The Iran/Iraq war was larger than WWI just by itself. The list of wars that caused 1 million or more casualties since WWII is rather long. I would argue that in fact there is little different between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. Nuclear powers simply use proxies, either directly against each other or against each others' client states. The end result is the same. In fact a government will generally at least feel SOME restraint or limit when sacrificing its own citizens (some goals may not be worth it), but in the "I cannot be directly attacked" post-nuclear world there's nothing at all stopping them from pushing their clients and proxies on and on forever to the very bottom of the slipperiest slope into unending conflict.
There is in this sort of world also no real fundamental difference between a civil war and an international war. They are all largely the result of different nuclear powers pushing different agendas in different regions.
Another aspect of this is the inability of a great power to push a conclusion with an asymmetrically weaker enemy, leading to endless stalemate and maximized suffering and death. This sort of issue is pretty apparent in Afghanistan where a fear of destabilizing other nuclear powers (Pakistan) or antagonizing them too much (again Pakistan) has lead to a permanent stalemate that will simply go on killing people and draining resources such that other parts of the world also fall into disorder, etc. This will go on essentially forever, until the whole conflict becomes irrelevant, which could be another 20-30 years (though I suspect the US will effectively collapse before that).
And that's a whole other aspect that hasn't been talked about by Mr Waltz. He seems to live in a fantasy world where nation states endure endlessly. Sometime in the next couple decades he's going to get a very rude awakening on that one!
So, no, IMHO nuclear weapons do nothing to foster peace. They push warfare to the periphery of the orbit of the great powers is all. Europe may be safe from war, and North America, but for the rest of the world? It is a giant curse. Even for us the piper will eventually be paid. Someone will slip up, go insane, miscalculate, etc. Then all of civilization will be ashes and any putative saving of lives will have been paid for 1000x over.
CONSERVATIVELY 250 million people were killed in 'wars' in the 20th Century alone, far outstripping the casualties in any other century. Large scale wars have raged around the world continuously both before and after the introduction of nuclear weapons. In fact the casualty rate INCREASED somewhat after WWII.
I see not the slightest evidence that even the basic premise of Waltz's hypothesis is valid. He's proposing a causal link between nuclear weapons and some non-existent 'peace'. The whole proposition is insane and his hypothesis is idiotic on the face of it.
Well, actually I'd say that most "space craft grade" stuff is pretty much exactly what it is advertised to be. Supplier relationships are pretty tight there. If you're ever found to be screwing someone, that will be the last time you're on anyone's vendor list... The markups are high enough on that kind of thing that it probably isn't much worth cheating. I'm sure it has happened, and I do hear about it happening with weapon systems and maybe commercial aviation stuff now and then, but the volumes there are a lot bigger. When I was in the industry our company made 90% of its sales off things like 747's and military jets. We also did space shuttle and other stuff, but those were so low volume that they were all literally hand-crafted parts, a whole production run might be 10 or 20 units, including spares.
But yeah, I really have little idea what the total program cost for a one-way to Mars like they're talking about would be. I suspect your right, $600 billion is probably high. It cost $100 billion to get to the Moon in the '60s (at today's dollars), but you might set up that program today for 1/10th of that cost, especially if you're not picky about who you partner with or exactly what the timeline is and money was the only object.
Mars it is just hard to say. Developing a landing system that could put a 4 man lander on the surface reliably might end up costing a billion or it might cost 5 billion, who knows? It depends on how many blind alleys you stumble down and how huge the redesign of everything else ends up being if you have to start over on that subsystem. Clearly things DO get cheaper as time goes on too. Certainly hardware will get cheaper, launch costs will go down, etc. At some point it may get cheap enough that launching a test to Mars just to try out a landing system technology is actually pretty cheap and you can do a more iterative and thus cheaper design process overall.
In 2050 a $6 billion Mars one-way program might even be reasonably feasible. At that point of course you might see private enterprise really get into the act. I could see the PR/IP licensing/etc value making such a project possibly a winner at that point, which seems like something this group has concluded as well. Those will be interesting times I guess, though probably a bit past my time on Earth, lol.
EVERYTHING is custom in spacecraft. Actually when I said "COTS" what I meant was "existing aerospace hardware" vs 100% entirely bespoke design. So for instance say you use a Dragon Capsule and customize it to do X, Y, and Z, that's at least roughly "off the shelf." As for electronics used in space, the chips and whatnot are of course manufactured, but they are all entirely space qualified rad-hardened designs. Boards, software, etc and all the "system level" stuff (which trust me is like 90% of the work) is all entirely custom one-of-a-kind design. One generation of a spacecraft might be based on a design from a previous generation or borrowed from another similar spacecraft to a certain extent. So for instance you might use a fairly standard design of guidance computer in a series of spacecraft and the software running on that computer might be 90% the same on each one. Still, EVERYTHING in aerospace is pretty close to totally hand-made unique custom parts. If you make 10 of a specific series of satellites or launch vehicles etc that's a LONG production run! Every one is made by hand by someone on a bench and there are engineering changes on each and every one.
