Hang on, in this case we aren't talking about luminance OR saturation. We are talking about contrast. The "black" screen gives us contrast. A darker "background" to compare our signal against.
Six o' one, half dozen of the other, but a little one watt bulb can illuminate a room in the absence of any other light. (I regularly use the back light of the phone to track down lost pacifiers under my daughter's crib in the middle of the night.)
I'm not saying they hadn't planned on it. I'm saying the trying to land a glider a few hundred miles away from where you intended, a few hundred pounds heavier than you intended (because you didn't burn off the fuel), a few thousand feet lower than you intended is pretty much going to mean an uncontrolled landing.
And I for one wouldn't want to be doing it with a full load of fuel.
Over the airport? Try it starts at the airport, builds up speed, and starts the ascent a few hundred miles away to end up back at the airport. The rocket motor fires in pretty much one direction: straight. We accellerate from Mach1 to Mach3 in 1 minute. We glide at Mach3 for 3 minutes. Mach3 is 2100mph. We are traveling in a straight line for 105 miles during the glide phase alone.
But the easiest way to get rid of cockroaches isn't to squash them all. It's to eliminate their food source.
Takes too long. I much prefer dumping borax powder around where I see them hanging out. Takes care of ants too.
(No, I'm not talking about chemical weapons, merely making former strongholds inhospitable. Something, I might add, Bush and Co have failed miserably at.)
Conventional weapons generate sonic booms all the times. Most rifles have a muzzle velocity higher than the speed of sound. (The exceptions are "sub-sonic" munitions designed for silenced weapons.)
Probably need to wear your earmuffs, but not much worse than any other deck gun. (The projectile can only displace so much air at a time.)
Curious. I would think the thinner atmosphere would all but eliminate the dihedral effect. Obviously so did the designers of the spacecraft. Well, knotch another lesson into the belt.
Now, how do they get around stability problems for multi-stage rockets? Do they have a special trick, or simply avoid splitting off into a different stage in the atmosphere?
Given a choice between maintaining the plan, versus trying to pilot an experimental aircraft outside the range of conditions it was designed for, I'd take the plan every time. He's at 100,000 feet, and his only way home is a rocket engine, and a mathematical model. They may not have worked out the control equations for a scrubbed flight. Perhaps attemtping to land from his release point would put him hundreds of miles off course.
There are any number of reasons why he did what he did. He made it back alive, and with the aircraft intact. In my book, that's a textbook flight.
Yes, a vacuum would provide plenty of lift. In fact, it would also solve the problem of the contents of the envelope expanding as the atmospheric pressure drops.
Now the trick is the materials. You need something that will withstand 14 lbs/in*in. It's not too hard for small volumes. But every time you double the surface area of the lift envelope, you double the force the air around it exerts, trying to fill it back up. One time on Mr. Wizard's World, they created a partial vacuum in a paint thinner can. The air around the can crushed it. (And it was a steel can!)
A peer poster noted a design by Buckminster Fueller. I haven't seen it, but it may merit looking in to.
Well, when you try to be everything for everybody these things happen. Heck, if you try to be anything to anybody these things happen. It's just human nature methinks.
That said, M$ did walk right into this situation. In their effort to force everyone to buy new software every other year, they yanked (or tried to yank) support for older versions of the OS. There are many folks out there running specialized apps that were written for the older versions. To be able to drop support for 98 and NT/4 they had to have a way for 98 and NT/4 programs to run under XP.
Why? Because if someone's going to have to pay for an app to be ported to a new environment, they sure as hell aren't going to port it to vendor who just screwed them. A lot of embedded stuff would go Linux. A lot of graphics and CAD would go Mac. By chasing this software assurance scheme they HAD to make XP backward compadible, or people would leave en-masse.
Any other explanation is putting air fresheners up to block the smell of Microsoft having to sleep in a bed they soiled themselves.
- Parents with young kids who need a steady stream of cheapy titles.
My little one is only 8 months old. But I'm envisioning the day we stroll over to the used game store and let her pick out a title every time we go shopping. "If you are really, really good, we can get you a new game" does wonders for kid control. And at $5 and $10 a pop, it's doable.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it a lot cheaper to inspect and re-apply a spray on material than it would be to remove, inspect, and re-attach 60,000 individual tiles.
