Nuke

most of the games i emulate are games i've bought at some point and wanted to re-play out of nostalgia, without the trouble of replacing the long dead hardware, scratched discs and non-functional cartridges. if nintendo and others were smart they would have emulators built into their next gen consoles, and sell old roms in an app store. people would pay $2 a game just for the convenience of not having to source roms and emulators from sketchy web sites. also an official sanctioned emulator with an active dev team to fix bugs its probably also worth paying for, so you don't need 3 different emulators to run all your roms.

its good to go back and play old games. but its more a nostalgia thing than something i use daily. in some cases you can even improve the visuals of some old games. i also like some of the things you can do with virtualization.

debugging magnetic systems. i have some diy hall encoders and pots where id love to see where all the flux lines are going.

motorhead: overkill black sabbath: paranoid

mom has a miniature of one of these old timey toilets, i also believe they showed one in the godfather (apparently a good place to hide a pistol).

i think it would be significantly simpler just to colonize lifeless worlds. any world with life on it is going to be very incompatible with whatever biology humans would need to bring with them to bootstrap a colony. if you aim for a strong terraforming candidate, right mass, magnetic field, big stabilizing moon. i think you would be better off colonizing the moon initially until enough science can be done to verify the target planet.

it does need fluid inertia to get the siphon action going though. small water jet accelerates the water in the pipes enough to make it over the trap to initiate the siphon.

older, this is the same kind of thing that makes toilets work.

ive had random components explode on me. like one i just got it im my bench and took the lid off. then i booted it up, worked fine. next thing i know i hear a loud pop and see a flaming power mosfet flying across the room like a tracer round.

when i was doing computer builds we delivered a bunch of computers to a charter school. the school was for the most part modern, except they had this old timey school house out front. this thing had to be built in the late 1800s and wired up sometime in the 1910s supposedly using the bare wire on ceramic insulators approach that was common back then. all the recepticals were installed external from the wall with drop down conduit, not flush installed like normal outlets and was somewhat more modern, like the 1950s. anyway, for some reason they decided to use this building for the computer lab rather than the significantly larger modern building with good up-to-code wiring. after 3 months computers were failing left and right. i was fixing them and sending them back. this went on for several months. almost all had power supply issues. finally i said what everyone was thinking but didnt want to fess up to. "check your power quality", which of course turned out to be bad. i convinced them to invest in line conditioners, of course at our usual markup. solved the problems. though i dont think the higher ups liked this, they were probably trying to milk them for support fees. they fired me a week later.

i think proton-boron11 fusion is more viable than he3. if you are doing he3+deuterium you can lose energy to d-d side reactions, creating neutrons. so not 100% aneutronic. and boron is pretty damn abundant on earth. though if you are going to build a moon base its probably better to source the fuel locally, and you don't need a whole lot. but i like to point out that we are talking about second-third gen fusion reactors. the first reactors are going to target the fuels with the biggest cross sections as they are easier to fuse, and that's d-t and d-d.

who knows what we will find when we start stripping away the regolith.

i thought we were building a fleet of orions? the only propellant you need is uranium, which i believe has been found on the moon. you would probably need to refine that, burn it in a reactor to produce plutonium and refine it further to make it weapons grade. what other consumables you need for that process, im not sure which could be locally sourced. but they are certainly safer to stick on a rocket bound for the moon than nuclear pulse units. as for antimatter, thats certainly not something i want to mass produce on earth or anywhere near it.

im for a moon colony because that's is the best place for placing the infrastructure needed for large scale solar system exploration and colonization. mars is significantly harder to get to from earth.

at some point you are going to need the logistic infrastructure large scale colonization efforts will require. doing that sooner rather than later is going to have considerable long term payout. shipping the large number of nuclear pulse units alone would require a perfect success rate, as any mishap there will be a huge ecological disaster. thats really something that should be manufactured on the moon. besides when everyone and their mother has their own orion ship, you are going to need gas stations in as many places as possible.

