linkxsc

... well, Ive already got 26 latin characters for english, ~3 more associated with spainish. 46 hirigana, 46 katakana, maybe 300 kanji (of the 2000 "common" ones) and once I was become competent with Japanese I was thinking of doing Russian. I think this whole phonetic thing... yeah screw it. The hell does that even say?? I thought ,shi so tsu no and n in katakana were bad on reusing similar characters (all 5 of the characters are a curved / with some " to the left of them)

Dude so what if you need some fuel burning backup, or something to take up the slack during high load times. Thats still that much less fuel burned normally. You act like a real system would be just solar and wind. No youd have solar, wind, hydro, nuclear, and all manner of others. Hell you do realize that a lot of wind farms have gas turbines on site right? (Maybe not on site, but connected to the local grid) takes less than 2 minutes to fire a 30MW gas turbine up and have it producing power. Assuming the sun went out and the wind died down. But lets not forget that on several good days, oh right thats 30MW not burned in fuel. Been a while since I did the paper in college. But based on the fuel usage of the Newington New Hampshire oil plant (like 480 MW) we had figured out that your average 1MW wind turbine working at like 70% capacity offsets like 82 gallons of fuel burned per hour at that plant. Going on that gas turbine thing. For every day you're getting 30MW from wind, or solar, or hydro, thats almost 60,000 gallons not being burned elsewhere.

I dunno. I know most of my reading and spelling skill can be blames on gaming (pokemon was a big 1, coming out in second grade. Then a few years later was Everquest) But I know I only learned from those because I was constantly exposing myself to the chat. Even now where my company bought me a copy of Japanese Rosetta Stone (nice outfit, bought like half the people a 300 dollar language software) As added practice the boss sent me a set of like 30 volumes of some kids comic series (even though its written in full Japanese, they have the phonetic sounding written above the associated character. You know, for kids, who know the phonetics but may not know the complex characters yet.) Thing I find though. When I was a kid I read for fun. It may have been a side effect of my gaming, but it was still a constant part of my life. A lot of the time when I talk to kids (middleschoolers, related to friends often) who complain about they cant read. I wonder, how often do they actually practice? A lot of kids who I talk to (even gaming 1s now) they never practice reading (what with voice in all your fpses now anyways) its not something that regularly comes up in their lives outside of school. Cant learn to do stuff well without practice.

?? Why? ^^

Would an earth ceres cycler be possible?

I know that the larger dpfs can be refurbished a bit. Pull them off, spray them down with urea, and bake them for a bit. (Which is basically what should be happening when the car is running)

Most diesel engines can usually run on mixes of diesel and other stuff. You can run on vegetable oils and animal fats just fine, as long as you can keep them thin enough (heating coil in the tank. Or mix it with some diesel. I dont recommend doing this in the winter though) Heck Ive got a 100kw caterpillar generator sitting in my garage with some extra fuel filters, and a goofy triangular tank, made to run straight off of crude. (So you can run it in an oil field, without needing to transport fuel to it)

Main point of a cycler would be a reuseable station with the radiation shielding and space and comfort for several crewmembers for a longer duration mission (to mars) than could be provided for in a ship.

Another thing to note is fire safety. Gasoline is extremely volatile, and easy to ignite. Diesel on the other hand is actually pretty hard to burn without an extreme level of oxidizer, or extreme heat.

Actually not so anymore. Actually i know for a fact that running a modern truck, aside from the CO2, you actually end up cleaning the air of other stuff as you drive. Soot production is a real problem with older trucks, especially when forced down to low rpms. But at the same time. A properly working engine shouldnt make too much if you see soot production, you are probably looking at an older engine thats not getting quite as much compression as it should. modern engines sooting up is a pretty big problem because its usually accompanied by a sharp drop in power.

No not really. I usually rather enjoy telling people stuff. Take pride in it rather. But hey everyones got smartphones now, so everytime someone asks me something, maybe i should just tell them to google it.

Well i dont know about the whole economics of it. But there are some very strong reasons why diesel is the main fuel for transporting goods across countries. First of all, diesel engines are a bit more efficient than gasoline engines. (Higher compression) Diesel has more energy per gallon than gasoline. Also at least from my experience in the US, since you can get x gasoline from a barrel of crude and y diesel, might as well use both of them in applications rather than wasting 1. On other notes however. Diesel engines are often much higher torque, and lower rpm than gasoline engines of equal power. Lower rpm means less wear and tear in the engine, and transmission. Also diesel engines do not require a spark, and all the equipment required for 1 in a gasoline engine. If you lose the alternator in your diesel truck, the batteries can probably keep the fuel pump running long enough to make it to a repair stop. Gasoline cars that lose the alternator will drain the batteries at a significantly higher rate. Lots of deep water fishing boats (and many container ships, tankers and all) rely on diesel engines partially for this reason. I know that my dads boat, even after having a complete electrical failure, were able to trawl the 40mi back to shore since the engines are gravity fed with fuel, and will just keep running. Kinda sucked not having lights, but it was manageable. Gas boat, wed have had to call in the coast guard. Also in extremely high power applications, there are even more efficient diesel engines out there, called opposed piston, engines. As far as i know, they are only built extremely large, i think fairbanks morse is 1 of the manufactures. dont remember how efficient they had gotten them. I think some regular diesel engines out there are pushing into the 40-50% thermal efficiency range nowadays. And several groups are planning on making a truck sized version of an opposed piston design, which may push the efficiency up into the 60% range. J think some of the big engines for ships are even into the upper 60s (and when you are talking a 50khp engine, every .1% counts) Although dont take this all at face value. My numbers may be off a bit, and i am on my phone and cant really look them up super well. When i get on later perhaps i could link you some articles supporting my statements.