The spray on can be applied by machine. The Space shuttle's tiles have to be maintained by hand. You can just peel off the old abblative before applying new. Tiles you alway wonder if there is some problem underneath that is not visible through the grout. Abblative's have no seams, can be re-applied in orbit, and cool the vehicle during re-entry.
The plasma torch concept is interesting, except of course that it you had that much spare energy on-board you would be better off using it to brake the spacecraft so it wouldn't be contacting the atmosphere at such terrific speeds.
Especially because she is doing it while straddling two lanes of traffic in front of me, in a bohemeth that completely blocks my view of the sky ahead.
The re-entry problem is pretty easy: a spray on heat shield that evaporates off during re-entry. It's cheap. It's reasonably light weight. It's a proven design.
Spacecraft before the space shuttle used that to great effect. The space shuttle has more or less become a prime example of how NOT to do it. The ceramic shields were expensive, brittle, and (as it seems) prone to failure at the worst possible time.
I think they were trying too too hard on the space shuttle to make it re-usable. Certainly the avionics computers and the seats were prime candidates to be re-used between flights. But I think if they had to do it again they'd make the engines and the heat shields disposable. Those two systems were responsible for more groundings, failures, and overall expense than anything else.
I was working out the napkin notes on this idea and concluded that the mass "savings" are eaten up by the mass of the gass required to pull it off. You have to displace the same "weight" of air as that you are trying to lift. Sure, hydrogen has a fraction of the mass of air at STP, but you are still talking about tons of it. The rules of the contest stated that something like 90% of the craft (by mass) must be re-used. The ballon would be a significant mass.
The second problem is that as you ascend, the pressure drops, and the less boost you get. Sure, for the first few thousand feet you rise like a bat out of hell. But from there on out it's slow, slow, slow, and all the while you are going to be shot off target by the jet stream.
Finally, once you are up in the air, your velocity is still zero. Most of the fuel you are expending is to build up speed. (At least for orbital flight. For the x-prize this isn't so important.)
My back of the envelope (pun not intended) calculations showed that the mass that would have been used for a ballon would be better spent on a bigger booster.
Well no. They really did intend to cash in on neophilia with a "new brand". The PR stunt was realizing in time that the cause was lost and putting together a quicky branding strategy with the "classic".
It's a bit like praising someone's ingenuity for repairing a busted tire with chewing gum while ignoring the fact they hadn't had a spare.
Before you get that far, there you could probably catch them for Perjury, namely lying under oath. Bad faith litigation only affects your ability to file new suits. Perjury is something they toss you in jail for a long time, and strip you of any legal credentials.
It's pretty hard to be convicted of perjury. It has to be proven that you KNEW what you were saying was in fact not true AND your false testimony was material to the court case.
The punishments are pretty stiff. The problem is enforcement is usually limited to someone the system wants to bring down, rather than those who are playing it like a cheap guitar.
Yes, but the Russians would have insisted on a pair of Vodka bottles. They would also insist that they be emptied under carefully controlled circumstances over the course of an evening...
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Six o' one, half dozen of the other, but a little one watt bulb can illuminate a room in the absence of any other light. (I regularly use the back light of the phone to track down lost pacifiers under my daughter's crib in the middle of the night.)
(Cast, troll, troll, troll...)
And I for one wouldn't want to be doing it with a full load of fuel.
Over the airport? Try it starts at the airport, builds up speed, and starts the ascent a few hundred miles away to end up back at the airport. The rocket motor fires in pretty much one direction: straight. We accellerate from Mach1 to Mach3 in 1 minute. We glide at Mach3 for 3 minutes. Mach3 is 2100mph. We are traveling in a straight line for 105 miles during the glide phase alone.
Takes too long. I much prefer dumping borax powder around where I see them hanging out. Takes care of ants too.
(No, I'm not talking about chemical weapons, merely making former strongholds inhospitable. Something, I might add, Bush and Co have failed miserably at.)
Probably need to wear your earmuffs, but not much worse than any other deck gun. (The projectile can only displace so much air at a time.)
I can't wait for my chance to get rid of them.
Did you ever wonder if that's what Rush's song 2112 was all about?
Now, how do they get around stability problems for multi-stage rockets? Do they have a special trick, or simply avoid splitting off into a different stage in the atmosphere?
Landing gear is a critical safety item with no backup too.
