Right. Because the civilian nuclear industry has in sixty years hardly seen fit to invest anything in it, but that's clearly because they're ignorant nitwits who can't see how much clearly better it is, right?
Sorry, but thorium is not the be-all end-all. There are lots of lists touting its advantages that people like you and the gp love to share that conveniently omit the downsides. And the disadvantages aren't just "it's immature mothballed technology". You have to produce their (large) initial fuel load from other reactors, adding a lot of cost and robbing them of output for quite a while. Either that or use expensive, proliferation-risky highly enriched uranium or plutonium to start them, which itself has all sorts of problems related to limited solubility - and none of the workarounds are appealing. LTFRs have salt-freezing difficulties (so muchso that the leading "solution" is to run the entire reactor building blazingly hot rather than trying to heat every line) and use beryllium, a highly expensive, limited resource that's extremely toxic when aerosolized. They also are less controllable due to a lot of the delayed neutrons coming from outside the core. Moving the fuel (and thus waste) around also means that you can plate out waste onto your pipes and valves, potentially causing reduced flows or blockages. The tellurium formed tends to corrode the nickel-based alloys used. The alloys are also very damaged by long-term neutron exposure, and the alloying "fix" reduces the temperature limit, to a low level that may not be acceptable. The graphite has short lifespans and tends to accumulate radioactive daughter products and become a bulky, dangerous waste stream. It also has a potentially risky positive feedback loop, increasing U-233 fission as it heats up (remember Chernobyl? Same thing). The fuel (and thus waste) is fluorides, which are highly water soluble and thus a storage hazard, requiring a conversion step before storage (every such step adds costs and increases risk of spills). Fluoride wastes also over time tend to outgas hydrofluoric acid, uranium hexafluoride, and other extremely dangerous gases. Nobody has any clue what decommissioning costs would be, which is a massive unknown - the tiny Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment had huge decommissioning costs compared to its size. LFTRs are a serious proliferation risk via the protactinium extraction pathway, a necessary step if you want a half-decent power output, and the diversion would be very easy to hide because it's hard to quantify exactly how much protactinium the reactor should be producing at any given time. Protactinium can be used to produce very pure U233, which is a suitable material for making bombs. Another easy proliferation pathway is via extraction of Np-237 - working with a constantly reprocessed, fluoride-based stream makes proliferation almost too easy (the supposed "anti-proliferation" nature of LFTRs is that you can't (without difficulty) just extract the uranium due to U232 contamination... but that's irrelevant because it makes Pa-233 and Np-237-based proliferation so easy). LFTRs have to use expensive highly enriched lithium (7Li) to avoid becoming a major source of tritium outgasing and losing a lot of their neutronicity (which is already for many reasons a huge challenge in thorium reactors - they're much harder to simply "make work")
But no no, let's go on about how it's the solution to everybody's problems and that the industry is a bunch of morons for not throwing all of their money into it...
Really, a LFTR is pretty much backwards from where reactors should be going in every regard. You want your fuel and waste to be contained in small, stable elements, not flowing all over the place and touching (and degrading) everything. You don't want random, potentially rogue states having their hands on reprocessing equipment and liquid fluorides. You don't want to have to use more rare, expensive, and toxic materials in your construction and operation. You want delayed neutrons and negative v
Postgres is leading edge in some things, like (ridiculously useful) table inheritance. Their implementation could have been slightly better (the most common complaint being that indices don't inherit, you need to re-add them on all descendants), but I'm very glad that they were early adopters on this one. They even pulled off multiple inheritance well.
Everything in ((Field X)) would be so much better if they simply used ((Trendy Technology Y)) that I only have a superficial understanding of - yet all of those sheeple who actually work in the field refuse to give it the attention that I think it deserves! Check out this article in the Huffington Post that talks about how ((Trendy Technology Y)) could solve all the world's problems in ((Field X)) with no downsides!
These "X can't solve our energy" problems debates all generally come back to the concept of, "I personally can't imagine it". They see what vast scale of effort/material/etc it takes to build something, declare it impossible, and then declare something that they don't know as much about and haven't yet been overwhelmed by to be the solution.