The JWST cost more than $6 billion and that's an observatory that is meant to sit in space at a Lagrange point and basically do nothing for 10 or 15 years except orient in space on demand and turn a few instruments on and off. Now consider designing a spacecraft that has to carry 4 human beings, move from one planet to another, and (at least part of it) then has to land at the destination. It would be hard to say that said spacecraft is less than 100x more complex than JWST. Clearly it won't have a massive expensive telescope on board, but even without that just simple spacecraft are still QUITE expensive.
$6 billion buys you almost squat. I think that is one thing our Mars Mission friends just don't get. Sure, Thales will give you a wonderful sales pitch about how great their existing products are and oh sure you can buy one for cheap money. Sure, until you decide to do with it something a bit different from what they designed it for. Then the costs go WAY WAY WAY up. Part of the problem is that spacecraft have to be built on a razor's edge. It is really close to impossible to get into space in the first place. There's little or no room in these kinds of designs for generalized excess capability beyond exactly the one specific thing it was designed for, and those designs are so 'tight' in tolerance in all respects that seemingly small changes are actually BIG changes.
This is why you constantly see new designs for manned capsules for instance. Between NASA, ESA, and several defense/aerospace firms there have been EASILY 10 different designs for a manned vehicle in the past 20 years. I don't mean just pretty drawings, I mean stuff that big money was spent on and most of which could definitely have been built. Yet every time there's a new set of requirements they go back to the drawing board and start over. Why? Because by the time you ripple a bunch of modest changes through your razor's edge design it is just cheaper to literally start over with a fresh piece of paper. That's why statements like "well, we'll just use Dragon Capsules, but we'll make them slightly bigger and land them on Mars. That will be cheap, its off the shelf!" are ludicrous. "Slightly Bigger" IS A WHOLE NEW DESIGN, and it is cheaper to just start over in most cases. "Land them on Mars" is a WHOLE DIFFERENT SET OF REQUIREMENTS and no existing hardware, zero, is going to just be pulled off a shelf somewhere and land on Mars with a few tweaks. Sure, SpaceX or Thales or whomever will tell you great tales about how it won't be a big deal, but used car salesmen will tell you how Granny drove that '78 Pontiac once a week to Church and it REALLY has only 30k miles on it too...
Yeah, your chances are bad. hehe. There are just a lot of really huge unknowns. The real problem is you spend a lot of money and you then find out you're at a dead end because of whatever, and then you have to backtrack, and then you have to spend MORE money, etc. It all sounds nice and simple when you lay it all out and assume all your assumptions are going to work out. Sadly many of them don't. You can throw $6 billion down a rat hole real fast in aerospace, believe me. I've seen it happen. It sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn't. Their timeline is truly an awesome exercise in naivety as well. Some of the stuff they're talking about is 5-10 years of engineering, and you can't just throw money at it to make it go faster. If they had a 30 or 40 year timeline then they might be starting to get into realistic territory. The idea that the stuff they want to do can be done 'off the shelf' is frankly just total wishful thinking. I don't disagree that the basic means exist, but people grossly underestimate just how hard it is to put this kind of stuff together. Every ounce matters. Every little detail is the difference between life and death. The most trivial thing kills you dead in space every time and you never get second chances. Study Apollo 13 very carefully, you'll see what I mean. That was a 1 in 10,000 miracle.
Here's the problem. The so-called plan these people have is so utterly, completely, and totally ludicrously unrealistic it is not even funny.
They're planning to spend $6 billion to design something like 10 different spacecraft, which will perform entirely novel missions in a largely unknown hostile environment. Their budget alone is easily 1 and maybe 2 orders of magnitude short of what is required. Their timeline is so utterly naive as to be simply some sort of fantasy.
Yes, I know all about "oh, those government dinosaurs can't do squat blah blah blah..." but the truth is that the public space agencies, when they're given a specific goal that doesn't change constantly and is realistic, work pretty well. It cost well over $100 billion to put a man on the Moon in today's dollars. It cost an equal amount to figure out how to get the ISS up there and run it. Now, albeit you can CERTAINLY do those things more cheaply now, the things that are going to be done in this proposed mission to Mars are vastly different. To just pass off life support on the Martian surface as "Oh, its just like the ISS but easier" for instance is UTTERLY LAUGHABLE!
