wumpus

There have been a few "revivals" of ancient beer, and mostly for curiosity's sake as beer has moved on (notably with the addition of hops in the middle ages). I suppose they could store beer in either the quarry or the pyramid itself (thanks to using the Earth as a heatsink), but this probably requires hauling the beer up and down too much of an elevation change for too short for the length of time the beer was good. Better to just drink it. If somebody tried to make a monopoly on brewing, I'd expect a revolt and a new pharaoh. But perhaps "monopolizing the beer" was a slander used to justify a coup? Who knows? Generally speaking the fancy hieroglyphics on walls was pure political propaganda (often writing of "great victories" before the battle was fought). If there was a monopoly of brewing for any significant length of time (presumably centuries when talking about Egypt) you'd expect it to show up on the scribe's tallies. That's where the history was really recorded, but trying to find preserved records and making sense of them (especially finding the right context: things that were obvious to the scribes is quite a different thing from a cache of a bunch of records) is another story. From "Beer & Brewing magazine" (second hit after wiki). "This bacterium is distinctive in that it can ferment glucose, fructose, and sucrose—as can brewers yeasts—but it cannot ferment maltose." I'm guessing that Egyptian brewers didn't have any glucose, fructose, or sucrose in their beer, about the only way that could happen is if they tried to cask condition it with honey. Egyptian beer was quite primitive, although possibly to limit just what yeasts would make the beer.

An airplane is basically a more or less hollow tube. The air will resonate, if nothing else. Although you can presumably dampen most of the audio frequencies, and I'm sure "the drone of flying" can't be due to the length of the tube, but might be a side-to-side resonance.

SpaceX isn't public, Tesla is. Two entirely different legal requirements. A lot depends on just how confidant they are with Falcon Heavy. Somebody on stackexchange did a quick calculation and claimed that 20 fit on Falcon 9 (fully expendable), while 64 fit on Falcon Heavy (presumably non-expendable, I'm pretty sure Falcon Heavy LEO mass is limited by what the Falcon structure can physically support). But 64 birds are a lot to risk on a rocket that you are less than confident in (they have sold a single flight and don't appear to be pushing any more).

One issue is that we can settle Mars and then presumably terraform it. Presumably it would be easier to terraform Venus: start by seeing life in the clouds, then wait for the inevitable oxygen catastrophe. After that you can begin terraforming in ernest. So far, the only justifications in colonizing Mars is "because it's there" and "plan B". I have to wonder if the next generation would share the same ideals. They may well want to leave and go back to Earth (expect this to be an obsession with teenagers, although they may also feel trapped by the reduce gravity and have issues working out enough to thrive on Earth). Consider the common story of "there are no second generation commune members" and wonder if Mars colonization will be similar.

Inside, I assume that most of the noise is from the engines. Does it travel through the airframe and resonate in the tube, or is that outside noise resonating at a frequency associated with turbines?

The wiki doesn't compare mass. I suspect it isn't much (but *anything* is significant on Apollo command modules and moreso the lander). It is entirely possible the board it is connected to makes up most of the mass difference (board mass should scale with cubic meter, but is probably less than the mass of the rope). As far as I can tell, rope is a packaging technology that traded mass for repairability. It just happened that the only use of rope involved replacing magnetic cores with transformers (for ones only), making it ROM.

I doubt it. When you hear of ROM (from before the 1990s), it typically meant transistors or diodes mean a one, no component means a zero. The only thing is, unless they were using actual chips (doubtful, memory was "rope memory"), you could produce small/lighter memory using magnetic core (each bit is just a magnetic ring, not a diode). They might not like this as it wasn't quite as reliable as true "hard coding", but since it could be re-rigged if something else failed (and was strongly reliable on its own), I'd expect that the program was stored on (re-writable) rope memory. Now that I think about it, it wouldn't be *that* hard to imagine replacing "rope memory" with specific ROMS that only included a magnetic ring on the one and was missing it on the zero. I really wouldn't expect it to be any cheaper, but they might try it (save what, a few grams? Worth it in the lander, probably worth it in the command module as well).

Any idea of the location of this Egyptian brewery? While Egyptians may have been happy to brew their own beer, pyramid workers are said to have been paid in beer and they might not want to wait for it to ferment. The central government may well have had need for a large brewery (especially one near the pyramids, at least while they and other huge monuments were under construction). Also don't forget about the Nile. Transportation in Egypt can't have been that difficult when the entire civilization was located in a singe river valley (have your brewery upstream so that you only need to send the [threshed?] barley upstream, go downstream once the water is added).