Let's make it simple. If you're making hundreds of megawatts from something (let alone gigawatts), it's going to be mind-bogglingly huge and expensive, period. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about wind, water, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or whatnot - anything that can make and harness that much power is huge.
Since this is about nuclear: here's a cutaway of a "small" (180MW) reactor. This is just the reactor building, not all of the associated buildings, such as the (very large) turbine house, primary and backup support systems, power distribution infrastructure, and on and on. Again, that's a small reactor. And not only does all of that have to be built, but engineered to great precision, for the obvious reasons of the toxicity of what it's containing and the highly corrosive environment that it creates. Now think of how much you'd have to build to add new/replacement 3-4 terawatts. It's mind bogglingly vast.
But you know what, it's all mind bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of dams is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast. And on and on and on. There's a reason why electricity production eats up such a large chunk of the planet's GDP - it deals in mind-bogglingly vast things. Some things take less material and more manpower, while others take more manpower and less material... and ultimately material itself equates to manpower. All of these things are captured in the construction cost figure, which amortized plus maintenance and operations costs yields the cost of the electricity. So one doesn't have to trust some sort of "I can't conceive of that, it's too big!" sense - they just need to look at what the power costs (undistorted by external factors). The market will pay for whatever is cheapest, and will build whatever factories or mines or whatnot that it needs to in order to make it happen.
Turnaround times are an issue, but they're not be-all end-all. Because even the longest turnaround times on projects are generally no more than a decade to a decade and a half. Climate change is an issue that needs to be approached over the course of decades. So even if the need to ramp up production of the projects' "dependencies" before the projects themself can commence, there's still plenty of time. IF there was confidence that that it's the best option.
Ultimately, however, since people can't see the future, nobody knows what's going to be cheapest. Different people have different views. Different countries offer differing market conditions and resources. So ultimately, no one solution is going to be taken up as the "be-all, end-all". Many routes will engage in parallel, and with each iteration, the data gleaned from earlier attempts will influence decisions as to what to make next.
But one thing is for sure: what ever is built, it's going to be mind-bogglingly vast. That's what we 7,4 billion humans do.
Am I the only one who got the idea from the movie that Kylo just wasn't "all that"? Sure, he's the leader of the Knights of Ren, but my impression was that he's still just an angry emo teenager desperately wishing he could actually be as powerful as he wants to be, like his idol, Granpa Vader. He didn't even seem to get the same sort of respect in the First Order that Vader got in the empire. Hux in particular seems annoyed by his presence and eager to snipe at his poor decisions to Snoke.
And his blaster trick isn't new, Vader did something similar on Cloud City when Han shot at him - just without as impressive of special effects;)
Actually, the minimum energy needed to levitate the X-wing is surprisingly little. Energy is only technically required to raise it up - an object at a constant height in a gravitational well doesn't fundamentally require energy to remain there. Using Randall's XKCD assumptions about the scenario, Yoda exerts 19,2 kW of power over 3,6 seconds, or 0,0192 kWh.
Vader ripping apart metal on cloud city might qualify as vastly higher power expenditures, although only briefly, so again not vast amounts of energy. I'm really not sure about Palpatine's electricity. It goes great distances through the air as if it's high voltage, but it impacts Luke as a low, high current source would. This makes it hard to really estimate how powerful his lightning bolts actually are.
Not to mention, "A New Hope" has farmboy Luke who had only even just heard of the force briefly beforehand, who despite his boasting about how good of a pilot he was had just before the movie began crashed his T16 in Beggar's Canyon, fly through vast numbers of turbolasers, evade the Dark Lord of the Sith in the empire's most advanced fighter craft, and then land a shot that the actual experienced pilots he was with considered impossible... without his flight computer. Explicitly via using the force, doing the exact same thing Rey did (close eyes, find inner peace, open them, then letting the force channel one's actions)
The main difference is that Rey worked up to it. Luke did it out of the blue with no prior practice but the blast helmet thing.
