StrandedonEarth
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Posts posted by StrandedonEarth
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3 hours ago, darthgently said:
Hoover, being an American company, is occasionally used as a verb here in the states also
It’s also used as a command for my dog to find and clean up dropped food…
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Metal-poor worlds. Assuming intelligent life could even develop, advanced tech requiring metalworks would be rather difficult…
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Oh hey, something to make me late for work…
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28 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:
Is it possible to keep propellant depots cool by shading then behind sunshields? That would allow you to basically have them everywhere in the solar system the shield can survive and operate.
Should be able to with a JWST-class sunshield. But that is multi-layered, and the biggest problem is preventing conduction from reaching the tank. Multiple sunshields for different directions would be needed to deal with planetshine
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Thanks for verifying that it's worth it. I was going to see it this Tuesday but my kid had a hockey game rescheduled then. So now we have to wait for next Cheapskate Tuesday....
Just now, Nuke said:this is where i complain that it takes us months to get movies here. it will probably be up for streaming before i can go see it. the rest of this month seems to be booked up (with more super hero hogwash), so april maybe.
When we moved to Mackenzie, BC in my teens, the theater there was many months behind. Even though we were only there for four months, it closed down in that time. That was right when VCR rentals were taking off, so that's what killed it.
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32 minutes ago, DAL59 said:
But you would also be able to have a greater mass budget of fuel for braking on the probe.
Someone would have to run the numbers, and it would be a delicate balance, for sure. A shorter trip would mean a much longer insertion burn, or more powerful (heavier) engines. Would it still have the dV for a shorter trip, with all that extra fuel/engine mass? Many trade-offs, to be sure. At least it wouldn't need as many RTGs, maybe.
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12 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:
A group from SETI is working on communicating with humpback whales, with the idea that we should practice learning to communicate with known species before we need to do it with extraterrestrial ones.
This. Dogs understand us, but we barely understand their body language. We expect other animals to understand our commands. We should be working to communicate and understand the languages of cetaceans.
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17 minutes ago, darthgently said:
That is kind of clicking for me now. I can see how replacing air with a non-compressible liquid would cause the 9g force to be distributed over one's surface to a large degree so I think the analogy to diving fair. And Clarke was a stickler for the math and physics by and large. I need to read past the first book of that series, but dang my reading list is endless at this point. Something is still bothering me about the physics of 9g in a fish tank but I can't figure out what
Rama II was a hard slog, I admit. Gentry added a lot of verbose social back story aspects to the story in the beginning, but it did pick once they finally reached Rama. III might even be the best of the sequel bunch, IV (Rama Revealed) went a little too far into the religious aspect IMO, which is presumably one of the reasons why the later books were generally panned.
E: And while I know the pressure at 9G wont be a problem, I still don't know how the internal organs will handle the gees, or what it would feel like.
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1 hour ago, DAL59 said:
There's been a lot of discussion on this thread of shrinking Orion and/or adding a small lunar lander to SLS, but isn't there another option to get around the "too weak to go to LLO and back" problem?
Why not have Falcon Heavy or an equivalent launch vehicle launch a kicker stage into LEO, Orion docks with it, gets boosted into a moon transfer, then uses its own fuel to capture into LLO and return. This would enable smaller lunar landers to be used for Artemis.
Because at that point SLS is pointless. Three FH launches can put way more payload mass on orbit than a single SLS launch (two would do more, but most of the mass would be residual props), and for a lot cheaper. But, politics/jobs...
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Brian Mulroney, one of Canada's most consequential prime ministers, is dead at 84 | CBC News
QuoteBaie-Comeau, Quebec-born leader negotiated U.S. free trade deal, introduced GST
Brian Mulroney — who, as Canada's 18th prime minister, steered the country through a tumultuous period in national and world affairs — has died. He was 84.
Oh right, he introduced the Grab-and-Steal Tax (to go along with the Pretty Stupid Tax in most provinces), which led to this bit of doggerel still lodged in my mind:
Spoiler"We're tiny, we're tooney, we haven't got a loonie
Since Brian, Mulroney, invented GST!"(yes, for those who don't know, Mulroney rhymes with loonie (slang for the Canadian dollar coin))
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30 minutes ago, darthgently said:
Ok, but what pressures would the fluid exert on you if the fluid is at 9g acceleration?
A person is a bag of water, so their hydrostatic pressure would balance with the outside pressure. It would be similar to deep-sea diving, without a hardsuit. The recreational dive limit is 100', with heliox mix 200' and more is possible. So at 9 gees, being under 1' of water would be like being under 8'-9' of water, which is easily doable although it gets painful on the ears without equalization (a skill I never mastered; I even have difficulty popping them during an airliner descent).
