Shpaget

That's in Hamburg. But Speyer is great anyway.

I'll admit I had something like RPi in mind mind when writing this, since it was mentioned earlier in the thread. However, while my 1 ton remark is perhaps a bit exaggerated for effect, I do believe it in the correct order of magnitude, if one would try to design something as described here using standard model rocketry engines. Keep in mind that those things have abysmal ISP compared to real things.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Freenove-Ultrasonic-Starter-Kit-for-Arduino-Beginner-Uno-R3-Detailed-Tutorial/301995038239?hash=item46504e961f:g:uOMAAOSwvg9Xb8Lf&enc=AQADAAAB4KX%2FKt4E1xf3SDqEdBclaYYDETDqRiEb7BnZqYQ3hAMWauisZpf%2B8hpFnX74UkIA9GH41KdLcqPI4pB6Z0QPoJ2EWekg6tO1355yXyp%2BBDqPqkz0WfNKZuPcQ6aGO00i4F9PjY5vvIumWosEGgED0%2BwT8uJ778b6G0ZarY9n8RlZaXIq2M0%2BHdp%2BWj%2F87nTrMraAHmL64LKA%2BDdvZb%2F7Ju1Toaj7RUAQVABpmPSg5WNh8G2Sv4vHMYmakV5idxXSPOrOiYx4fUD4T2EhDiYnt%2BIwiYqDBt4ducQ4UA7MrbGwOG0qIUJlPEbrwKk%2FLlkEKr3SYaN7lSCxbkGkdA2uh1EPRrkkUPntcRc5rocCVMr7iUlVoXHwgBNd5%2F6x868yg0sDahyQZJrBcejlUO45Urz86ZXQJjtDjVnvsm70RiAByCyXMeMM15k55J1VzrvMxYDLaAfkKm32ErBH1KlG4DEvfqIr2en5A6fpwRtQxAx101vFinzojd%2FhyWtDMWl83kTh2X22O1C%2BzyLxlMuXBMT9zp5UPKtwBd%2BRUpF%2BgeEhlVJeg0xGmL08LpxlTbHJpz6mbObFEpEX3MQjuc8%2FfkK8K6gsAkSBXnTUFgDp2%2BNxTLvWdJhk%2FLvIwYEvqmbDKQ%3D%3D&checksum=301995038239966eb911d59a4e7683dd4560eb571f0d Get yourself something like this. In that set you'll have plenty of bits and pieces to keep you occupied and learning for months. The project you are proposing is beyond your level and while I would never try to dissuade you from taking on a project, for you and your skill level it's just not time yet. Start small. Launching a rocket with half baked software will become very time consuming, frustrating and expensive. Learn how to read a potentiometer value, learn how to move a servo motor, then learn how to move the servo based on the value of the potentiometer. You are trying to integrate too much stuff too quickly. Learn in steps, and gradually build your project. Just how big do you expect your final rocket to be? You are talking about cold gas thrusters. That implies large, high pressure tanks and some beefy solenoid valves. Do you have any experience with those? I still don't understand why you insist on Python. That choice will necessarily lead to a significantly bigger and much more power hungry CPU than needed, leading to more powerful and heavier control mechanisms, which require bigger batteries etc... Soon your rocket will be a one ton missile.

You have to understand that unless you are working on a multi threaded CPU your code can do only one single thing at the time. It can do a task quickly and get to the next task in a blink of an eye that we puny humans might interpret as two events happening at the same time, but for the computer it is doing one thing, and only when that is done go on to the next task. When you use "while 1>0" you tell the program to do whatever is in that block for as long as 1 is greater than 0, which is forever. You never allow the code to do something else. A proper way to do it would be something like this pseudocode: note that "while 1 > 0" is replaced with something that will eventually return false and allow the code to progress further, but during flight it will check and do multiple things in sequence. CountDown Launch CheckAccelerationSensor if Acceleration > 0 RocketInFlight = true while RockeInFlight == true CheckAttitudeSensor1 CheckAttitudeSensor1 CheckAttitudeSensor1 CheckAccelerationSensor CheckMotorThrust CalculateAttitude CalculateCorrection MoveControlSurface1 MoveControlSurface2 if Acceleration == 0 EjectParachute CheckForSplashown if SlashDown == true RocketInFlight == false BeepHappyilyBecauseFlightIsOver

People smarter than me can deduce composition and mass of the smaller body, or in case of known impactor and relatively small bigger one the compostion and mass of the larger one. If you can land some seismic sensors on the bigger one, those brainy folk can figure out physical structure of the body as well.

To be honest, that's how it works with every language. The problem is when you (consciously or otherwise) lead the change and are met with a lack of enthusiasm.

Our local club is celebrating its 50th cakeday, so there is an exhibition. I neglected to bring my camera, so I took some pictures with a potato I found laying nearby. Opening speech and greetings to all. As with every proper cakeday, there was cake. Quite good actually, if you skip the blue thing. I'll be spending next two weeks there.

I could care less about all this. Which means I do actually care and usually make an effort to spellcheck my stuff. Ironically I had to spellcheck the word "spellcheck". Is it one word? Are there two? Is there a "'-" somewhere in the middle? I suppose anything goes.

Keep it in for a month or two, then clone it to her old HDD, replace HDD, take our SSD and see how she likes it.