Just a small few things that instantly spring to mind as likely mission busting issues:
1) How do you land a large payload on Mars? This sounds like a stupid question but actually Mars is VERY HARD TO LAND ON. The reason is you're coming in from a fairly high velocity transfer orbit into a VERY thin atmosphere. This is NOT like landing on the Moon at all where you approach from a rather slow orbital velocity in a low gravity and just touch down with thrusters. Look at the MSL, which in order to get to the surface with a fairly small rover has to resort to a hypersonic parachute followed by a sky crane, a totally untested system that IMHO has maybe a 25% chance of working. How many billions will it cost just to get one of these landers (that are cavalierly passed off as "oh just a minor variant of the Dragon Capsule, ROFLMAO!") onto the surface. You can't do it with just rockets, takes too much fuel on Mars. Can't do it with a parachute, payload is WAY too heavy, etc. There have been MANY engineering studies done on this and it is NOT a solved problem. Just this ALONE could (and probably would) eat up the whole time frame and a large chunk of the proposed $6 billion budget...
2) Someone has actually sailed through interplanetary space? Yeah, probes have gone this way and that, but I'm sorry, nobody has sent a large manned spacecraft 100's of millions of miles through the void to another planet. Just living in orbit for 6 months is a pretty good feat which few people have accomplished, and only at huge cost. Nobody has ever done it without resupply and it is at best a very dicey proposition to operate such a craft autonomously for 7 months. Nor are we really certain what the effects of such a journey would be on the crew. While one could say that "no new technology is required" there is a lot of very serious engineering that IS required, billions of $ worth of it.
3) God only knows what happens to you when you land on Mars. The Moon is one thing, but Mars is far harsher than the Moon. It is covered in caustic and probably toxic dust. The air may be thin, but it is still thick enough to blow dust into every crack and crevice. It will be tracked into your habitat, etc. And what about this water? It is going to be magically just nice and drinkable? Really? We know that? There are 1000's of easy ways to die, and Mars almost certainly holds quite a few secrets in that department.
4) Lets just estimate the chances of success based on how many missions need to be successful for the whole thing to work. LESS THAN HALF of all the spacecraft ever sent to Mars have arrived there intact and functioned AT ALL. Here we're talking about A DOZEN different landers. What's the actual probability that you get enough of them onto the ground intact in the right place? Surely they'll be more reliable than past missions, but there are also surely going to be quite a
Hope things go really well. I'm sure we're all pretty excited about the whole thing. You guys are going to have a lot of fun with this. I'd love to see schools and such launching their own satellites in 10 years, and it really could happen. fun fun!
Pretty much never done because a lot of the important questions revolve around how you actually end up interpreting the data, and raw data is far more valuable for that. When a sensor reports a voltage for instance you want that voltage reading, not some digested version of it who's calibration is hard to know. The general practice is to use compression techniques of various kinds, or some very basic data reduction. Satellites are really remote sensors, not so much remote data processing systems. In general you're better off with a lesser amount of raw data that can be interpreted accurately vs a larger amount of data who's processing may well make it very hard to interpret later.
Processing and throughput on communications channels can of course create limitations in what you can do, but looking at the design of their satellite the only channels that are going to use appreciable bandwidth are the cameras, and they'll be demanding LOTS more bandwidth than things like temperature sensors and such. From a purely technical standpoint the best strategy for getting the best data would be to put the best data acquisition code possible on the satellite and leave it at that. Said software might well be refined and upgraded regularly, but purely from an operational standpoint there's little value to be gained from running applications on the spacecraft itself beyond that.
Of course as an educational tool different considerations apply. It is a cool project and should be a great teaching tool if it works out well. It will be fun to see how it goes.
Sure, but I don't need to upload code to do that. In fact I'd imagine any sane design won't turn over actual low level spacecraft control to user supplied code, even if it has been vetted.
Or they're pretty specialized. Honestly, the sensor suite that they have on their proposed satellite isn't going to care what code is running it, the only thing that could possibly be interesting to do is point the thing in some direction so the camera can take a picture of it. They could do that just with a single simple app that points the thing in a specific direction at a specific time. All the other sensors might as well just be sampled constantly and the data downlinked.
I could see things being more interesting with a more customized set of sensors perhaps, but REALLY the only thing you can do with one of these things is point it anyway. It isn't like you're going to be able to stick a 20' long dipole magnetometer on one!
Still, it sounds fun as an educational thing for schools. People could learn a few things about how REAL code is engineered, written, and flight qualified, hehe. Of course 99% of/. could probably use that lesson! I know developing code that has flown on various things was quite a good way for me to learn, that's for sure (and no the next 747 you fly in probably won't fall out of the sky, and if it does it was someone else's fault, V-22s OTOH may be a different matter, but you couldn't pay me enough to set foot in one anyway...).
Why exactly would you want to run code ON the satellite? "run sensors, download data" That's pretty much the drill... The interesting code is what you run to analyze the data AFTER you get it...
Mass is a big thing, yes, and balance. Rattan has the mass, balance of course really depends on who made the weapon, though of course probably a lot of run-of-the-mill period weapons were not particularly all that balanced anyway (museum pieces we have today generally being only the highest quality examples of the art).