Well ive been using both all throughout my gaming career (since 03 when i built my first machine. It was ati then) and 90% of the time... it really doesnt matter. Nvidia does pull ahead when it comes to games that were optimized for it, but theres always cost as a factor. Either way if you spend 350-500 on a card you should be all set for a couple years either way. I find that nowadays, having a good speed processor and high speed ram has a bit more of an effect. (And when i say high speed i dont mean lol 4-8 processors. I mean a good quad core with 3.5-4ghz. Really for gaming due to how few games actually support multiple cores. If you could get a dual core at 4.5-5ghz, youd prolly be better off than some lol 8 core thing. But high speed processors like that can be expensive.) Clean your heat sinks every few months though. I have had a raging overheated nvidia card once because the heat sinks are often too tightly spaced, and will cake up with dust over a few months. Edit, sry i got cut off there. Got a call and when answering hit post

I thought that the gold stuff was kapton insulation. Nit gold

I was being sarcastic

Try it out in ksp yourself. Make a lander, use 1 of the lander cans as the main portion, then try to land it with 3, 4, 6, 8 legs, and see how stable it is. 6 is usually the best btw, but you cant always find space for them what with other things attached like ladders.

Whats a gravity scanner

^ totally not thought that out at all. Though your mention if the mass driver did remind me. Catapaults do work in space, and having a smaller craft launched off from the cycler, without having to use its onboard fuel, could save a solid chunk of delta-v for the landers

Flat board will stop flying because you arent adding any stability or power to it to keep it going. It stops "flying" when its airspeed gets too low. Flown countless little rc planes that the wings didnt have proper airfoils on them, they were straight flat pieces of depron foam. Just have to have a rudder and elevator keeping the thing stable and making an angle to the airflow. Most of them fly just fine. As far as temeter with the weapons convergence. Yes perhaps keeping weapons tight together firing forward is a good thing (p38 lightenings had all the guns right in the nose, and would often fire at enemies from much longer ranges than the 100m convergence area of a p51 or other wing mounted fighter.) You can always argue cooling, wanna keep the engines and weapons far apart, so mount them out away from eachother. But tie fighters have the weapons tight in to their engine, with the coolant from both being routed out to the wings.

My curiosity. Why must we return space borne materials to the earth surface to give them worth. Like said above its prohibitively expensive to put the mining equipment in space, to be followed by even more cost returning the products. My thought has always been, why? Keep the stuff in space, maybe move it to a station in earth orbit, and use them in space to build stuff. Tech in things like 3d printing have been skyrocketing. Given a century, Im pretty sure that we could just be building new satellites up in space, rather than launching them from earth. All wed need to lift Then would be people, and small amounts of things that are too difficult to manufacture. (Semiconductors come to mind) could probably build the hulls of satellites and probes up there. Heck if the station were just off of geo graveyard orbit (so it would get chances to grab at all the defunct satellites out there without an extreme difference in orbital speed). Could recycle defunct satellites also. But i know why we wouldnt. Because there wouldnt be any short term economic gain on earth. So its worthless. But then again, so is exploring space anywhere beyond GSO (which is only worthwhile due to com sats). Ya know what, screw this whole space business. I want a giant ocean floor base first.

iirc it was the shield that wrapped around the wings deflecting the air that caused the airfoil properties, also by adjusting the shield output, thats how control surfaces were done. However that was a description out of some now noncanon comic talking primarily about the z95 headhunter

Well on the note of wings. More space for hardpoints, more space for radiators, more ability to handle in atmosphere. In scifi youll note a lot of space craft are also atmospheric. Starwars, macross, BSG, all of those winged craft were also atmospheric. On the note of the lol banking in starwars. I do realize it is a silly thought, and the whole design of the xwing was they wanted something that anyone could look at, and make a pretty good guess that this is some kind of fighter. Though 1 halfassedly decent explanation for banking a spacecraft, your craft has SAS or RCS thrusters to maneuver does it not? Is it not possible that in 1 axis (pitch) there is more torque capability than in others (yaw and roll) perhaps even using some thrust vectoring. Cause often in scifi its treated that craft cant really stop and start their engines instantly (perhaps it wouldnt be too good for the reactor or whatever), which would make those more useful. Hence when trying to reorient the craft, it might be faster to roll and pitch rather than yaw? Also theres the point of contention in that the xwing like a real aircraft has the hull of the craft in the way of more than half the pilots vision. Banking into a target would allow the pilot to keep the target in view, as opposed to yawing the craft over.

Its not totally undoable, just a little hard. off the topic of a cardboard plane/drone. If you went with a more legit aircraft with a fuel burning engine. Its not too hard to get a plane airborn with a few hours worth of fuel. From there, if you relied on an interface to the plane that ran through internet via cell service, the thing could technically be flown any range away from its launching point. As long as it still has cell service and fuel. (Actually could probably build a phone right into the thing, have the gps and sensors in the phone and the phones processor handle the work, and send out on the usb or bluetooth to the planes servo control board.) Although i know in the US there are some serious legal restrictions for doing that, and its probably quite hard to get a permit.

Any rules on the size of the motor and battery and such, propeller size? Thickness of cardboards to be used? Other materials allowed? (Fiberglass, or balsa for supports and wing spars. Paper allowed?) Honestly i have a pretty solid design already made from foam that i could link others for a base idea.

^ what speed ram are you going for. It makes a pretty big difference with some games