Apparently in your mind the only way to turn chemical energy into electricity is to fire a bullet. Also, apparently in your mind, a person can swap out a bullet but not swap out an energy source. And the two can't be combined or paired. And there's not literally thousands of different ways to store energy, many easily managed by hand. And the amount of energy needed to run a fingerprint scanner for a split second trivial.
Nope, clearly it's an impossible task, let's all go make threats to any stores that want to carry smart guns and block all attempts to improve the technology!
It's funny how people are absolutely convinced that there's no way to store chemical energy - for the purposes of conversion to electricity for the fingerprint reader - in a manner that one can be sure will be available when they need to fire their gun, but they're absolutely confident in the ability to store chemical energy - for the purposes of creating expanding gases to propel the bullet out - in a manner that one can be sure will be available when they need to fire their gun.
Oh, and as for the size of the crane you need? This size (right hand side, yellow - the cab is in white for a size comparison). And as for how you transport them? Like this. Same way as they already do.
It's not to be "balanced" for the return journey - the plan has always been to weld steel shoes to the deck to hold it in place. And it's very bottom-heavy. It's not at all at risk of falling over.
The way to transport it off the barge is called a crane, it's already been done, and it's not tricky.
The "compelling reason" is because rocket launches are complex procedures in the best of circumstances, that's anything but the best of circumstances, and they don't even know if the thing is flightworthy. And they certainly don't want their first reuse flight to be a failure.
The drone ship is a ship. It moves - it sails to and from port. There are cranes in port. They've already loaded and offloaded rockets from the barge in the past.
Each "hop" is strain on your rocket, new risk, and using up the lifetime of parts that have limited lifespan. Last I heard they were only hoping for a couple dozen flights out of each rocket.
That said, flying back has been mentioned in the past as part of the plan. But for the first go-around, that's very unlikely. They're going to want to give it a full rundown back onshore.
That would be the Just Read The Instructions then that went back to the owner; it had been taken out of service and replaced with the Of Course I Still Love You.
I really doubt that their first "intent for reflight" rocket will have its maiden reflight from the drone ship. They're surely going to go over it with a fine-toothed comb on land before relaunch.
The concept of refueling at and relaunching from the drone ship is pretty exciting for the future, mind you. If they really can get the reliability that high and the maintenance that low, it'd enable all sorts of things.
It's a win for everyone really. Very easy for homeowners to record their property to be insured and reduction of the number of false claims.
I really just love 3d scanning tech, it's so broadly applicable to so many fields. It doesn't need to be "augmented reality" stuff, it just needs to be able to capture, isolate, and identify objects. I've been patiently (okay, not so patiently;) ) waiting many years for this.
Submitter here. I actually tried to come up with a better word but couldn't. They're really "slinging" doubt, but "doubtslinging" isn't a word. I thought of "FUD", but that implies a point of view, that the other side is deliberately trying to scare people off with misinformation, and that would be taking things too far.
Some of you with better English language skills than I can surely come up with better phrasing that's not overly wordy.
"Wouldn't it be nice if ((Insert Company Name Here)) were to actually, you know, pay dividends with that first dollar that they earned? Just a thought, but so far the one dollar they recovered is going to a frame, but it's totally profit if we wanted to but we don't want to so..."
Try having more than about four weeks patience here. They landed one, they're just about to land another. Why does an extra four weeks delay in getting a rocket to refurbish and relaunch matter to you so much?
They have three now - "Just Read The Instructions", "Of Course I Still Love You", and this one, whose name has not yet been announced (it's built from a barge called the Marmac 303). It's not clear what they're planning with Just Read The Instructions at this point, it may be permanently retired.
It's also not just about floating in seawater. The shuttle SRBs, for example, hit the water at highway driving speeds. It's basically a highway-speed crash.
But yes, floating in seawater is not exactly conducive to reuse of sensitive components;) It's like saying, "Hey, toss your car in the ocean, have it bob around for a couple hours, then fish it out, dry it off and start it up, it'll surely be fine!" Only rockets have far tighter tolerances than cars - cars are sturdy, heavily built things while rockets are giant aluminum balloons that weigh a couple dozen times more when full than empty. Cars pump their fuel through tiny nozzles and drain a half dozen liters per hour of driving, while rockets can drain a swimming pool's worth of fuel and burn it in a manner of seconds. Cars roll down roads and face "some" air resistance, while rockets face so much that the compression heating burns the paint off of them. Etc.