you dont ship an orion, you ship orion parts, or make them in situ. logistics dictate whether they are built on the lunar surface or in orbit depending on where the bulk of the materials are sourced. building it in earth orbit might be possible, but i would use something other than the orion to get it a safe distance from the planet. and launching the first orion from earth is probably fine, but if you are going to have a fleet of them the moon is a more sensible and practical place. doing an antarctic launch is probably fine if you don't do a gravity turn and just go for escape velocity (i usually do this when launching an orion in ksp). so load your foundry, mining equipment, base modules and portable uranium processing plant on that first orion to bootstrap your moon base. do it on a regular basis though and you might run out of penguins. i also don't think we have reached the theoretical maximum that is possible from a chemical rocket. i dont even think we are in diminishing returns territory yet. its just we dont currently have a need for anything larger than our current launch vehicles. but in the future when you are building your star fleet, then you definitely have a need for another tier of heavy lift rockets. if starship turns out to be the c-130 of rockets, then what will our an225 of rockets look like? rather than send a single big delivery it might be better to do it like a colony of ants would go about building an ant hill, which wouldn't be too unfeasible if we have fully reusable launch vehicles.

i dont think you would need pulse detonation with an antimatter engine, a steady state engine would be better (mostly because you are not dependant on a large mechanical shock absorber to not die). airbreathing antimatter engines may also be possible. though i think if we were going to have fleets of orion/antimatter/torch ships, it might be a good idea to launch them from a moon base. slow plasma tugs can handle the earth orbit <-> lunar orbit cargo transport and reusable chemical rockets can do the launching (say starships or skylons). i think its a lot more economical to keep the reactor on the ground making chem fuel than it is to put it on the ship for some kind of exotic propulsion, and if you are using hydrolox you have a more or less closed fuel cycle that is environmentally friendly (no carbon, no nuclear waste products). while it might be a good idea to keep your expensive antimatter motherships in space, and rely on reusable shuttles for planetary operations, landing them on planets and moons with no existing population should be ok so long as its safe and practical for the ship to do so.

i don't expect to see aneutronic fuels coming into play until second and third generation power reactors. you need about 10x breakeven for a viable power reactor, but i think aneutronics need 100x or greater. but they do stand to come with efficiency gains do to the fact you can use direct conversion which might make up for some of the gap there.

put the guinness down, you have had too many already.

brushless motors cram a lot of power into a little motor. so provided you have a lot of power to work with, say a fusion reactor, then an array of small ducted fans would work on planets with suitable atmosphere. any other planet, probably some kind of nerva or fusion rocket, any life forms are likely protected by domes anyway. me personally i think i would differentiate my atmospheric shuttles from non-atmo shuttles. former would likely be shuttle-like belly landers with air breathing engines. maybe some kind of multi-propellant thermal engines, which can run off the local atmosphere, or internal tankage. the latter would be much more simple craft likely with a small number of main engines in a nozzle down config. mothership would be equipped with whatever shuttles it would need for its mission. exploration type ships (sort of like the enterprise) would likely carry both and maybe other more specialized craft (like inter-vessel shuttles, gas giant fuel skimmers or sun divers that can operate close to a star or on hot planets like venus).

you could probably construct cellular machinery to constantly scan dna and error correct it every time it splits, spewing out a corrected strand. perhaps have a little self destruct gene that gets triggered if an error is detected. such that a bacterium with good code can split, and one with bad code can not. so either the cell does its job or it dies.

i do kind of like general fusion's "you are all overthinking this" approach. it also solves the problem of getting heat out of the reactor. the steam to drive the pistons can also be sourced from the secondary water loop, meaning you can operate much of the high energy components directly on the thermal output, hell even the liquid metal pumps could be steam driven. having to convert all that thermal energy to electricity before using it to power reactor components would make the whole thing less efficient. then you got my favorite, the polywell. they dont release much information or very often but the last word was they are doing the design work on their demo reactor now, using a lot of really high end supercomputer simulations to optimize and verify the final design. dr bussard just wanted to do a big (if you call 3-meter big) reactor but didn't get the funding before he died. his successor dr park is taking a more conservative route. i kind of which they would do more public outreach. they only seem to come out of the woodwork when they need funding, get it, and then get back to work. and to be fair it likely costs less than iter's public outreach program.

aren't those already a thing? i mean is a very rare structure but they exist. you can usually get around those with a vpn. just bounce off of a us server.

anyone who doesn't believe in evolution hasn't had to put down an insect infestation. them critters will evolve faster than you can counter. poison one works great at first, but subsequent generations will rapidly grow resistance. so you deploy poison number 2. a couple generations later that stops working, you go back to number 1 and nothing happens. so you bring in poison 3. after a long campaign of chemical warfare you might actually succeed at putting them down. and thats nothing compared to what people who work with germs can observe on even shorter timescales. as for the whole documentry i could have summed it up here:

if we could move atoms around we could make really fast computers one atom at a time. that or really small movies.