Squad also has a good long time between anouncement and availability, but I wouldn't expect the 4-5 years wait for "Making History" (to be honest, they announced when they were still in pre-release and promising all updates (so wound up giving the DLC to anybody who already had bought the thing, then needed to really fix the release edition. So by 1.4 they were ready to release their first DLC. In completely unrelated news, HarvestR is announcing his next project: virtual airplane project. [Occulus VR required for now]

Hydrolox on stratolaunch? Is stratolaunch capable of carrying LH2 and topping it off before launch? How much insulation would the rocket need to not lose excessive fuel before launch? There are a lot of reasons that Pegasus uses solids, and I'm curious if Stratolaunch can work around them. Is stratolaunch developing a rocket engine on their own? Did they just buy up a failing rocket engine compay (or possibly just the aerojet team that was beat by Blue Origin?). Paul Allen's history as a patent troll makes the idea of his company designing an engine scary: way too much stuff that is difficult to prove that it wasn't "published" or patented in a court of law that he can easily patent.

Weren't the universal rockets pushed by Glushko? His specialty was engines, so he'd have to deal with all the critical issues of cross-feeding and asparagus in general. I'm curious how far he got, but there doesn't seem to be any Soviet/Russia/former-USSR development of such things from his work. And of course the universal rockets used hypergolics as a first stage fuel, which I oppose in principle (can't you even light the things when they are on the ground???).

Parallel staging started the space era, as most rocket designers didn't want to deal with the issues of serial staging and mid-air ignition (just look at a Soyuz, it is still used). The key to Asparagus is to cross-feed fuel lines, especially where one fuel tank is jettisoned (whether or not including an engine) and another fuel tank is used by the remaining engine (thus the Shuttle doesn't count. It uses completely different engines (OMS) for orbital insertion after ditching the main fuel tank). As a pressure-fed engine, it isn't clear that there would be any benefit for cross-feeding the OTRAG fuel tanks ("engine mass" shouldn't be all that high), nor was there any interest as reducing complexity appeared the overall goal. I still think the closest we've seen is Rocket Labs dumping spent batteries, while the original motors continue using other batteries on flight.

If I was writing a proposal for a Mycenaean dig on Thera, I might throw in a reference. That's about as far as you'll get.

Some notes on asparagus staging (yes, it's a necrothread and I'm going back to the topic. But mostly on the differences between 2012 and 2018). Asparagus staging dates from at least 1953 if not 1947 (I found it described in the 1958 work "Space Flight" by Carsbie C. Adams) even if it wasn't named "Asparagus" until 1989. One important thing to understand is that the cult of Asparagus made a lot of sense in pre-release KSP, not so much in "real life", "post-release KSP" and "realism overhaul". The biggest reasons follow: The biggest reason for asparagus staging was that KSP had a limited maximum size of rocket engines. If you wanted a bigger rocket and/or more delta-v, you simply piled small engines on top of small engines and built "kerbal" rockets. Only N-1 and Falcon Heavy use "lots" of engines, and really doesn't work in real life. More modern KSP (including beta and other late pre-release editions) had things like mammoths, twin-boars that made these "kerbal" rockets only needed for wackjob-style rockets built out of huge numbers of mammoths. Second is that for peak aero efficiency, you need to maintain a velocity equal to your terminal velocity. In KSP<1.0, this was achieved by limiting TWR=2.0. In real life (and KSP>=1.0) this requires a huge TWR and essentially requires solid boosters. Asparagus staging let TWR stay relatively constant (at ~2.0) all the way through the souposphere. In pre-release KSP, vacuum nozzles had full thrust but simply used more fuel to compensate. I didn't understand why this was so terrible until some of my "lift off with vacuum rockets" simply failed and showed just how badly I was "cheating" by relying on old KSP's poor physics model. Consider a hypothetical Falcon 9 with "onion staging" ("onion staging" is provably less efficient than asparagus staging, but is needed to make my point): Instead of 9 first stage engines + 1 second stage engine, this "Falcon 8" rocket has 8 first stage engines firing in parallel (and feeding through KSP's "magic fuel lines") the second stage engine. There is no way the benefit of losing one engine (roughly one ton) will compensate for using a sea level optimized nozzle on the second stage (which provides much more than half of the delta-v). Also post-release KSP has a working aero model. The cult of Asparagus fed on the issue that strapping stage after stage in parallel didn't add any aero losses. I think this is mostly minor, but it still artificially made asparagus look good. That said, asparagus would really help on Falcon Heavy, but was beyond even spacex's prowess (and remember all the claims that it was impossible to stabilize all 27 engines in Falcon Heavy. SpaceX does 6 impossible things before breakfast and was stuck on this one detail). Drop tanks may be catching up and replacing asparagus as "important kerbal tricks" in post-release KSP, and can be seen in Rocket Labs' Electron (in the form of "drop batteries", which makes sense since they don't get any lighter and are an obvious candidate to drop). I'd expect that restartable vacuum optimized craft would try drop tanks in the future (do one Pe kick on one tank, shut down, drop the first tank, switch to the second tank, and do the second (final?) Pe burn afterwards).