What google's core business is has nothing to do with how they have to market a specific product. Nor is every product Google makes oriented around advertising (any more than its competitors' are). Furthermore, Google really has pushed itself to become more of a "big data company" in general rather than specifically advertising.
Indeed, I think they're marketing the whole concept wrong.
I like the above example - a person fixing a car. That'd be pretty darned nifty if you could pull out your phone and get a model of your engine, automatically broken down into identifiable parts (to the degree that the phone can see), fetching the geometry of what it can't see, letting you virtually remove parts out of the way to see what you need to get to, showing you how parts should look so you can see if something looks wrong, etc. They could still work shopping in - maybe a link from a part lets you search new or used parts sellers for example. But the emphasis for the technology shouldn't be "shopping", it should be "everyday life".
They could hit up the Facebook crowd too - capturing 3d videos of events rather than just pictures and videos, tagging their friends, reliving events in a Cardboard or Rift viewer, etc. They could target the creative crowd, showing features for automatic capture and download of 3d models, including tools for preprocessing them into discrete, workable objects. They could target the extreme sports people, for planning and recording their crazy endeavours. And on and on. For almost any group, there's a good way they could market this.
But for YVHV's sake, don't make it all about shopping.:P
All of this comes across to me as knee-jerk. Your phone isn't going to sit around and scan without you telling it to. And since the processing is done in-phone, there's no need to store everything on the cloud.
That said, the things that people want stored could build Google up a pretty impressive database. Picture, say, the AR equivalent of a car repair manual (ignore what I wrote below about AR not really interesting me, there are some subsets that I find neat;) ). Everything in your car, you can pull up images of what it should look like, how it's attached (make the other objects in front of it "disappear"), connect to parts suppliers and order replacements, order 3d prints or lasercut/CNC parts of things that no longer are available or whose shape the user wants to modify, etc. Such a database could certainly be populated my manufacturers and interested third parties wanting to sell parts, but these sorts of databases could also be populated by enthusiasts (of pretty much any topic), wiki-style or curated with managers. And it's not just the products of mechanical engineering that applies, but civil engineering, industrial processes, architecture/city planning, geology, GIS, forestry management, oceanography, biology, and pretty much anything else on the planet.
Google could have a massive database, comprised of data entirely from willing parties who are happy to have it there, and users who are happy that it's available. They could, and almost certainly would, make data access free and open - that's Google's MO. But as the owners of the database, there's all sorts of ways that they could monetize its analytics. Ford wants to know what percentage of user-submitted scans of driveshafts from 8-year-old F-150s in coastal areas are heavily rusted vs. those far inland? Google's got that data. The local Department of Transportation wants to know if anyone's submitted a scan of a bridge with heavy concrete spalling that they didn't know about? Google's got that data. Etc. Data can be exchanged freely and fully willingly, with all parties content with the arrangement - but Google still remains in a very good position from an analytics perspective. So long as others can't just download their entire servers as a whole, that is.
The actual issues I see aren't "Google secretly taking scans without the user's knowledge" - I find that highly unlikely. It's the fact that people will constantly be - even if inadvertently - scanning other people and their possessions. And recognition of individuals in 3d is much easier than in photos, and every scan is geolocated and contextualized. And the system is designed to capture motion as well. You know, if you go to a concert or sports event or anything like that, there's certainly going to be people almost constantly taking scans that capture you. So I certainly hope they're going to have a very good "do not track" system for people who don't to be able to be tagged. That said, I personally want just the opposite - I want to be tagged everywhere that I'm captured, I'd love a 3d trail of my life and all of my experiences. I thus hope that they don't take privacy controls and automatically anonymize everyone with no option to opt-in.
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Right. Because the civilian nuclear industry has in sixty years hardly seen fit to invest anything in it, but that's clearly because they're ignorant nitwits who can't see how much clearly better it is, right?