For a controller I'd say mass is critical, haptics of some sort would be pretty necessary as well, though at least you can get some of the feel of handling a weapon if it has the correct weight. Frankly nothing is going to come even close to what it is like to actually fight for lots of other reasons anyway, at least until we have holodecks. I'm doubting even our buddy Niel can't get one of those built...
Meh, I think you'd be quite surprised. There's a bit of a difference in the sort of fighting done. All I can say is that the quality of the expertise around this area back in the days when I paid attention was quite high, but far less focused on late period techniques. I assure you any of your guys would meet a quite unpleasant surprise in a circle taking on someone like Randall with a halberd.
Oh yeah, I still have the desk lamp, lol, though the 'scope itself finally did succumb to curious children with small tools... lol. I can remember all sorts of tricks to lighting. Well slides are a great idea. You can also get plastic cover slips, which are probably not a bad idea for kids, though I'm sure they are generally inferior. Even with my bad childish sample prep though we managed to make some pretty interesting observations. Helps to have a set of prepared slides though. Damn it was fun being a kid around our place.
Yeah, I'm sure there are good ones. I hear they are VERY not cheap though. It is actually kind of hard to know what is and isn't really good either. VERY few people have any experience handling authentic non-reproduction period weapons. I've been told even most of the expensive stuff is not usually particularly well balanced (after all, these products are basically made to be display pieces and there's almost zero chance anyone that would know the difference will handle one).
All that stuff exists already though. No doubt there are improvements that can be made, but people have been swinging virtual golf clubs and bats, etc for quite a while now, have they not?
Meh, don't knock rattan. It can be QUITE realistic. As I said above, the advantage is in not really having to hold back. Even dull steel is unfriendly stuff. It may be true that the majority of people fooling around with rattan weapons in the SCA aren't particularly serious and have no clue, but you can also find people who are very good and know there stuff. Believe me, fighting with some of them can be quite an experience.
It is arguable whether steel or rattan really gives you a better feel for the real thing. Rattan has the weight and balance. The thing with steel is you really do HAVE to hold back in some ways. Get out there with good armor and rattan weapons you can really go at it full tilt. Then again I've never fought with steel, perhaps there is something essential lost there? Can't say the steel weapons I've handled really felt that much different. Most available steel weapons are also rather questionable reproductions. Usually quite overweight from what I've seen, but not really any kind of expert on that subject.
Everything you basically need, good optics. You'll need a light, but honestly a desk clamp and a decent LED light will do fine. Not too pricey and you can get good results without too much fiddling. Should be fairly rugged too.
Eh, my experience with finicky 'scopes is that you really never get decent results. Best one I've ever had was a beat up old 50's bio lab scope that the local college dumped when they upgraded their biology building. Cost, nothing. OTOH you can spend $150 on a new 'toy' grade scope and you'll be lucky if you ever manage to focus on anything or get enough light into it to see much. While something like EBay is always a crap shoot you're more likely to get something you can have some real fun with for your money I'd think (though honestly I haven't looked to see what they have).
We can do boffers in the back yard, and this cannot even rise to that, much maligned, level of realism. At least send old Neal over to the SCA for a few clouts in the head with a rattan and compressed foam 3 pound mace. Even THAT isn't exactly realistic, but it IS as close as you'll ever get.
I got a reasonably decent scope when I was around 7. It was great. Cheap scopes on the other hand are just not worth the bother, they'll barely work and nothing loses kid's interest faster than some cranky finicky thing that won't produce interesting results even if you do fiddle with it for an hour. There's really just no reason to skimp that much either when decent stuff can be had for a couple bills and the cheap worthless junk is still just about the same price.
God, the smell of Canada balsam still takes me back to my youth:)
My BS in Math hasn't hurt me, but I can't say it really gives you enough depth in math to do a lot with directly. It is a leg up on engineering or science career paths, but I'd be real surprised if anyone could find a position that relied on an undergrad math degree. Math is a beast, 4 years is barely enough time to learn the basics.
I think she's maybe be best off looking at some area where her education degree could be helpful. Training or some type of course design work or something. I'm sure there's a niche there somewhere for someone that is willing to go out and carve it out for themselves. The other option? Go for the PhD and teach education at a college level, lol (or math for that matter). Heck, I've taught a few college level courses as an adjunct myself, you don't usually need an advanced degree. It isn't the best paying job ever, but she might find that teaching a few courses at college level will tell her if she's at all interested in that. It is a BIT different from teaching K-12 in a public school.
He's only running for the VERMONT Senate. Trust me, as a citizen of Vermont though not Washington County, NOTHING that has to do with national security ever happens in the VT Senate. Not unless it has something to do with cows or the next invasion of the US by the Empire of Quebec.
