Slashdot Mirror
John Carmack, Rocket Boy
will_edit_for_food writes "Space Future has an interview with John Carmack (of Doom and Quake fame) about his new company Armadillo Aerospace and their plans to build a passenger-carrying vehicle for space tourism." Carmack's involvement with unconventional rocketry is well-known, but this interview offers a glimpse into the details of Armadillo's approach to the skies.
About 2 million duct tapes are used when doing preps for each shuttle mission. We have such a large order that 3M has it's own division set out for us. Ductape is an intergrial (no joke) part of all space research. Oh I'm at NASA btw.
From a programming standpoint, Quake 3 is a marvel, but I wouldn't exactly call it a marvel in game physics. The game relies mostly on characters within bounding boxes. There isn't much interaction with the environment other than shooting at objects, jumping, or falling.
From a physics standpoint, the most impressive things about the Quake series is most likely its lighting. Even though this is a pre-calculated lightmap, radiosity isn't really a simple thing.
Trespasser was years ahead of Quake in this area. Boxes would shatter, and each pieces of wood would scatter everywhere. Too bad the game didn't do much else right.
Doom 3 is supposed to be worlds better. Enemies are supposed to be able to fall down steps, more interaction, etc.
Remember that the Graphics Engine for Doom was done a while back, around the time he started Armadillo Airspace. Think about what's left for him to explore. AI and Game Physics are two big regions.
I'm expecting Doom 3 to be a lot of things that all other Id games weren't. AA plays a big part of my expectations.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
In some ways it's better than LOX- it's 'specific impulse density' is slightly higher than LOX. This means you get more kick per unit volume of tank (although it is heavier too). However, since rockets are mostly tanks, it's not a silly fuel.
In normal applications HP ("HTP") is used for attitude jets because it is a 'storable propellent'. This means that you can put it in a tank and leave it there for over a year without any big issues. LOX evaporates. Also HTP is a monopropellent, so it's fairly easy to work with.
The Space Shuttle uses storable propellent for its OMS engines, although not HTP. Some russian rockets use HTP as a fuel to run their turbopumps IRC.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"The hydrogen peroxide you get at the store is 3% hydrogen peroxide, rest water, and maybe a bit of salt (so saline solution, eh.) 30% H2O2 will melt your skin off faster than any acid you could hope to find. It's shipped in very thick plastic container (brown to keep the UV out of it, makes H2O2 turn to water + oxygen really fast), with about 3" of solid styrofam packing around it, then a cardboard box. It's very serriously nasty stuff, and at concetrations of more than 35% will turn to water on it's own, given enough vibration, heat or sunlight.
I think it is an interesting symbolism that Carmack is involved in design of rockets for cheap access to space.
In many science fiction books there are two trends for the near future (there are a lot more but these are two major ones). Distopia is typically presented by heavily cybernetic society where the humanity is not really concerned about space. The other trend, is diametrically opposite with humanity focused on space exploration.
Carmack is in a sense a protagonist of future distopia as a designer of cybernetic worlds that are becoming increasingly important to our society (graphics acceleration business, success of 3D animation, even the debates over the impact of the violence in video games). People like Carmack working on rockets is a sign that our future does not have to be a choice between space and cyberspace.
NASA is the problem - go read Kings of the High Frontier to understand the solution.