Sorry, but thorium is not the be-all end-all. There are lots of lists touting its advantages that people like you and the gp love to share that conveniently omit the downsides. And the disadvantages aren't just "it's immature mothballed technology". You have to produce their (large) initial fuel load from other reactors, adding a lot of cost and robbing them of output for quite a while. Either that or use expensive, proliferation-risky highly enriched uranium or plutonium to start them, which itself has all sorts of problems related to limited solubility - and none of the workarounds are appealing. LTFRs have salt-freezing difficulties (so muchso that the leading "solution" is to run the entire reactor building blazingly hot rather than trying to heat every line) and use beryllium, a highly expensive, limited resource that's extremely toxic when aerosolized. They also are less controllable due to a lot of the delayed neutrons coming from outside the core. Moving the fuel (and thus waste) around also means that you can plate out waste onto your pipes and valves, potentially causing reduced flows or blockages. The tellurium formed tends to corrode the nickel-based alloys used. The alloys are also very damaged by long-term neutron exposure, and the alloying "fix" reduces the temperature limit, to a low level that may not be acceptable. The graphite has short lifespans and tends to accumulate radioactive daughter products and become a bulky, dangerous waste stream. It also has a potentially risky positive feedback loop, increasing U-233 fission as it heats up (remember Chernobyl? Same thing). The fuel (and thus waste) is fluorides, which are highly water soluble and thus a storage hazard, requiring a conversion step before storage (every such step adds costs and increases risk of spills). Fluoride wastes also over time tend to outgas hydrofluoric acid, uranium hexafluoride, and other extremely dangerous gases. Nobody has any clue what decommissioning costs would be, which is a massive unknown - the tiny Molten-Salt Reactor Experiment had huge decommissioning costs compared to its size. LFTRs are a serious proliferation risk via the protactinium extraction pathway, a necessary step if you want a half-decent power output, and the diversion would be very easy to hide because it's hard to quantify exactly how much protactinium the reactor should be producing at any given time. Protactinium can be used to produce very pure U233, which is a suitable material for making bombs. Another easy proliferation pathway is via extraction of Np-237 - working with a constantly reprocessed, fluoride-based stream makes proliferation almost too easy (the supposed "anti-proliferation" nature of LFTRs is that you can't (without difficulty) just extract the uranium due to U232 contamination... but that's irrelevant because it makes Pa-233 and Np-237-based proliferation so easy). LFTRs have to use expensive highly enriched lithium (7Li) to avoid becoming a major source of tritium outgasing and losing a lot of their neutronicity (which is already for many reasons a huge challenge in thorium reactors - they're much harder to simply "make work")
But no no, let's go on about how it's the solution to everybody's problems and that the industry is a bunch of morons for not throwing all of their money into it...
Really, a LFTR is pretty much backwards from where reactors should be going in every regard. You want your fuel and waste to be contained in small, stable elements, not flowing all over the place and touching (and degrading) everything. You don't want random, potentially rogue states having their hands on reprocessing equipment and liquid fluorides. You don't want to have to use more rare, expensive, and toxic materials in your construction and operation. You want delayed neutrons and negative v
Postgres is leading edge in some things, like (ridiculously useful) table inheritance. Their implementation could have been slightly better (the most common complaint being that indices don't inherit, you need to re-add them on all descendants), but I'm very glad that they were early adopters on this one. They even pulled off multiple inheritance well.
Everything in ((Field X)) would be so much better if they simply used ((Trendy Technology Y)) that I only have a superficial understanding of - yet all of those sheeple who actually work in the field refuse to give it the attention that I think it deserves! Check out this article in the Huffington Post that talks about how ((Trendy Technology Y)) could solve all the world's problems in ((Field X)) with no downsides!
These "X can't solve our energy" problems debates all generally come back to the concept of, "I personally can't imagine it". They see what vast scale of effort/material/etc it takes to build something, declare it impossible, and then declare something that they don't know as much about and haven't yet been overwhelmed by to be the solution.
Let's make it simple. If you're making hundreds of megawatts from something (let alone gigawatts), it's going to be mind-bogglingly huge and expensive, period. Doesn't matter whether you're talking about wind, water, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or whatnot - anything that can make and harness that much power is huge.
