Nuke

both dune and foundation are not really an exploration of the technology as a lot of hard scifi tends to be. if anything those things are just a part of the setting. dune touches on ecology (and the engineering there of), religion (and the engineering there of), social constructs (and the engineering there of) the effects of stagnation on a population, the limits of power and prophecy, the uncertain nature of history, and a great deal of other things that my brain isnt telling me right now. im significantly less versed in foundation, having only read the original trilogy, and having just watched the first two episodes of the new series, i am now confused about the whole thing, but it has a lot in common with dune.

yea but i never regret watching them. it is possible to enjoy a bad movie. its also possible to fail to enjoy a critically acclaimed popular movie (anything marvel). the latter might be good in the moment, but it leaves you with very little to think about when you leave the theatre. something about cult films makes you keep coming back. first time i saw dune '84, i wanted to see it again, and then i wanted to see it again when i finally did. then i watched other cuts of the film, even fan cuts. cult films get their hooks in you, even if they aren't the best.

mars is pretty cold, lots of places to dump waste heat. read a paper on a lunar tunnel boring machine which would store waste heat in the resulting rubble, and simply truck it out of the tunnel and dump it on the surface. also those infinite sources are only seemingly so, there is a finite amount of stuff here. i have a feeling if we replace all of our hydrocarbon infrastructure with fusion, we will have a problem with heat pollution.

i think the real reason i didnt like alien 3 was the horrible special effects and not the fact that it killed everyone from the previous movie. the new compositing techniques made the alien look like a cartoon. the previous incarnations of aliens used practical puppetry and a lot of slime. even the guy in the suit from the first alien movie looked better, and that came out in '79. later movies with cgi xenomorphs also lost something in translation, but they were acceptable where as alien 3 really botched it entirely (which is a shame because the overall story and characters were great).

i think they checked the systems at the sulaco. its the hot dustoff they didnt check. when i really think about it the alien got on twice. the one that took out the first drop ship, and the queen at the end. there is probibly something wrong with the ship's sensors. not designed for xenomorphs. i still think its more of a case of bad intel than a failure of the pilot or the procedures. because even the synthetic bishop made the same mistakes, even with the fore knowledge that xenomorphs are sneaky. after seeing the intro to alien 3 i think they would have been better off remote launching the nukes.

i dont think xenomorph removal was on the checklist. also aliens was kind of a commentary on the vietnam war. that decision making was so far removed from the action that it was impossible to give good instructions to troops in the field. that scene when the liutennant is in the apc and the aliens start coming out of the walls, all hell is breaking loose, and almost the entire squad gets wiped out while the commander hesitates to give viable orders. yea that happened in nam a lot, except replace aliens for charlie.

water main broke a street over and for 12 hours i had my very own private lake. the fishing was horrible though.

only real reason to go with hthl is that the earth has more airports than spaceports. though with vehicles like skylon you would need to add lh2+lox fuel capabilities at those airports. you can also move skylon under its own power to any airport in the world for specific orbits and have it rendezvous with a tanker truck to re-fuel it for orbital insertion (if the airport lacks cryofuel capabilities). then you can land anywhere (runway length permitting) in case of emergencies or returns from weird orbits. i think a better way to use skylon is in a suborbital flight that puts the payload at a good fraction of orbital velocity and above the karman line, then open the payload doors and launch a second stage. they would be wise to design it with additional removable tankage such that they can easily reconfigure the vehicle to be a suborbital first stage with a larger payload bay to accommodate a bigger second stage and payload, or just have a suborbital model. reusable rockets are nice but without more facilities to handle them, i think the horizontal option give you the most versatility. space planes also come with practical military applications, for when you need to launch a spacecraft now, instead of when a launch window occurs.

i figure you are going to want to do open pit mining for a few reasons. first of which it can be done with a few vehicles. granted you are going to need to put some of the biggest vehicles and machines humans have built on rockets and fly them to mars. lets just assume we can kerbal that problem. and you dont have to use the biggest dump truck you can find either, you can use a scaled down version and when you have used it to mine some metals you can build a bigger one. and the vehicle will need some modifications, a big diesel engine might need to be swapped with a nuclear system. also supposidly there is a mine in brazil that uses the weight of the ore and the altitude of the mine to recharge the batteries to bring the truck back up for another load. i suppose thats useful if you want to mine olympus mons. aside from a dump truck or two, you are going to need a backhoe. actual mining would need to be done with explosives (shipping large quantities of high explosives on a rocket would be interesting). simply blast and muck. however there is the small problem of having an ore refinery that can remove the useful components from thousands of tons of rocks. at least you dont have to worry about cave-ins. deep mines get interesting because at certain depths atmospheric pressure increases to shirtsleave levels. but with that equipment requirements go up and safety goes down.

those coils need not be huge and you can do things with switching to lower the force needed as a function of distance. the inverse square law would make this seem difficult, but because you know the scaling you can match it.