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The Iran/Iraq war was larger than WWI just by itself. The list of wars that caused 1 million or more casualties since WWII is rather long. I would argue that in fact there is little different between nuclear and non-nuclear powers. Nuclear powers simply use proxies, either directly against each other or against each others' client states. The end result is the same. In fact a government will generally at least feel SOME restraint or limit when sacrificing its own citizens (some goals may not be worth it), but in the "I cannot be directly attacked" post-nuclear world there's nothing at all stopping them from pushing their clients and proxies on and on forever to the very bottom of the slipperiest slope into unending conflict.
There is in this sort of world also no real fundamental difference between a civil war and an international war. They are all largely the result of different nuclear powers pushing different agendas in different regions.
Another aspect of this is the inability of a great power to push a conclusion with an asymmetrically weaker enemy, leading to endless stalemate and maximized suffering and death. This sort of issue is pretty apparent in Afghanistan where a fear of destabilizing other nuclear powers (Pakistan) or antagonizing them too much (again Pakistan) has lead to a permanent stalemate that will simply go on killing people and draining resources such that other parts of the world also fall into disorder, etc. This will go on essentially forever, until the whole conflict becomes irrelevant, which could be another 20-30 years (though I suspect the US will effectively collapse before that).
And that's a whole other aspect that hasn't been talked about by Mr Waltz. He seems to live in a fantasy world where nation states endure endlessly. Sometime in the next couple decades he's going to get a very rude awakening on that one!
So, no, IMHO nuclear weapons do nothing to foster peace. They push warfare to the periphery of the orbit of the great powers is all. Europe may be safe from war, and North America, but for the rest of the world? It is a giant curse. Even for us the piper will eventually be paid. Someone will slip up, go insane, miscalculate, etc. Then all of civilization will be ashes and any putative saving of lives will have been paid for 1000x over.
CONSERVATIVELY 250 million people were killed in 'wars' in the 20th Century alone, far outstripping the casualties in any other century. Large scale wars have raged around the world continuously both before and after the introduction of nuclear weapons. In fact the casualty rate INCREASED somewhat after WWII.
I see not the slightest evidence that even the basic premise of Waltz's hypothesis is valid. He's proposing a causal link between nuclear weapons and some non-existent 'peace'. The whole proposition is insane and his hypothesis is idiotic on the face of it.
Well, actually I'd say that most "space craft grade" stuff is pretty much exactly what it is advertised to be. Supplier relationships are pretty tight there. If you're ever found to be screwing someone, that will be the last time you're on anyone's vendor list... The markups are high enough on that kind of thing that it probably isn't much worth cheating. I'm sure it has happened, and I do hear about it happening with weapon systems and maybe commercial aviation stuff now and then, but the volumes there are a lot bigger. When I was in the industry our company made 90% of its sales off things like 747's and military jets. We also did space shuttle and other stuff, but those were so low volume that they were all literally hand-crafted parts, a whole production run might be 10 or 20 units, including spares.
But yeah, I really have little idea what the total program cost for a one-way to Mars like they're talking about would be. I suspect your right, $600 billion is probably high. It cost $100 billion to get to the Moon in the '60s (at today's dollars), but you might set up that program today for 1/10th of that cost, especially if you're not picky about who you partner with or exactly what the timeline is and money was the only object.
Mars it is just hard to say. Developing a landing system that could put a 4 man lander on the surface reliably might end up costing a billion or it might cost 5 billion, who knows? It depends on how many blind alleys you stumble down and how huge the redesign of everything else ends up being if you have to start over on that subsystem. Clearly things DO get cheaper as time goes on too. Certainly hardware will get cheaper, launch costs will go down, etc. At some point it may get cheap enough that launching a test to Mars just to try out a landing system technology is actually pretty cheap and you can do a more iterative and thus cheaper design process overall.
In 2050 a $6 billion Mars one-way program might even be reasonably feasible. At that point of course you might see private enterprise really get into the act. I could see the PR/IP licensing/etc value making such a project possibly a winner at that point, which seems like something this group has concluded as well. Those will be interesting times I guess, though probably a bit past my time on Earth, lol.
EVERYTHING is custom in spacecraft. Actually when I said "COTS" what I meant was "existing aerospace hardware" vs 100% entirely bespoke design. So for instance say you use a Dragon Capsule and customize it to do X, Y, and Z, that's at least roughly "off the shelf." As for electronics used in space, the chips and whatnot are of course manufactured, but they are all entirely space qualified rad-hardened designs. Boards, software, etc and all the "system level" stuff (which trust me is like 90% of the work) is all entirely custom one-of-a-kind design. One generation of a spacecraft might be based on a design from a previous generation or borrowed from another similar spacecraft to a certain extent. So for instance you might use a fairly standard design of guidance computer in a series of spacecraft and the software running on that computer might be 90% the same on each one. Still, EVERYTHING in aerospace is pretty close to totally hand-made unique custom parts. If you make 10 of a specific series of satellites or launch vehicles etc that's a LONG production run! Every one is made by hand by someone on a bench and there are engineering changes on each and every one.