Since this is about nuclear: here's a cutaway of a "small" (180MW) reactor. This is just the reactor building, not all of the associated buildings, such as the (very large) turbine house, primary and backup support systems, power distribution infrastructure, and on and on. Again, that's a small reactor. And not only does all of that have to be built, but engineered to great precision, for the obvious reasons of the toxicity of what it's containing and the highly corrosive environment that it creates. Now think of how much you'd have to build to add new/replacement 3-4 terawatts. It's mind bogglingly vast.
But you know what, it's all mind bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of dams is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of wind turbines is mind-bogglingly vast. 3-4 terawatts of solar panels and the factories to churn them out is mind-bogglingly vast. And on and on and on. There's a reason why electricity production eats up such a large chunk of the planet's GDP - it deals in mind-bogglingly vast things. Some things take less material and more manpower, while others take more manpower and less material... and ultimately material itself equates to manpower. All of these things are captured in the construction cost figure, which amortized plus maintenance and operations costs yields the cost of the electricity. So one doesn't have to trust some sort of "I can't conceive of that, it's too big!" sense - they just need to look at what the power costs (undistorted by external factors). The market will pay for whatever is cheapest, and will build whatever factories or mines or whatnot that it needs to in order to make it happen.
Turnaround times are an issue, but they're not be-all end-all. Because even the longest turnaround times on projects are generally no more than a decade to a decade and a half. Climate change is an issue that needs to be approached over the course of decades. So even if the need to ramp up production of the projects' "dependencies" before the projects themself can commence, there's still plenty of time. IF there was confidence that that it's the best option.
Ultimately, however, since people can't see the future, nobody knows what's going to be cheapest. Different people have different views. Different countries offer differing market conditions and resources. So ultimately, no one solution is going to be taken up as the "be-all, end-all". Many routes will engage in parallel, and with each iteration, the data gleaned from earlier attempts will influence decisions as to what to make next.
But one thing is for sure: what ever is built, it's going to be mind-bogglingly vast. That's what we 7,4 billion humans do.
Am I the only one who got the idea from the movie that Kylo just wasn't "all that"? Sure, he's the leader of the Knights of Ren, but my impression was that he's still just an angry emo teenager desperately wishing he could actually be as powerful as he wants to be, like his idol, Granpa Vader. He didn't even seem to get the same sort of respect in the First Order that Vader got in the empire. Hux in particular seems annoyed by his presence and eager to snipe at his poor decisions to Snoke.
And his blaster trick isn't new, Vader did something similar on Cloud City when Han shot at him - just without as impressive of special effects ;)
Actually, the minimum energy needed to levitate the X-wing is surprisingly little. Energy is only technically required to raise it up - an object at a constant height in a gravitational well doesn't fundamentally require energy to remain there. Using Randall's XKCD assumptions about the scenario, Yoda exerts 19,2 kW of power over 3,6 seconds, or 0,0192 kWh.
Vader ripping apart metal on cloud city might qualify as vastly higher power expenditures, although only briefly, so again not vast amounts of energy. I'm really not sure about Palpatine's electricity. It goes great distances through the air as if it's high voltage, but it impacts Luke as a low, high current source would. This makes it hard to really estimate how powerful his lightning bolts actually are.
Not to mention, "A New Hope" has farmboy Luke who had only even just heard of the force briefly beforehand, who despite his boasting about how good of a pilot he was had just before the movie began crashed his T16 in Beggar's Canyon, fly through vast numbers of turbolasers, evade the Dark Lord of the Sith in the empire's most advanced fighter craft, and then land a shot that the actual experienced pilots he was with considered impossible... without his flight computer. Explicitly via using the force, doing the exact same thing Rey did (close eyes, find inner peace, open them, then letting the force channel one's actions)
The main difference is that Rey worked up to it. Luke did it out of the blue with no prior practice but the blast helmet thing.
Apparently in your mind the only way to turn chemical energy into electricity is to fire a bullet.
Also, apparently in your mind, a person can swap out a bullet but not swap out an energy source. And the two can't be combined or paired. And there's not literally thousands of different ways to store energy, many easily managed by hand. And the amount of energy needed to run a fingerprint scanner for a split second trivial.