Given a choice between maintaining the plan, versus trying to pilot an experimental aircraft outside the range of conditions it was designed for, I'd take the plan every time. He's at 100,000 feet, and his only way home is a rocket engine, and a mathematical model. They may not have worked out the control equations for a scrubbed flight. Perhaps attemtping to land from his release point would put him hundreds of miles off course.
There are any number of reasons why he did what he did. He made it back alive, and with the aircraft intact. In my book, that's a textbook flight.
Now the trick is the materials. You need something that will withstand 14 lbs/in*in. It's not too hard for small volumes. But every time you double the surface area of the lift envelope, you double the force the air around it exerts, trying to fill it back up. One time on Mr. Wizard's World, they created a partial vacuum in a paint thinner can. The air around the can crushed it. (And it was a steel can!)
A peer poster noted a design by Buckminster Fueller. I haven't seen it, but it may merit looking in to.
Well, when you try to be everything for everybody these things happen. Heck, if you try to be anything to anybody these things happen. It's just human nature methinks.
That said, M$ did walk right into this situation. In their effort to force everyone to buy new software every other year, they yanked (or tried to yank) support for older versions of the OS. There are many folks out there running specialized apps that were written for the older versions. To be able to drop support for 98 and NT/4 they had to have a way for 98 and NT/4 programs to run under XP.
Why? Because if someone's going to have to pay for an app to be ported to a new environment, they sure as hell aren't going to port it to vendor who just screwed them. A lot of embedded stuff would go Linux. A lot of graphics and CAD would go Mac. By chasing this software assurance scheme they HAD to make XP backward compadible, or people would leave en-masse.
Any other explanation is putting air fresheners up to block the smell of Microsoft having to sleep in a bed they soiled themselves.
- Parents with young kids who need a steady stream of cheapy titles.
My little one is only 8 months old. But I'm envisioning the day we stroll over to the used game store and let her pick out a title every time we go shopping. "If you are really, really good, we can get you a new game" does wonders for kid control. And at $5 and $10 a pop, it's doable.
Reminds me of how to make a small fortune on the Internet. First, start with a large fortune...
The spray on can be applied by machine. The Space shuttle's tiles have to be maintained by hand. You can just peel off the old abblative before applying new. Tiles you alway wonder if there is some problem underneath that is not visible through the grout. Abblative's have no seams, can be re-applied in orbit, and cool the vehicle during re-entry.
The plasma torch concept is interesting, except of course that it you had that much spare energy on-board you would be better off using it to brake the spacecraft so it wouldn't be contacting the atmosphere at such terrific speeds.
Actually I do slug it with Fark photoshop contest entries on a regular basis. It's not a good day if I'm not fielding 6000 hits before breakfast.
Especially because she is doing it while straddling two lanes of traffic in front of me, in a bohemeth that completely blocks my view of the sky ahead.
Chase planes basically follow the wreckage down so the search parties know roughly where to look.
Given the number of chase craft "Convoy" might be a better tune...
Spacecraft before the space shuttle used that to great effect. The space shuttle has more or less become a prime example of how NOT to do it. The ceramic shields were expensive, brittle, and (as it seems) prone to failure at the worst possible time.
I think they were trying too too hard on the space shuttle to make it re-usable. Certainly the avionics computers and the seats were prime candidates to be re-used between flights. But I think if they had to do it again they'd make the engines and the heat shields disposable. Those two systems were responsible for more groundings, failures, and overall expense than anything else.
The second problem is that as you ascend, the pressure drops, and the less boost you get. Sure, for the first few thousand feet you rise like a bat out of hell. But from there on out it's slow, slow, slow, and all the while you are going to be shot off target by the jet stream.
Finally, once you are up in the air, your velocity is still zero. Most of the fuel you are expending is to build up speed. (At least for orbital flight. For the x-prize this isn't so important.)
My back of the envelope (pun not intended) calculations showed that the mass that would have been used for a ballon would be better spent on a bigger booster.
It's a bit like praising someone's ingenuity for repairing a busted tire with chewing gum while ignoring the fact they hadn't had a spare.
Nope. The end of the end is between "almost" and "just about."
It's pretty hard to be convicted of perjury. It has to be proven that you KNEW what you were saying was in fact not true AND your false testimony was material to the court case.
The punishments are pretty stiff. The problem is enforcement is usually limited to someone the system wants to bring down, rather than those who are playing it like a cheap guitar.
Yes, but the Russians would have insisted on a pair of Vodka bottles. They would also insist that they be emptied under carefully controlled circumstances over the course of an evening...