The JWST cost more than $6 billion and that's an observatory that is meant to sit in space at a Lagrange point and basically do nothing for 10 or 15 years except orient in space on demand and turn a few instruments on and off. Now consider designing a spacecraft that has to carry 4 human beings, move from one planet to another, and (at least part of it) then has to land at the destination. It would be hard to say that said spacecraft is less than 100x more complex than JWST. Clearly it won't have a massive expensive telescope on board, but even without that just simple spacecraft are still QUITE expensive.
$6 billion buys you almost squat. I think that is one thing our Mars Mission friends just don't get. Sure, Thales will give you a wonderful sales pitch about how great their existing products are and oh sure you can buy one for cheap money. Sure, until you decide to do with it something a bit different from what they designed it for. Then the costs go WAY WAY WAY up. Part of the problem is that spacecraft have to be built on a razor's edge. It is really close to impossible to get into space in the first place. There's little or no room in these kinds of designs for generalized excess capability beyond exactly the one specific thing it was designed for, and those designs are so 'tight' in tolerance in all respects that seemingly small changes are actually BIG changes.
This is why you constantly see new designs for manned capsules for instance. Between NASA, ESA, and several defense/aerospace firms there have been EASILY 10 different designs for a manned vehicle in the past 20 years. I don't mean just pretty drawings, I mean stuff that big money was spent on and most of which could definitely have been built. Yet every time there's a new set of requirements they go back to the drawing board and start over. Why? Because by the time you ripple a bunch of modest changes through your razor's edge design it is just cheaper to literally start over with a fresh piece of paper. That's why statements like "well, we'll just use Dragon Capsules, but we'll make them slightly bigger and land them on Mars. That will be cheap, its off the shelf!" are ludicrous. "Slightly Bigger" IS A WHOLE NEW DESIGN, and it is cheaper to just start over in most cases. "Land them on Mars" is a WHOLE DIFFERENT SET OF REQUIREMENTS and no existing hardware, zero, is going to just be pulled off a shelf somewhere and land on Mars with a few tweaks. Sure, SpaceX or Thales or whomever will tell you great tales about how it won't be a big deal, but used car salesmen will tell you how Granny drove that '78 Pontiac once a week to Church and it REALLY has only 30k miles on it too...
Yeah, your chances are bad. hehe. There are just a lot of really huge unknowns. The real problem is you spend a lot of money and you then find out you're at a dead end because of whatever, and then you have to backtrack, and then you have to spend MORE money, etc. It all sounds nice and simple when you lay it all out and assume all your assumptions are going to work out. Sadly many of them don't. You can throw $6 billion down a rat hole real fast in aerospace, believe me. I've seen it happen. It sounds like a lot of money, but it really isn't. Their timeline is truly an awesome exercise in naivety as well. Some of the stuff they're talking about is 5-10 years of engineering, and you can't just throw money at it to make it go faster. If they had a 30 or 40 year timeline then they might be starting to get into realistic territory. The idea that the stuff they want to do can be done 'off the shelf' is frankly just total wishful thinking. I don't disagree that the basic means exist, but people grossly underestimate just how hard it is to put this kind of stuff together. Every ounce matters. Every little detail is the difference between life and death. The most trivial thing kills you dead in space every time and you never get second chances. Study Apollo 13 very carefully, you'll see what I mean. That was a 1 in 10,000 miracle.
Here's the problem. The so-called plan these people have is so utterly, completely, and totally ludicrously unrealistic it is not even funny.
They're planning to spend $6 billion to design something like 10 different spacecraft, which will perform entirely novel missions in a largely unknown hostile environment. Their budget alone is easily 1 and maybe 2 orders of magnitude short of what is required. Their timeline is so utterly naive as to be simply some sort of fantasy.
Yes, I know all about "oh, those government dinosaurs can't do squat blah blah blah..." but the truth is that the public space agencies, when they're given a specific goal that doesn't change constantly and is realistic, work pretty well. It cost well over $100 billion to put a man on the Moon in today's dollars. It cost an equal amount to figure out how to get the ISS up there and run it. Now, albeit you can CERTAINLY do those things more cheaply now, the things that are going to be done in this proposed mission to Mars are vastly different. To just pass off life support on the Martian surface as "Oh, its just like the ISS but easier" for instance is UTTERLY LAUGHABLE!
Just a small few things that instantly spring to mind as likely mission busting issues:
1) How do you land a large payload on Mars? This sounds like a stupid question but actually Mars is VERY HARD TO LAND ON. The reason is you're coming in from a fairly high velocity transfer orbit into a VERY thin atmosphere. This is NOT like landing on the Moon at all where you approach from a rather slow orbital velocity in a low gravity and just touch down with thrusters. Look at the MSL, which in order to get to the surface with a fairly small rover has to resort to a hypersonic parachute followed by a sky crane, a totally untested system that IMHO has maybe a 25% chance of working. How many billions will it cost just to get one of these landers (that are cavalierly passed off as "oh just a minor variant of the Dragon Capsule, ROFLMAO!") onto the surface. You can't do it with just rockets, takes too much fuel on Mars. Can't do it with a parachute, payload is WAY too heavy, etc. There have been MANY engineering studies done on this and it is NOT a solved problem. Just this ALONE could (and probably would) eat up the whole time frame and a large chunk of the proposed $6 billion budget...