Nope, clearly it's an impossible task, let's all go make threats to any stores that want to carry smart guns and block all attempts to improve the technology!
It's funny how people are absolutely convinced that there's no way to store chemical energy - for the purposes of conversion to electricity for the fingerprint reader - in a manner that one can be sure will be available when they need to fire their gun, but they're absolutely confident in the ability to store chemical energy - for the purposes of creating expanding gases to propel the bullet out - in a manner that one can be sure will be available when they need to fire their gun.
Oh, and as for the size of the crane you need? This size (right hand side, yellow - the cab is in white for a size comparison). And as for how you transport them? Like this. Same way as they already do.
It's not to be "balanced" for the return journey - the plan has always been to weld steel shoes to the deck to hold it in place. And it's very bottom-heavy. It's not at all at risk of falling over.
The way to transport it off the barge is called a crane, it's already been done, and it's not tricky.
The "compelling reason" is because rocket launches are complex procedures in the best of circumstances, that's anything but the best of circumstances, and they don't even know if the thing is flightworthy. And they certainly don't want their first reuse flight to be a failure.
Patience. It'll happen eventually.
The drone ship is a ship. It moves - it sails to and from port. There are cranes in port. They've already loaded and offloaded rockets from the barge in the past.
Each "hop" is strain on your rocket, new risk, and using up the lifetime of parts that have limited lifespan. Last I heard they were only hoping for a couple dozen flights out of each rocket.
That said, flying back has been mentioned in the past as part of the plan. But for the first go-around, that's very unlikely. They're going to want to give it a full rundown back onshore.
That would be the Just Read The Instructions then that went back to the owner; it had been taken out of service and replaced with the Of Course I Still Love You.
I really doubt that their first "intent for reflight" rocket will have its maiden reflight from the drone ship. They're surely going to go over it with a fine-toothed comb on land before relaunch.
The concept of refueling at and relaunching from the drone ship is pretty exciting for the future, mind you. If they really can get the reliability that high and the maintenance that low, it'd enable all sorts of things.
It's a win for everyone really. Very easy for homeowners to record their property to be insured and reduction of the number of false claims.
I really just love 3d scanning tech, it's so broadly applicable to so many fields. It doesn't need to be "augmented reality" stuff, it just needs to be able to capture, isolate, and identify objects. I've been patiently (okay, not so patiently ;) ) waiting many years for this.
Apparently you're under the impression that every bit of data collected by an android phone gets transmitted straight to Google.
Submitter here. I actually tried to come up with a better word but couldn't. They're really "slinging" doubt, but "doubtslinging" isn't a word. I thought of "FUD", but that implies a point of view, that the other side is deliberately trying to scare people off with misinformation, and that would be taking things too far.
Some of you with better English language skills than I can surely come up with better phrasing that's not overly wordy.
"Wouldn't it be nice if ((Insert Company Name Here)) were to actually, you know, pay dividends with that first dollar that they earned? Just a thought, but so far the one dollar they recovered is going to a frame, but it's totally profit if we wanted to but we don't want to so..."
Try having more than about four weeks patience here. They landed one, they're just about to land another. Why does an extra four weeks delay in getting a rocket to refurbish and relaunch matter to you so much?
They have three now - "Just Read The Instructions", "Of Course I Still Love You", and this one, whose name has not yet been announced (it's built from a barge called the Marmac 303). It's not clear what they're planning with Just Read The Instructions at this point, it may be permanently retired.
It's also not just about floating in seawater. The shuttle SRBs, for example, hit the water at highway driving speeds. It's basically a highway-speed crash.
But yes, floating in seawater is not exactly conducive to reuse of sensitive components ;) It's like saying, "Hey, toss your car in the ocean, have it bob around for a couple hours, then fish it out, dry it off and start it up, it'll surely be fine!" Only rockets have far tighter tolerances than cars - cars are sturdy, heavily built things while rockets are giant aluminum balloons that weigh a couple dozen times more when full than empty. Cars pump their fuel through tiny nozzles and drain a half dozen liters per hour of driving, while rockets can drain a swimming pool's worth of fuel and burn it in a manner of seconds. Cars roll down roads and face "some" air resistance, while rockets face so much that the compression heating burns the paint off of them. Etc.
