Shpaget

Another series of earthquakes shook us. Several foreshocks and a main (at least I hope it was the main event) of 6.4 magnitude brought quite severe damage in a nearby town Petrinja (about 50 km from my location). At least three fatalities are reported and multiple injuries. Structural damage in epicenter is severe and widespread. Dozens of aftershocks are recorded. Here in Zagreb, the damage is not as severe, but there is debris on the streets, public transportation is down, (some) hospitals are being evacuated. It's a mess. My house faired well with no obvious damage. I'm still waiting for my brother to get home and check his apartment. I'm trying to find data, but the shake was quite long; I'm estimating about 15 seconds, seemed like it went on and on. This follows the 5.3 magnitude quake from March that had the epicenter much closer to Zagreb center and caused significant damage. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/29/strong-6-3-magnitude-earthquake-hits-central-croatia

Good for you for playing with numbers. Solving this problem is probably the first documented brilliancy of Gauss. https://www.nctm.org/Publications/Teaching-Children-Mathematics/Blog/The-Story-of-Gauss/

Hayabusa 2 is back! https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55201662 It safely reentered the Earth atmosphere and landed in Australia. The sample container was recovered and seems to be in good condition.

You could use steppers. They can spin arbitrarily slowly and 300 RPM on the high end should be no problem. They also have more torque at lower speeds. My complaint is that it was only today that I learned about the existence of atomic chess. It's just like regular chess, but every time you take the opponents piece, your piece is lost too. Additionally the opponents piece blows up every non pawn piece in a 3x3 square. It's rather chaotic and games can end rather abruptly. I played a few games on lichess today and it's amazing. The opponent keeps the pressure and is one move from mating me, but one slip and the tables turn. It's no longer a game of tactics and strategy, it's a game of trickery and insane sacrifices.

Bumpity bump, this is still dumb, but now with a bit more info and some shiny hardware. https://spacenews.com/aevum-unveils-autonomous-aircraft-that-launches-rockets/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/12/meet-ravn-x-a-fully-autonomous-air-launched-rocket-for-small-satellites/ "55,000-pound unpiloted aircraft is 80 feet long with a 60-foot wingspan." "It releases a two-stage rocket that can launch 100 kilograms to 500 kilograms of payload to low orbits." "Because we don’t have to worry about human pilot, we ignite half a second to 1 second on separation." which is, according to them, a gamechanger and will make existing plane air launched systems obsolete "because after the rocket is released from the aircraft, it takes several seconds for the plane's pilots to pull away to a safe distance, and by the time the rocket ignites its engines, it is accelerating back toward Earth." "The business plan is based on conducting about eight to 10 launches a year at prices ranging from $5 million to $7 million a launch". That sounds a bit optimistic, considering Pegasus is ~$40M. They claim to have a billion dollars worth of contracts which is impressive, including military contracts, which is impressive considering they don't have a flight article.

I hereby grant you your 1000th Like. May there be many more.

Yeah, it was the instruments pod thing that was freakishly massive (900 tons) and the cables that were in tension, ready to snap and cut in half whatever and whoever happens to be in the way that were the dangerous bits. All of that is now safely at the bottom of the valley. Sure there are probably some bits of the dish itself that are damaged and still may be dangerous, but that is a problem much easier to solve. The pylons that were holding the instruments platform are no longer stressed and can probably be demolished with standard demolishing procedures. In any case, the loss of the instrument is sad enough, I'm just glad there were no injuries on top of it.

Perhaps it's for the best that it collapsed, since controlled demolition would have been dangerous. At least now it's much safer to clean up.

It's gone! https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/us/monolith-utah-disappeared.html

Maradona, 60, cardiac arrest. He goes into the history books.

Is it multiplying yet? That would be of concern.

DC doesn't suffer from the problem of power factor correction, something that is of significant interest on utility scales, and even as small as industrial users. With more and more switch mode power supplies powering our appliances, I would not be surprised to see power companies penalizing households for poor power factor. Modern solid state switch mode power supplies can easily deal with voltage shuffling. Increase in DC power generation (solar panels) is also an important aspect of design. When we started building the power grid it made sense to use AC simply because transformers were the only reasonable way to convert between voltages and you really need high voltage for long distance distribution. Today, it's really much more even race. I wouldn't be surprised is Mars colony used DC.

That sucks. Any chance of rebuilding it?

Technically, they can charge more than F9/FH if they discontinue the F9/FH flights, which is something I don't consider unimaginable. Right now F9 is the workhorse, but Starship is intended to not only be more capable but also replace F9. Once they are comfortable with Starship and have a couple of functional units, they may decide it's too expensive to maintain two designs and production lines, and just drop F9. At that point, price for Starship launch can be significantly higher than F9. Even in that scenario it might still be cheaper for customers, since they would be sharing a ride with somebody or multiple somebodies.

Ok, you got me, I'll spill the beans, however, my monthly cheque from Shills'R'Us ltd is barely a week late so you'll have hold tight for a few more days. Usually they arrive a few days early, but they said there was an unplanned chemtrail dusting project they had to do and it tied up their resources. Anyway, I'll take some pictures of the tictac'o'plane as we call it and post them later.

You are making a positive claim with little to no evidence. Occam's razor says the explanation is something mundane. Sure, it could be some advanced active camouflage that can project false visual, radar and IR signatures, but it's more likely it's just birds.

What's with the black ninja with two swords on his back (T-2:50:00)?

He's just a stickler for details and imprecisely tightened fasteners are his pet peeve.

My friend also can't see anything wrong, apart from it it looking like a crumpled up loose ball of wire, or as if a spool of pipe fell of a cliff, then rolled down a hill and ended up as a winner of a crash derby. That being said, I'm sure there is method to the madness. It works, right? Kind of, at least.

Didn't Elon say that hydraulics failed? Perhaps it was dripping burning hydraulic fluid?

Did I misunderstand something? Wasn't the 15 km hop supposed to be today (instead of static fire)?

Remember how you think that Terminator 2 is the best movie ever in the history of past, present and future? Well, it almost wasn't. Thank the scissors, they cut this part out: Skip 3:34 - 3:37 if you don't want to have the movie spoiled, destroyed and cast to the oubliette for eternity.

You seem to constantly mix fiction with real world science. Magnetic airbreathing antimatter plasma pusher plate micro orion saucer torchship (MAAPPPMOSTTM) may be impossible/impractical/suboptimal/whatever in real life, but in fiction it may be just the right thing. However, you don't make is clear what you want. Just write your thing and worry more about characters, their development, story and dialog than technobabble. Speaking of which, when do we get to read it? Do we get the credit, and more importantly, do we get the credits?

Is the main risk the collision with Bennu itself, or with debris kicked up from the surface? I suppose those rocks will take their time to settle down. Again, thank you for the time you spend here talking to us about this. It's totally cool to have an inside man we can ask these questions.

Perhaps not in total amount, but certainly in the ratio of pollution/usefulness, and even in pollution/power, since they are usually pointed up and a good deal of the light completely misses the structure. They are the prime candidate for blanket ban.