The expendable launch vehicles of the 70s were grounded once the Shuttle took off and "ungrounded" when Challenger crashed. Weirdly enough, this would bolster his argument better than botching the chronology. NASA was determined to justify the costs of the Shuttle, so demanded that everyone needing to put something into orbit must risk the lives of seven astronauts and pay the exorbitant rates to put the entire orbiter in space using man-rated technology. They couldn't keep doing this after Challenger, even though the Shuttle's safety record was more or less as predicted.

Is anybody more familiar with the stuff? I read that and think: hybrid rocket with nitrous oxide replaced with real LOX (which should put hybrids much closer to "the big boys"). You might need a third (or more) stage, but it sounds like a real way to make a smaller rocket.

From the very bottom of the article; Basically he is a shill for the Military Industrial Complex and will say whatever it takes to keep the pork flowing through the DoD to ULA. And even at the top it is listed as an "editorial" and not "journalism" (there's a difference? YES: you can use photographs without permission for "editorial usage" but have to pay for them for "journalism". Yet another reason that opinion masquerades as news).

I'd assume the entire arctic (and antarctic) circle would freeze over (down full 50m) and this would spread beyond that (although possibly not all the way down. Europe would freeze: don't expect enough mass to circulate for the gulf stream, expect some serious cold. I doubt there would be much different in the tropics, I'd expect temperature pretty much stabilizes. Anybody know the temperature of tropical depths? Biodiversity takes a huge hit: anything that needs to stay below 50m (day or night) goes extinct. Mammals probably take over, with sudden increase from reptiles and other air breathers: if you need only dive 50m, then why bother with gills? How many rivers are 50m? Is the Nile? The Mississippi is wide enough, but I doubt there are many parts more than half that deep. Any sufficiently wide river that is roughly that deep should have an ecosystem roughly similar to an "ocean" only 50m deep. The other big surprise? I'd expect shores to turn into vast swamps. Dropping erosion into a 50m hole should fill up in a few centuries (probably less: dams should prove this), this will lead to gradual change out to 50m, instead of the huge cliff down to km that plate techtonics gives us. And can I say this is a really weird topic for this forum? If you can't handle the oceans, expect to be completely freaked out sooner or later by space.

Somehow I can't imagine John Glen simply being able to do any arbitrary task in the Shuttle like I'd expect a "real astronaut" to do, much the same as I wouldn't expect a shuttle astronaut to strap himself (or herself, those things were tiny and women might fit better) in a Mercury capsule.

If Take Two wanted KSP 2.0, I think they bought the wrong company (didn't Harvester leave long before Take Two came along? I may be missing a few things but I thought HarvestR was out after 1.1 or so). Although you might be tempted to call it a "prequel", although jet and rocket development happened more or less in parallel (except that early rocketeers had to disguise themselves: thus "Jet" Propulsion Laboratories, and their early "Jet" Assisted Take Off (aka solid rockets)).

