Shpaget

Consider yourself lucky. You could have had radio face.

You can't. A variable is a number. A number can not be two different numbers. Also, I don't think this: if T>x2: 1==300 2==600 3==900 will do what you think it will do.

But you can't cook in glass dishes.

That reentry burn IR view made me wince. That sudden exhaust plume made me thing there was a RUD. Well, center core gave a boom of the day, I suppose. It looked like it missed the barge.

Here we go!

HA! Decided not to stay up for it only to wake up to the delay! It's a national holiday over here and I can stay home. So, I'm baking some snacks.

Star Trek calls it inertial damper.

Of course props have variable geometry. At the root the propeller the cord ratio is much higher than at the tip, and the entire aerofoil is twisted. That is to compensate for differences in airspeed near root and near tip of the blade. Using a simple wing geometry for prop would lead to inefficiency because wing is designed for one single airspeed - cruising. Each "slice" of propeller crossection is designed for different airspeed because at the designed standard angular speed of the propeller different parts of the blades travel at different speeds. But there is not fundamental or conceptual difference.

Those tweets are insane. 500 engines per year and 1000 flights out of an engine sounds insane. 500 engines per year, 1000 flights per engine, 34 engines per flight = 40 flights per day. He is serious about rocketliners (point to point Earth passenger service)?

It's been years since the last time I heard this thing and I still like it: I stumbled upon it by accident while going on a dance/trance/electronic/whatever binge.

Some time ago I saw a project with a high power laser (100-ish mW or so) mounted on a turret with some machine vision system that would track mosquitos and take them out of the skies. A summer project? Might want to issue safety goggles to your housemates.

This is a good place to apply my favorite approach to conceprual thinking. Just go to extremes. Imagine a huge propeller, infinitely big. At some point the blade of the propeller is traveling in pretty much a straight line - just as a wing does.

That's one of those cases where intuition breaks apart when faced with hard data of reality. Before reading your post I never considered this, and would have happily and ignorantly claimed that there was much more water on Earth than on some backwater moon (pun intended).

I just went to bed and had a most disturbing train of thought. I probably won't be able to fall asleep until I resolve this, so I'm here to ask for input. In the the term "thinktank", does the "tank" part mean something like a container (as in fish tank) or the armored and armed combat vehicle? Both could work.

Oh, there are people for whom I made a custom "delete automatically" filter because they would forward every mail they considered funny to everybody else. Of course, they would cc everybody, not bcc, so my email address got around to people I didn't particularly want to have my address. I would usually ask once to stop including me into that type of spam, and then just automate the deletion. Once, one of them asked me why I haven't replied to an email they had sent a few days before. They got offended when I told them that their emails go straight to the trashcan. They stayed on the filter list.

Bioneural gel packs are new tech in Voyager, so there's room for improvement there. Borg transwarp is not available to Federation, so they might look into backengineer that. It's illegal, but laws change so cloaking tech. Harnessing the Omega particle. Or any other trans field phase shifting gobledygook.

These cargo ships, which are 400 m long, take 5 minutes to turn 180°. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/45/313145.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiHvtbn9f7iAhWvM-wKHRJsDOAQFjAKegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw2kEiCAUqQTadS3Pu-5ZWn9

Adam Savage says that the difference between screwing around and science is taking notes. So, document the unconventional method and you're good to go! In my book anyway.

How does that mesh with "new $7 million test facility on 10 acres at New Mexico’s Spaceport America" they started building? Are there any suitable mountains over there?

Now put a payload on that 100 m arm. If the payload + upper stage rocket is very conservative 1000 kg, you're stressing the arm with about 1000 tons. The arm itself needs to be massive. Edit: Of course, once you release the payload, you suddenly have a 1000 ton imbalance on your spinning contraption.

During the Starlink launch, 1 km/s was reached at around 30 km altitude. They would need to increase acceleration dramatically to reach that 1 km/s in reasonable distance, reducing the variety of payloads due to the inability to survive the initial G forces.

An obscure (at least for me) company apparently scored a "a responsive launch prototype contract " with US DOD. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190619005661/en/SpinLaunch-Secures-Contract-Revolutionary-New-Space-Launch http://www.spinlaunch.com/SpinLaunch_Media_Fact_Sheet.pdf They speak of kinetic hypersonic launch system with final circularisation done by a small rocket, five launches per day at $250k a pop: They don't actually say what is their proposed system, but they say what it is not: They don't list any specification for mass to LEO or any other relevant number, so it's hard to say anything, but they expect first launch in 2022. Sounds fishy. Every time I hear about kinetic launch to orbit I remember the Pascal-B and how the manhole cover probably didn't actually reach space.

I honestly don't see the need for multiple CPUs. I'd wager a bag of gummy bears that the task at hand can be adequatly performed by a single microcontroller. Keep it simple. You're struggling with even basic programing stuff. Get that sorted out first. You don't need additional hurdles (nor the benefit of more computing power).

What's the nature of the out of wackness of the calibration? Is there a sensor that is out of cal? If so, can you document the offset and adjust the data according to it?

You certainly can. However, depending on what is "a" and what "dostuff" does, it may or may not be a smart thing to do. In a system where there is a need for rapid decision making to correct deviant behavior, such as is the case with a rocket going off the intended course, you want to check the attitude as often as possible, do minimal course correction (because you caught it just a fraction of the moment after it deviated), then check attitude again to see if the correction was adequate (in which case you stop correcting) or it needs another fraction of a moment. You then check again and again. Getting your code stuck in one while loop opens up the possibility of stuff happening that you intended some other while loop to fix, but the code is stuck in the first one and the second one is left unchecked for too long.