (the responsible approach), or a second day where you listen to jimi hendrix and discuss the meaning of string. i for one wouldn't mind a 24 hour work week to become the new full time. if we legalize other substances of which walter white is familiar, we could do that 24 hour work week in one day and have a 6 day weekend.

yep. i can stop watching star trek discovery. there is an actual scifi show on now. i guess they are going to do strange dogs serial like, with a little bit each episode. i didn't think they would be cute. also alien critters. s4 should have had more than just death slugs, so its nice to see them putting some time into the critters.

it does, but i have a feeling the thing would break on its own accord if the rocket didnt go through it. i think it serves as a short delay between the opening of the main hatch and the inrush of atmosphere, long enough to fling a rocket through it.

remaking a critically acclaimed classic its always going to suck. they got it right the first time, and there was no need to reboot it. dune does not have this problem, lynch dune was a cult classic at best. miniseries was close to the book but very low budget. its sort of like if you got one of today's best directors to make a reboot of plan 9 from outer space. cant wait for the christopher nolan reboot of ice pirates (thats not a thing, but id go see it if it were).

i think they need to stop doing remakes and reboots. its just an easy out and they almost always do it in a revisionist way and never to the same standards. so you end up with a mediocre knockoff.

i dont think rocketry is the limit for a mars mission. life support, refueling, making oxygen/water/food, radiation, electrical power, human endurance, regulatory bs, funds, those are the limits.

from the rocket's perspective, you get a huge increasing lateral g, and then within a very short time that goes away and is replaced by a lot of aerodynamic forces. re-balancing the centrifuge is probibly not that hard. a mass on a jack screw can be raised after the release of the rocket to bring the balance back into something that wont tear the machine to bits. i think the real advancement with this whole thing is really high speed, high load, high performance actuators. especially on the ones to the launch door. getting that thing open fast enough is no doubt a hard thing to do. the membrane the rocket has to tear through probibly cannot hold the vacuum on its own, and is only providing a delaying action, it simply takes longer to collapse than it does for the rocket to leave the tube. i bet they shoot compressed air into the gap in order to break the seals on the main door, it gets out of the way, and a very short time later the rocket goes through. with a tube launch, i figure with the rocket riding on a big piston, with the air in front mostly removed from the tube. you could probibly take out just enough so that by the time the rocket got to the top of the tube, what little air left in the tube would be compressed enough to exceed atmospheric pressure at the door, and the whole thing would simply blow open without needing to break any seals or any really strong actuators. a spring would probibly suffice, not strong enough to open while there is a vacuum on the other side, but will open the door when the air pressure is closer to the equalization point.

a compressed gas, steam, or liquid air system (probibly not a nuke pumped steam boiler though), with some flow control actuators and a little bit of control theory could probibly actively maintain sane g loads for a tube launch. it would probibly also be very straightforward to convert it to a maglev facility at a later date. spinlaunch does give us some technologies. the high speed airlock for example. this would enable an evacuated launch tube and opening a big hatch to a vacuum chamber really fast at altitude is probibly easier than opening one at sea level. now that we have demonstrated a door that can get out of the way fast enough. i think the big problem is that they can only launch in one direction. so a complex with a single chamber pressure and a selection of tubes might be better. just use the tube that bests lines up with your orbit at a certain time. im also not quite sure if tbms like going up hill. you will probibly need to engineer the reinforced concrete liners in a special way to allow angled installation to spread the mountain scale loads correctly, and also survive the passing of a rapidly accelerating mass. or if they can maintain enough accuracy to keep the ship from bouncing around inside the tube too much. perhaps do a small diameter pilot hole with enough accuracy to shine a guidance laser through so you don't have to deal with the messiness of inertial guidance. your main tbm can follow that up. tbms dont have reverse, they progress by pushing themselves off of the tunel liners the machine just installed with big hydraulic rams. usually with a follow up team injecting concrete behind the liners to seal up any gaps. retrieving a tbm from the top of a mountain and at a weird angle is a problem to solve. perhaps setting it up to drill back down to make an extra launch tube. sending the same machine up and down several times seems like an interesting thing. i think typically they are broken down in place and brought out the tunnel piece by piece at the end of the project. i could imagine the thing spawning several very interesting engineering documentaries. or we could just like build a rocket.

finally saw dune on the big screen, if you call our screen big.

xkcd, you jest good sir!

its all in good fun.

i do belive i solved my cpu cooler fitment issue. apparently the amd kit that comes with the nh-c14s is not as versatile as the stand alone kit, which allows 90 degree fitment. and it fits well in this orientation, its not conflicting with my front panel usb headers (who the eff designed these connectors? especially the new usbc mobo headers are they supposed to be this loose? and it looks like they based the connectors on the most hated sata connectors. shame! stop designing bad connectors). and it works with all my cabling and my psu mounting option. im not quite sure it clears the video card by a good enough margin, so i stuck some kapton tape on the end of the pipes. i also have a second set of brackets to work with, i think if i drill out the tapped holes, slot them with a file and find some longer m3 screws, nuts and washers, i could get a few more mm of clearance. the block is bigger than the heat spreader so that shouldnt reduce efficiency. its not much but it should clear the back plate on some of the newer gpus. still getting nowhere on the gpu front, they are a scarce beast it seems. but the other problem is sorted and thats good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Atmosphere there's a table there with the data you need. there is also a us-specific model, i think the big difference is the use of freedom units and that its calibrated for us airspace.

i figure the warhead option would be for high payload situations. building a pressure vessel that can withstand the forces of what is essentially a nuke pumped steam boiler is no doubt going to be a very interesting design challenge. id love to see the engineering involved.

let me re-iterate i meant that i was impressed that their thing worked at all and didn't fly apart into a million pieces. i still don't think its a great way to get into space. its not scalable and you cant use it for manned launch. i still like the idea that if you can loft a rocket to the point where a vacuum nozzle gives you better performance than a sea level nozzle you can do away with the first stage. i really dont think of this as an ssto, because the first stage is the thing on the ground, but i can imagine better ways to do this. guns are a good example. a 45 degree bore through a mountain, evacuate the tube, put a rocket on a sled in the tube and launch via gas or compressed air. perhaps a nuclear warhead detonated under ground using water as the propulsion medium. you come out in thinned air. then your second stage lights off when you clear the mountain.