A catamaran would only make sense if the mass piled on the deck was low enough to be displaced by the reduced displacement of the catamaran. The catch is that while this was probably built after Archimedes described how displacement worked, I'm not sure that news had traveled to Egypt and was known by shipbuilders. Roman shipbuilders would have been more aware of displacement (yes, I know both Archimedes and the Ptolemies were Greek, but Archimedes lived in Syracuse) and would have loved to construct ships based on arches, but I doubt they did it. Another point is that thing had to have been merely a showpiece. It would be enough to let the Pharaoh waft down the Nile, with the oars beating for show. Once he (and his party) were safely off, use not only all the oars, but more oar-efficient "tugboats" to slowly drag the thing upstream for another cruise. Modern cost? I imagine it would depend on how much you wanted to refurbish a dying container ship (or simply start from scratch). Other choices depend on if you want anamatronic rowers or simply long pushrods moving all the (steel core, if not solid steel) oars. Don't assume that man-powered oars could move the thing, especially since the whole point of the vessel (audacious conspicuous spending) would be blown if you had a man-rowable wooden vessel and a massive modern ship glided by.

While I don't really agree with this, if you want things to make *sense* then make temperature readings give "science points" (which only help with PR and *maybe* budget) and unlock the tech tree by using things in the tech tree (the more you use the prerequisite tech, the further down the tech tree you go). This is about as close to how the "tech tree" gets to real life as you can model in a game. It would also really force missions (especially crewed missions) to look a lot more like Mercury->Gemini>Apollo. Gemini only makes sense when you realize you need to "push the tech tree" by doing/testing the tech you need (although KSP comes close in this in that the skills needed for an "Apollo style" mission pretty much need a Gemini program's worth of practice before success. Count me as one not terribly interested in a KSP 2.0. My only suggestion to Squad would be to conceptually throw all the gameplay away, and rebuilt the thing around career mode. KSP 1.0 is a great sandbox game with career mode grafted on, so most of the complaints are about career mode. Whether this would leave a sufficiently good sandbox is a good question: I can't imagine a broken sandbox, but if career was sufficiently possible it might happen. Breaking KSP 2.0 sandbox would probably leave 1.0 the better game, with Take Two refusing to sell it. Be careful of what you ask for. The problem with KSP is that it really doesn't have much in the way of any path to a sequel. I'd suggest the Civilization model: just "remake" the game with the latest graphics tech and lessons learned, but I can't really expect that much has changed to justify a KSP 2.0

Have you ever been to LA, or even America? Transit-oriented development here means cars (meaning trucks now, see Ford's change) and only "cars". In NYC, Chicago, Washington DC, the SF Bay area, and possibly Seattle (I've never been to Seattle to tell), there has been a sufficient secondary attempt at mass transportation to allow sufficiently rapid transit to the point where it might be considered ahead of a personal car. But only a small fraction of the US population lives in those cities. Whether I've heard or understood it or not is moot. It simply doesn't exist here. Even in the places I've mentioned, any growth must first be served by cars and any other means is an afterthought. That leaves most of the US, and LA in particular, leaving public transportation as "the means of last resort" (especially with the rise of Uber). Oddly enough, LA *does* have a light rail, with enough connections to possibly be useful (don't be surprised if much of Uber's traffic is in the "last mile [km]" as I doubt it gets all that close to most destinations). The map included appears to be 50km by 50km. Has anybody used this? I wouldn't believe that LA is anything like the cities I've mentioned, but it has been 20 years since I've been there. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fd/Los_Angeles_County_Metro_Rail_and_Metro_Liner_map.svg

Is it supposed to come in "backwards", or "forwards" and eventually flip for a powered landing? Doing tricks like that in KSP, I've always come in backwards (largely because engines have OP heatshields).

The Boring Company is in Los Angeles, so I'd expect them to bore there. I have no idea what you would do with a hyperloop there, possibly airport to San Diego airport? My understanding is that public transportation is the means of last resort (they have a subway, of sorts. I think it has two, three stops tops). Simply boring more bypasses sounds like a good idea, but in practice adding roads only increases dispersion to match previous commuting times. San Francisco is obvious, with at least two larger (Oakland and San Jose) cities nearby and mostly connected by BART (I've been on BART from Walnut Creek outside Oakland, so it goes a long way. Although I've heard that only commuter rail goes to San Jose). It would be one of the more ideal locations for a hyperloop (or at least boring). I've never been to Houston, but expect it to be even more spread out than LA. Also forget about public works in Texas (you might find acceptance in Houston, but still get pushback from the rest of the state). Has Pittsburgh thrown its hat in? Navigating through Pittsburgh requires crossing two bridges and at least one tunnel (if taken by a native, otherwise expect to get lost and cross many of each). If any place would be helped by boring, it would be Pittsburgh. Don't ask about Boston: I can't imagine the issues involved in attempting another "Big Dig".