Nuke

big orbital proton collectors?

i attribute it to youth really. when you are young they constantly try to sell you on the utopian concepts and as you age you realize that its all just a pipe dream. i once thought that computers in everyone's home would solve all the problems, but it made more problems, and those problems got worse when the computers started fitting in your pocket and everything is always connected. im using technology as an example rather than something politically charged, so use your imagination. every solution to every problem is a can of worms and will bring new problems. eventually you realize that there are no solutions, only tradeoffs and you turn your attention away from end all solutions and start looking at how to get the most bang for your buck.

rockets are cheaper than thousands of miles of fiber.

im seeing starlinks pop up like daisies here. granted there is difficulty running fiber through glaciers and tundra (we cant even build 50 miles of road to connect our capital to the alcan) and the distances make that very unprofitable. ground based infrastructure is going to be astronomically expensive and destructive to the environment. people of an urban mindset dont really understand the impact starlink has when you can just get good internet from the wall/wifi/cell for a small fee. now imagine having to pay 10x as much, and being really slow and flakey on top of that. this is exactly the market star link was going for.

people ask how its possible to do space math without computers, but it makes a lot more sense when you realize that people in the duniverse are all on uppers that make you see the future. so you can get answers pretty quick.

i cant wait for the ai takeover and subsequent butlerian jihad. then we can be human again.

so what happened to the banana?

banana is swaying! shake your banana.

wondering if the interior is pressurized and if we just found a new way to freeze dry bananas.

dune prophecy episode one launched recently. just watched it. i didnt throw anything at the tv, which is my definition for "watchable".

every day is education day when you aint got nothing to do. liner algebra, calculus, metal work, carpentry, electronics, programming, how to do these things with zero budget. would i have had all these skills if i stayed in school, nope. id be working some job either filling in holes dug by others or digging holes. i dont need money to prosper.

thing i worry about here is that spacex lets this fast tracking go to its head and starts making mistakes.

its getting there, i had to be very careful how much detail i used, but then again i realized that since its such a universal apathy (or perhaps willful intent) that it was apolitical. if everyone is doing it, then its simply human behavior.

where have you been? this has been the norm as far back as i can remember. bureaucrats are the second most wasteful thing in government right behind war, and im not sure i got the order right. that said no administration that has existed since ive been alive has made one step towards solving the problem.

tuesday is shopping day, but im broke so...

kicking the tires and lighting the fires again, already. i guess the bureaucrats really want to keep their jobs before they get doged out of existence.

i grew up in anchorage and the bike trail network there was awesome. you could get almost anywhere in the city without having to cross more than a couple roads. we did have problems with moose though. but il take a moose over a human in a car any day. i didnt ride much in juneau because of the cross winds. biking in phoenix sucked because of the damn heat. these days i dont even own a bike.

im not riding a bike near any of those lunatics. its sort of like how cats have managed to circumvent every leash law while dogs have to be dragged around by their owners. cats do not recognize any sovereignty but their own. if someone tried to pass a bill, a cat would probibly pee on it.

i want a new unit of measure where 0= the plank length, and 1 = the size of the observable universe. even the metric system uses human-arbitrary definitions like the size of the earth. this is a terrible system for communicating death star plans to other aliens.

the banana for scale thing i always thought was kind of dumb, because there is quite a big difference from an african wild banana and a plantain (which is good sliced, fried and used as a side for jerk chicken). its kind of a cursed unit of measure. perhaps as a radiation source, but im not sure how size affects banana radioactivity.

the problem is power. to cast a steel melting beam, you need steel melting power. and there are laser systems that can do that, but they need to be powered from the wall and will draw a few kw. and its hard to put that much power into a pistol sized object. energy storage that dense is a bomb by definition. though its probibly not impossible. i can imagine using a backpack full of batteries or a fuel cell connected to a hand unit. but at that point its too unweildly to be called a pistol.

i can see this being used for terminal guidance, like the last seconds that the missile is a missile. that said by the time you are close enough to the target to identify it, you need course corrections immediately. doesn't give you a whole lot of time for image processing.

so its possible it may find its way into a new engine design. the manufacturing process for the heat exchanger is the real technology. also the de-icing method they came up with. i think the best use for a precooled engine is not necessarily an ssto though, but as a stage one that solves the launch/landing issue by using existing infrastructure. get stage two above the karman line with a good fraction of orbital velocity then use a big dumb kick motor as stage two you could at least compete with falcon and have access to a wider array of launch windows and orbital parameters than a fixed infrastructure like with reusable rockets. just dont let boeing do it or the door will fall off.

you think they could at least sell their heat exchanger tech. that was actually kind of impressive and has a bigger market than the engine itself. the rest of the engine is mostly paper.

kilrathi space program.