Don't go to a shiny-trendy-overpriced-gadget company for your phone dictation needs. ;)
Or an ad company.
What google's core business is has nothing to do with how they have to market a specific product. Nor is every product Google makes oriented around advertising (any more than its competitors' are). Furthermore, Google really has pushed itself to become more of a "big data company" in general rather than specifically advertising.
Indeed, I think they're marketing the whole concept wrong.
I like the above example - a person fixing a car. That'd be pretty darned nifty if you could pull out your phone and get a model of your engine, automatically broken down into identifiable parts (to the degree that the phone can see), fetching the geometry of what it can't see, letting you virtually remove parts out of the way to see what you need to get to, showing you how parts should look so you can see if something looks wrong, etc. They could still work shopping in - maybe a link from a part lets you search new or used parts sellers for example. But the emphasis for the technology shouldn't be "shopping", it should be "everyday life".
They could hit up the Facebook crowd too - capturing 3d videos of events rather than just pictures and videos, tagging their friends, reliving events in a Cardboard or Rift viewer, etc. They could target the creative crowd, showing features for automatic capture and download of 3d models, including tools for preprocessing them into discrete, workable objects. They could target the extreme sports people, for planning and recording their crazy endeavours. And on and on. For almost any group, there's a good way they could market this.
But for YVHV's sake, don't make it all about shopping. :P
All of this comes across to me as knee-jerk. Your phone isn't going to sit around and scan without you telling it to. And since the processing is done in-phone, there's no need to store everything on the cloud.
That said, the things that people want stored could build Google up a pretty impressive database. Picture, say, the AR equivalent of a car repair manual (ignore what I wrote below about AR not really interesting me, there are some subsets that I find neat ;) ). Everything in your car, you can pull up images of what it should look like, how it's attached (make the other objects in front of it "disappear"), connect to parts suppliers and order replacements, order 3d prints or lasercut/CNC parts of things that no longer are available or whose shape the user wants to modify, etc. Such a database could certainly be populated my manufacturers and interested third parties wanting to sell parts, but these sorts of databases could also be populated by enthusiasts (of pretty much any topic), wiki-style or curated with managers. And it's not just the products of mechanical engineering that applies, but civil engineering, industrial processes, architecture/city planning, geology, GIS, forestry management, oceanography, biology, and pretty much anything else on the planet.
Google could have a massive database, comprised of data entirely from willing parties who are happy to have it there, and users who are happy that it's available. They could, and almost certainly would, make data access free and open - that's Google's MO. But as the owners of the database, there's all sorts of ways that they could monetize its analytics. Ford wants to know what percentage of user-submitted scans of driveshafts from 8-year-old F-150s in coastal areas are heavily rusted vs. those far inland? Google's got that data. The local Department of Transportation wants to know if anyone's submitted a scan of a bridge with heavy concrete spalling that they didn't know about? Google's got that data. Etc. Data can be exchanged freely and fully willingly, with all parties content with the arrangement - but Google still remains in a very good position from an analytics perspective. So long as others can't just download their entire servers as a whole, that is.
The actual issues I see aren't "Google secretly taking scans without the user's knowledge" - I find that highly unlikely. It's the fact that people will constantly be - even if inadvertently - scanning other people and their possessions. And recognition of individuals in 3d is much easier than in photos, and every scan is geolocated and contextualized. And the system is designed to capture motion as well. You know, if you go to a concert or sports event or anything like that, there's certainly going to be people almost constantly taking scans that capture you. So I certainly hope they're going to have a very good "do not track" system for people who don't to be able to be tagged. That said, I personally want just the opposite - I want to be tagged everywhere that I'm captured, I'd love a 3d trail of my life and all of my experiences. I thus hope that they don't take privacy controls and automatically anonymize everyone with no option to opt-in.
What does this exactly have to do with AR rather than just general "cameras and GPS devices on phones"?