i think a lot of this crap is because they had to re-hype the movie due to the pandemic. this should have come out last christmas, they should all have oscars and they should be working on part 2 right now. bad germs, bad! i think ive watched over 20-30 different trailers for the movie already. there is also a rumor of a 5 hour directors cut. also in a cruel quirk of fate our one screen movie theater broke down and i hope they get it up and running again in time for the dune release, id hate to have to stream it, after all ive been waiting on this movie for well over a decade. i kind of like the baron this time around. he is not an annoying like the old movie and not bland like in the miniseries and certainly not fruity like would have happened to orson wells in jordowski's dune (i know i didnt spell that right). keep him grimdark and sadistic which is the image i had in my mind when i read the books. they picked the perfect actor. i like to think of him as the big guy in prison who always gets what he wants, and then elevated to a position of great power. make giedi prime great again! with regards to fruty i am glad they dropped the medieval attire . i like the militaristic atradies uniforms. i really like the spacesuit styled guild uniforms, at least that's what i think those are. idk why nobody ever thought of that before. these guys live and work in space most of the time so why wouldn't you wear your life support gear like the fremen. the fremen outfits look nice and utilitarian but it kind of has a superhero vibe (that codpiece) that i don't really like. dune is supposed to be a deconstruction of the superhero genre, sort of like watchmen (which is probibly why i liked watchmen when my usual attitude towards superhero films is usually meh). i guess they could be worse, the miniseries stillsuits that look like scorpion from mortal combat took his outfit to the cleaners and they used too much bleach, and the 80s ones looked like something you would wear to judas preist concert. i always felt like they should be bulkier as they contain heat exchangers and evaporators and i hope an entire wastewater processing plant. the bene gesserit are done like in the book, and i believe they are the only ones with a good literary reference to their appearance to go on and all 3 dunes they came out as expected (though the shaved heads and abilities of the first ones was definitely non canon). but damn that soundtrack is something else. sometimes it seems like a throw back to the theme song for alien nation, with a little klingon opera thrown in. they even actually went through the trouble of coming up with lyrics in galach for their choiral arrangements. this is everything i like about scifi music. still cant wait to see gurney hallack jamming on his baliset. i kind of thought they should cast lemmy for this role so he could play ace of spades for liet kynes, but i guess that dream got shelved along with lemmy's hat and urn. i have to admit i did not hate toto's soundtrack for '80s dune, but this blows it out of the ballpark. i love the vehicles in this movie too. the 'thopters are excelent. i mean sure the troop transports are kind of boxy. i mean they ride on suspensors so they hold altitude and decelerate slow and dont have to go through the usual heat of re-entry. the guild heighliner is something completely different, it looks more like the no-ship on the cover of chapterhouse. descriptions of space hardware are kind of vague in the book otherwise. so i guess they went with the only image they had. the big metal tube from 80s and the more detaled and i think more practical centrifuge design from the miniseries is out. and think about it, they have anti-gravity technology so it makes sense that they would also have anti-anti-gravity technology as well. some references (i believe the dune encyclopedia) do mention that they use torch ships like in the expanse, but this is really never mentioned in the books or shown. and since very little in the duniverse happens in space i can forgive them glossing over the space ships a bit. though special node i do like the imperial ship at the beginning, kinda has a union class (battletech) vibe to it (i almost expect an atlas to walk down the ramp, though i do have a fan theory that battletech and dune take place in the same universe crosspost from mwo board below if interested). as for the flashbacks (forwards, prescience dude), i dont think you can tell the dune story without them. as for the dust, hell at least they are using practical effects and not being all cgi like the miniseries (worst sandworms ever) and you arent pan and scanning the concept art in lieu of a budget sufficient for modelcraft. as for the mentats, those are your computer nerds in lieu of computers. it will be interesting to see how they portray an unplugged society to a bunch of smartphone zombies.

meow

fun fact: 9 out of 10 metal heads like johnny cash.

cats do what cats do.

rip norm macdonald. i remember him most from his snl fake news bit. at least he was honest about it.

so did i, at least until i docked with a rather large and unruly station component.

why are you adding high test peroxide to the jello shots?

infinite resources is by definition a violation of the laws of physics. if we had infinite resources here on earth, we would quickly collapse into a black hole of infinite mass. the universe would be doomed! might as well divide by zero and then multiply the result by infinity.

i like my metal and i like it black. but sometimes also thrashy doomy and deathy. throw on some classic rock, old outlaw country, bluegrass, and classical/opera for good measure.

yea the way 2 ports slam together in ksp is somewhat problematic for some constructions. this has broken many a station of mine. so a lot of cases i turn down the attraction as much as possible. mechanical ports almost always seem like a better idea. you also have to realize that most spacecraft will have their rcs ports placed at optimal locations and are not slapped on willy nilly as an afterthought like with your usual ksp spacecraft. while its fun docking with a dead elephant on your back, probibly wouldn't work in real world spaceflight.

anywhere. with unlimited nuclear warheads fuel, you can go anywhere. whether or not the universe is in heat death when you get there or not is an excersise for the reader.

now that im down to 2 i find them a lot less tiresome. i have a theory that the amount of work you have to put into your cats is the number of cats, squared. same holds true for the amount of cat food and litter you have to buy.

that movie (the birth of a nation) wasn't terrible, if you ignore the fact that the klan were the "good guys". it actually had some impressive battle scenes at the beginning. at least impressive for the silent film era. there are those who would permanently delete it from existence for pushing the racist point of view, which amounts to book burning imho (a policy embraced by fascists, communists, and religious zealots alike). i mean you do that you might as well burn any movie made before ww2, a few after and all the walt disney era disney films as well. that's just no bueno for anyone who respects film history.

i find when the 'movie people' reach a consensus about something, it usually mean that its so bad that only 'movie people' will like it. case in point, the oscars. those movies tend to be long and drawn out and leave me with a 'what did i watch this crap' feeling at the end. but this is dune so i will probibly like it even if they screw it up horribly. then again if they do whats been done to star trek and star wars, then we might have a situation.

linux has been doing it for years. you can upgrade the security at the kernel level and leave everything else alone.