2) Someone has actually sailed through interplanetary space? Yeah, probes have gone this way and that, but I'm sorry, nobody has sent a large manned spacecraft 100's of millions of miles through the void to another planet. Just living in orbit for 6 months is a pretty good feat which few people have accomplished, and only at huge cost. Nobody has ever done it without resupply and it is at best a very dicey proposition to operate such a craft autonomously for 7 months. Nor are we really certain what the effects of such a journey would be on the crew. While one could say that "no new technology is required" there is a lot of very serious engineering that IS required, billions of $ worth of it.
3) God only knows what happens to you when you land on Mars. The Moon is one thing, but Mars is far harsher than the Moon. It is covered in caustic and probably toxic dust. The air may be thin, but it is still thick enough to blow dust into every crack and crevice. It will be tracked into your habitat, etc. And what about this water? It is going to be magically just nice and drinkable? Really? We know that? There are 1000's of easy ways to die, and Mars almost certainly holds quite a few secrets in that department.
4) Lets just estimate the chances of success based on how many missions need to be successful for the whole thing to work. LESS THAN HALF of all the spacecraft ever sent to Mars have arrived there intact and functioned AT ALL. Here we're talking about A DOZEN different landers. What's the actual probability that you get enough of them onto the ground intact in the right place? Surely they'll be more reliable than past missions, but there are also surely going to be quite a
Hope things go really well. I'm sure we're all pretty excited about the whole thing. You guys are going to have a lot of fun with this. I'd love to see schools and such launching their own satellites in 10 years, and it really could happen. fun fun!
Pretty much never done because a lot of the important questions revolve around how you actually end up interpreting the data, and raw data is far more valuable for that. When a sensor reports a voltage for instance you want that voltage reading, not some digested version of it who's calibration is hard to know. The general practice is to use compression techniques of various kinds, or some very basic data reduction. Satellites are really remote sensors, not so much remote data processing systems. In general you're better off with a lesser amount of raw data that can be interpreted accurately vs a larger amount of data who's processing may well make it very hard to interpret later.
Processing and throughput on communications channels can of course create limitations in what you can do, but looking at the design of their satellite the only channels that are going to use appreciable bandwidth are the cameras, and they'll be demanding LOTS more bandwidth than things like temperature sensors and such. From a purely technical standpoint the best strategy for getting the best data would be to put the best data acquisition code possible on the satellite and leave it at that. Said software might well be refined and upgraded regularly, but purely from an operational standpoint there's little value to be gained from running applications on the spacecraft itself beyond that.
Of course as an educational tool different considerations apply. It is a cool project and should be a great teaching tool if it works out well. It will be fun to see how it goes.
Sure, but I don't need to upload code to do that. In fact I'd imagine any sane design won't turn over actual low level spacecraft control to user supplied code, even if it has been vetted.
Or they're pretty specialized. Honestly, the sensor suite that they have on their proposed satellite isn't going to care what code is running it, the only thing that could possibly be interesting to do is point the thing in some direction so the camera can take a picture of it. They could do that just with a single simple app that points the thing in a specific direction at a specific time. All the other sensors might as well just be sampled constantly and the data downlinked.
I could see things being more interesting with a more customized set of sensors perhaps, but REALLY the only thing you can do with one of these things is point it anyway. It isn't like you're going to be able to stick a 20' long dipole magnetometer on one!
Still, it sounds fun as an educational thing for schools. People could learn a few things about how REAL code is engineered, written, and flight qualified, hehe. Of course 99% of /. could probably use that lesson! I know developing code that has flown on various things was quite a good way for me to learn, that's for sure (and no the next 747 you fly in probably won't fall out of the sky, and if it does it was someone else's fault, V-22s OTOH may be a different matter, but you couldn't pay me enough to set foot in one anyway...).
Why exactly would you want to run code ON the satellite? "run sensors, download data" That's pretty much the drill... The interesting code is what you run to analyze the data AFTER you get it...
Mass is a big thing, yes, and balance. Rattan has the mass, balance of course really depends on who made the weapon, though of course probably a lot of run-of-the-mill period weapons were not particularly all that balanced anyway (museum pieces we have today generally being only the highest quality examples of the art).
For a controller I'd say mass is critical, haptics of some sort would be pretty necessary as well, though at least you can get some of the feel of handling a weapon if it has the correct weight. Frankly nothing is going to come even close to what it is like to actually fight for lots of other reasons anyway, at least until we have holodecks. I'm doubting even our buddy Niel can't get one of those built...