Years ago I played Aurora 4x for a short while. Never left the Sol. Now I made my first visit to a neighboring system. I jumped a small geo survey ship, no active sensors. A few months later I get a message. Something about nuclear explosion and ship systems failing. I guess I should have expected something like that to occur in a system called Wolf 359.

So what is preventing you from warping however far out needed and accelerating to near c towards your target without engaging the warp? If you approach from above or below ecliptic you're not going to get noticed.

Song bird population plummets, locust invasion begins, crops are destroyed, human civilisation collapses.

Sure it's not black and blue? Mine is always green.

Well, to be honest, gem grade diamonds are almost worthless. Pricey yes, but no intrinsic value other than the potential to be ground up and used as industrial grade dust. Dumping huge amounts of gem grade diamonds on Earth would crash their price to the level of industrial stuff, and industry wouldn't even notice.

HA! It took me only 15 minutes to find a bug in the piece of code I wrote that made the thing I made not work. This is a thing I made some 4 years ago that scans barcodes, decides if the ticket is valid or not and lets the visitor enter the exhibition or not. The first time the device failed about two years ago was due to the battery for the Real Time Clock overcharging and becoming dead. Not entirely my fault since I used an off the shelf RTC module. My part of the fault was that I failed to make proper backups of the software and make a simple way to change date. I wanted to rectify this problem so just reprogramming RTC was not enough and since I was rewriting the entire code I might as well make some hardware changes, right? I rotary encoder for date and time change and added a display for setup and debug. This version work fine for about a year when we started noticing a problem. The bar codes were not read properly. It took me quite a while to figure out the problem since it was intermittent, but over the last few months it became pretty much completely nonfunctional. Except on my workbench in the basement, where it worked flawlessly. A lot more hours than I am comfortable to admit I spent on the problem I narrowed the issue down to stray IR from the Sun. Shielding the enclosure made no difference so I ended up ordering a new barcode scanner. The problem was that the old scanner was old PS/2 keyboard port and the new one USB, which meant that I had to rewrite the interface part of the code. Luckily I found a USB host module that came with a bit of a sample code that I managed to borrow and implement. Not without an ugly bug, though. On my workbench everything seemed to work fine, but when I installed it and tried scanning a ticket, the little display said that the ticket was all used up and the piezzo buzzer kept buzzing angrily. Through my boundless wisdom and forethought regarding the installation of a display, and a decent amount of debug printouts I managed to figure out that I was trying to cram 100 000 bytes into an array that can hold no more than 1 000. At least it was a quick fix. The new scanner is now happily bodged to the microcontroller and seems to work fine. Now I just need the weather to clear up to double check if it works in the Sun (it's been cloudy and rainy for weeks with only sunny periods when I didn't need the sun). Now I just need to figure out what additional bugs I introduced.

Humans have trouble getting along with other humans.

I'm more concerned what this constellation is going to do to long exposure wide angle night sky photography. They might paint a massive grid on every photo. I expect some uproar in the Cloudy Nights community.

But what are important facts is a matter of opinion when it comes to entertainment. No one here would suggest that this is a training or educational video meant to be taken literary and as complete account of the events. This is entertainment piece based on a real event. The helicopter crash is irrelevant for the general event, but here is used to further illustrate the danger of intense radiation. People on the bridge looking at the fire and the pretty lights being covered in radioactive ashes is illustrative of the governments failure to inform the population of the dangers. Two or three individuals going into reactor is beyond irrelevant. Sudden skin bleeding you mention I assume you're talking about the firefighter that picked up a piece of graphite? Yeah, that's used to introduce foreboding. A standard storytelling device. Eyewitness accounts are notoriously unreliable and prone to be misunderstood. Cherenkov radiation is shown as air glowing above the reactor, both in the night scene with people on the bridge and from the helicopter during the daylight (which is obviously exaggerated, but perfectly reasonable for a piece of entertainment. Flashlight dieing due to radiation is something I brought up earlier in the topic and doesn't sit well with me either, but as a visual effect is just perfect. Again, this is entertainment. Claiming that nobody ever suggested the possibility of an additional explosions is a bold move. I doubt we have access to everything that has been said behind the closed doors.

If you have antigravity travelling through atmosphere would be much more efficient using air breathing engines, with rockets used perhaps only for transition between high atmosphere and vacuum.

/me kicks down the door, unplugs the massager and runs away. hihi

Well, if you were looking for something more devastating than crashing an asteroid into Earth, crashing an antimatter asteroid into Earth would do just fine.

You can't just drop something like this and not give us the full story. As for me, I was having a snack.

You are mistaken. Iron oxide (rust) is a lot less ferromagnetic than iron itself. There is a topic around here that discusses pros and cons of Moon and Mars colony, but IIRC the bottom line is that both are hard and inhospitable, with Mars having an added con of being a lot further than Moon. Also don't forget that the best thing about having material in space is the fact that it is in space. Chucking it down to Earth is very wasteful. Sure, it might be ok for some low volume and high value materials that are expensive to produce on Earth due to their rarity, but mining iron or nickel in space just to crash it down to Earth is not sound. The sheer volume of iron produced in the world means that in order to have any significant impact on the economy, it would need to have a much more significant impact (as in dino killing asteroid impact).

Are you saying that we, the lowly four point plebs, are not awesome?

Yeah, that's an interesting approach. I'd probably do something stupid and spin up the second stage to release them one by one. Or perhaps do something a little less radical and put some springs between them to push them apart.