As to how practical or effective it is, I don't know, I ran across the concept while reading Arthur C. Clarke's (with Gentry Lee) Garden of Rama (unofficially aka Rama III in the Rendezvous With Rama series)
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6 hours ago, Terwin said:
Then again this is a magic drive, so if you want it to, inverting the thrust could cause daisies to sprout from the control console.
Sounds more like an infinite improbability drive….
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One concept I had for limited-life cooling and power generation on a Venusian probe was to start with an ice (water, oxygen, nitrogen , hydrogen?) heat sink. As it boils away, use the escaping gas to spin a turbogenerator. Perhaps some form of thermocouple insulation could provide extra power while soaking up some of that Venusian heat?
Is there any sort of refrigeration tech that would be able to reject enough heat on the Venusian surface to keep the insides tolerable for the aforementioned hi-temp electronics, given enough power like the aforementioned wind turbines??
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2 hours ago, darthgently said:
I, personally, would find one hour at 9g a very hostile work environment and would be floating my resume as soon as acceleration decreased enough to allow my resume to float rather than being embossed on the aft bulkhead.
Depends, if you’re suspended in a buoyancy tank it may not be so bad
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It's gotta be something silly/stupid, like clashing time stamps or something similarly weird. Especially weird since logging out fixes the issue, only to have it come back when logging in. But I feel for anyone trying to fix this, as intermittent issues are the absolute worst to troubleshoot, especially when not many users are affected, (AFAIK)
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On 2/27/2024 at 2:31 PM, AstroWolfie said:
how do people dual wield weapons? I see these a lot in video games/movies and tv
As others have said, dual-wielding only really happens in entertainment media. Because, it's cool.
The only fiction that touches on reloading while dual wielding (that I know of) is The Gunslinger, who relies on years of training and practice to reload his revolvers, cartridge by cartridge. One line from the book stands out, which my mind somewhat paraphrases into a compact, standalone line (compared to the wordier quote in the book) "And still his fingers did their trick..."
Stephen King admits that Roland was inspired by Clint Eastwood, of course...
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Hear ye, hear ye:
Richard Lewis, comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ star, dead at 76 | CNN
QuoteComedian and actor Richard Lewis, whose self-deprecating humor and acerbic wit in shows like “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Anything but Love” entertained audiences for decades, has died, according to his publicist Jeff Abraham. He was 76.
Abraham said in an email to CNN that the entertainer passed away “peacefully” at his home in Los Angeles on Tuesday night after having a heart attack.
In April of 2023, Richard revealed that he had been living with Parkinson’s disease.
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7 minutes ago, Vanamonde said:
Oh, I misread it. This is what happens when you've had the Death Cold for 1.5 weeks. Even so, if it's not a neutron star why isn't convection dispersing the metals?
Apparently it's pinned in place by magnetic fields.
Quote“This scar is a concentrated patch of planetary material, held in place by the same magnetic field that has guided the infalling fragments,” said Landstreet, also affiliated with the Armagh Observatory and Planetarium. “Nothing like this has been seen before.”
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2 hours ago, Codraroll said:
All right, time for a short one.
Every high school student knows the measure of pH for the acidity of aqueous solutions. The H is always upper-case because it stands for "Hydrogen ion exponent". It's essentially a measure of how much free Hydrogen ions there are going around in the solution.
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Modern chemistry has scrambled to ret-con the p into meaning something like "power" or "potentiality", or the like, but neither has gained any definite dominance. We've just accepted that there is a little p there, without fully understanding why. And now it's too ubiquitous to replace with something more sensible.
I learned it as "power of Hydrogen" which makes sense to me given the "Hydrogen ion exponent." I never realized there was any debate as to the actual meaning.
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5 hours ago, DDE said:
Meanwhile, on the chlorine pentafluoride engine development team...
What team? They looked at it wrong and were instantly dissolved...
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1 hour ago, darthgently said:
Corrosion? I imagine it is a loose pile of reduced flakes and dust with a few parts made of odd materials still recognizable.It could have been swallowed completely by a molten volcanic outflow by now also
IIRC the atmosphere has a good proportion of sulfuric acid (although I'm not sure if that it true at ground level) so I think this is the most likely condition of Venera...
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I always wanted to visit Meteor Crater, but that's three hours away from Phoenix...
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The Defector, by Chris Hadfield, was a pretty good read.
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And yeah, it went back to a white screen for me last night (Sunday evening, to be precise)
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
I’m guessing they need thrust for ullage to dump the LOX, especially at any reasonable flow rate.