Meh, I think you'd be quite surprised. There's a bit of a difference in the sort of fighting done. All I can say is that the quality of the expertise around this area back in the days when I paid attention was quite high, but far less focused on late period techniques. I assure you any of your guys would meet a quite unpleasant surprise in a circle taking on someone like Randall with a halberd.
Oh yeah, I still have the desk lamp, lol, though the 'scope itself finally did succumb to curious children with small tools... lol. I can remember all sorts of tricks to lighting. Well slides are a great idea. You can also get plastic cover slips, which are probably not a bad idea for kids, though I'm sure they are generally inferior. Even with my bad childish sample prep though we managed to make some pretty interesting observations. Helps to have a set of prepared slides though. Damn it was fun being a kid around our place.
Ah well, I'm not that up to speed on a lot of the current gen controllers. Kinda like keeping my sports real and my games gamist, hehe.
Yeah, I'm sure there are good ones. I hear they are VERY not cheap though. It is actually kind of hard to know what is and isn't really good either. VERY few people have any experience handling authentic non-reproduction period weapons. I've been told even most of the expensive stuff is not usually particularly well balanced (after all, these products are basically made to be display pieces and there's almost zero chance anyone that would know the difference will handle one).
All that stuff exists already though. No doubt there are improvements that can be made, but people have been swinging virtual golf clubs and bats, etc for quite a while now, have they not?
Meh, don't knock rattan. It can be QUITE realistic. As I said above, the advantage is in not really having to hold back. Even dull steel is unfriendly stuff. It may be true that the majority of people fooling around with rattan weapons in the SCA aren't particularly serious and have no clue, but you can also find people who are very good and know there stuff. Believe me, fighting with some of them can be quite an experience.
It is arguable whether steel or rattan really gives you a better feel for the real thing. Rattan has the weight and balance. The thing with steel is you really do HAVE to hold back in some ways. Get out there with good armor and rattan weapons you can really go at it full tilt. Then again I've never fought with steel, perhaps there is something essential lost there? Can't say the steel weapons I've handled really felt that much different. Most available steel weapons are also rather questionable reproductions. Usually quite overweight from what I've seen, but not really any kind of expert on that subject.
Yeah, the one I had didn't even HAVE a built-in light. Still worked reasonably well. Something like this would probably be a good bet:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Leica-E-Leitz-Wetzlar-Lab-Microscope-with-Wood-Case-/320918955069?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4ab842a43d
Everything you basically need, good optics. You'll need a light, but honestly a desk clamp and a decent LED light will do fine. Not too pricey and you can get good results without too much fiddling. Should be fairly rugged too.
Eh, my experience with finicky 'scopes is that you really never get decent results. Best one I've ever had was a beat up old 50's bio lab scope that the local college dumped when they upgraded their biology building. Cost, nothing. OTOH you can spend $150 on a new 'toy' grade scope and you'll be lucky if you ever manage to focus on anything or get enough light into it to see much. While something like EBay is always a crap shoot you're more likely to get something you can have some real fun with for your money I'd think (though honestly I haven't looked to see what they have).
We can do boffers in the back yard, and this cannot even rise to that, much maligned, level of realism. At least send old Neal over to the SCA for a few clouts in the head with a rattan and compressed foam 3 pound mace. Even THAT isn't exactly realistic, but it IS as close as you'll ever get.
I got a reasonably decent scope when I was around 7. It was great. Cheap scopes on the other hand are just not worth the bother, they'll barely work and nothing loses kid's interest faster than some cranky finicky thing that won't produce interesting results even if you do fiddle with it for an hour. There's really just no reason to skimp that much either when decent stuff can be had for a couple bills and the cheap worthless junk is still just about the same price.
God, the smell of Canada balsam still takes me back to my youth :)
My BS in Math hasn't hurt me, but I can't say it really gives you enough depth in math to do a lot with directly. It is a leg up on engineering or science career paths, but I'd be real surprised if anyone could find a position that relied on an undergrad math degree. Math is a beast, 4 years is barely enough time to learn the basics.
I think she's maybe be best off looking at some area where her education degree could be helpful. Training or some type of course design work or something. I'm sure there's a niche there somewhere for someone that is willing to go out and carve it out for themselves. The other option? Go for the PhD and teach education at a college level, lol (or math for that matter). Heck, I've taught a few college level courses as an adjunct myself, you don't usually need an advanced degree. It isn't the best paying job ever, but she might find that teaching a few courses at college level will tell her if she's at all interested in that. It is a BIT different from teaching K-12 in a public school.
He's only running for the VERMONT Senate. Trust me, as a citizen of Vermont though not Washington County, NOTHING that has to do with national security ever happens in the VT Senate. Not unless it has something to do with cows or the next invasion of the US by the Empire of Quebec.