That's actually correct. Ambient light on Mars is pinkish when dim, butterscotch/oolong-tea colored when bright - except near the sun at sunrise/sunset where it's bluish.
Actually I strongly recommend that people read the design documents (linked above). While the sleek look first comes across as an architect wildly fantasizing, the shape really comes from function.
1) You have to have radiation shielding. This means massive amounts of *something*, ideally from Mars. They identify water as the easiest "something" to work with. They're probably right.
2) Gantry cranes are heavy. You don't want to ship big heavy cranes to Mars. So it's best if you can build it up from bottom to top with a small device that ascends as it makes the wall. Hence their "3d printing bot" - yes, I know 3d printing is such a buzzword, but the bot design isn't actually that complex. It prints the tracks that it drives on into the wall it's making. Hence that "rippled" look to the walls. The shape doubles as a fresnel lens to focus light, which is neat and useful - but it stems from something much simpler, the need for the wall to be climbable.
3) This approach of printing tracks into walls is easiest done if the structure is highly vertical. For simplicity, the structure is also to be printed around the landing vehicle that brings all of the hardware and materials to print the shell - the vehicle also doubling as the habitat once it's been emptied out (reuse, reuse, reuse). Rockets tend to also be highly vertically-oriented vehicles. So you get - no shock - a highly vertical structure. It's function, not style - it's just that the function happens to also be stylish.
4) So you've got an outer pressure/radiation shell and an inner vehicle to be your habitat... but obviously you have to have insulation somewhere. What's the lightest insulation you could have? Aerogel. Okay, so you're going to bring aerogel. You can't just have it on your lander's exterior, it'll burn off on entry, so it's better to print it on when you get down to the surface - after all, you've already designed and built print bots. But if you're going to spray up a wall with your robots already designed for printing shells, why not leave a gap between the lander/habitat and the aerogel insulation, giving you more useful, room-temperature space? And another gap between the insulation shell and the ice - so now you have three independent domes providing redundancy? So right there again, function dictates form - even though the resulting form looks neat.
5) So you have room-temperature space outside your lander/habitat. And you have light filtering in through aerogel and ice, since they're mostly transparent. So why not grow plants there? Hence the greenhouse - it comes at almost no cost.
So while at a first glance it just looks like some fanciful design by a wannabe art/architecture student, there's actually solid reasoning behind it. Even the size of the habitat and its payload for making the shells was dictated by existing in-development launch vehicles (designed to fit on a Falcon Heavy or SLS).
No. Picture the following: Room temperature space, 20C -> start of insulation (20C) -> end of insulation (-50C) -> beginning of ice (-50C) -> end of ice (-60C) -> outdoors on Mars (-60C). How is ice at temperatures between -50C and -60C supposed to melt?
The actual design is more complex than that, of course (multiple shells, airspaces, etc).
It's not that simple of a design - there are multiple layers, not all of them ice, and different temperature zones. It's not even pure ice, it's an ice/fiber/aerogel composite, layered onto the inside of an inflated EFTE membrane in a modified fresnel lens shape to control where the light that filters through goes. This provides the "pressure vessel" as well as radiation shielding and some degree of insulation. A person can walk around in this area without a space suit, although it's quite cold. The next shell inward is printed using just the aerogel and binder. Inside this shell it's kept warm enough for living and plant growth; basically the whole area around the living quarters is a vertical greenhouse. The innermost section, the living quarters, isn't made on Mars. It's the landing craft that contained all of the excavation/printing hardware and supplies. It's sized to be launched on a Falcon Heavy. There's basically three separate airtight shells with airlocks leaving each one (the outer ice shell, the inner aerogel shell, and the inner living quarters/spacecraft, providing a great deal of redundancy against leaks. They even did actual 3d printing prototypes with their ice composite to test its properties, and have a pretty clever concept for how to have the printer be able to climb the walls its printing (it basically uses paired wheels (upper and lower) to grab onto the ridges of the fresnel lens structure it's printing, sort of like how some roller coasters hang into their tracks.
Really, it's not that bad of a concept, IMHO. There were certainly far worse in the competition.
North-flowing rivers in temperate and subarctic northern hemisphere regions are dangerous, as they collect rainwater or meltwater from warmer areas in the south and flow it up into areas that may still be frozen, and thus blocked off by ice dams.
Here in Iceland we have a related problem but with a different source - volcanic outburst floods (jökulhlaup). Unfortunately ours are still ongoing at regular intervals. We had one about 10-15% the size of the largest Columbia River Gorge floods in the 1800s. And in prehistoric times they've gotten far larger. It's the reason why people get nervous when big subglacial volcanoes like Bárðarbunga start rumbling. The power companies try to calm people down by saying no worries, the dams from which we get most of our power are rated to handle jökulhlaup... but when you look at the size of jökulhlaup they're rated for they're nothing, like 10k m/s or so.
Whoa, AC! A little hostile there. Maybe you should be the one in therapy. Then Mom and Dad can pay someone $200 an hour to listen to your thoughts so we don’t have to.
Wind... stop...? I don't understand the question. This concept of "stopped wind" confuses and infuriates us!;)
Hehe, just like anywhere else we have variation. It's just like we have a higher base multiplier on wind strength than most of the world. So what would normally be an imperceptible breeze in most places is a light breeze here, what would be a light breeze is a stiff breeze, what would normally be a stiff breeze is a strong wind, what would normally be a strong wind is a gale, what would normally be a gale is like being in a tornado.... etc.
I don't know when you came, but just so you know, summer is the calm season. Late winter / early spring is the peak of the windy season.
That's pretty much what the article says - the summary only cited the bad:
The Tesla wasn’t the only high-performance vehicle that fell below average in reliability. Others include the BMW X5 and 5 Series, and the Chevrolet Corvette.
When automakers roll out new technology, be it infotainment, transmissions, or engine variations, it often has a deleterious effect on vehicle reliability. Tesla is not only the poster child for a new type of high-performance, high-mileage EV, but it also has been adding complex new variations as assembly-line updates, such as all-wheel drive this year. So it’s not surprising to see problems continue to crop up.
Despite the problems, our data show that Tesla owner satisfaction is still very high: Ninety-seven percent of owners said they would definitely buy their car again. It appears that Tesla has been responsive to replacing faulty motors, differentials, brakes, and infotainment systems, all with a minimum of fuss to owners.
And Tesla’s attention to customer service has been effective. Almost every survey respondent made note of Tesla’s rapid response and repair time, despite the lack of a traditional dealer service network. For its early adopters, Tesla has made a practice of overdelivering on service problems under the factory warranty, as noted by these owners:
“A minor amount of play developed in the differential gears. Tesla replaced the entire drive system. Remarkable service!”
And:
“Had a creaking ball joint in the driver[-side] front lower control arm. Tesla replaced it the following day after they were notified.”
Even ignoring that, Sweden's rate is very low - 14th lowest in the world. So hearing someone from Sweden talk about how horrid their murderous "ghettos" are just reeks of "First World Problems". Norway, which has a small fraction as many immigrants as Sweden (both on a percentage and absolute basis) has three times the murder rate (2,2 per 100k).
What's wrong with it? We use viking-related terms a lot. For example, what you call "banksters" we call "útrásarvíkingar" - that is, "outvasion vikings";) That is to say, they went on "útrásir" to plunder and brought home the spoils to enrich themselves. Names from the viking era (both names of people and old norse deities) are popular here, Reykjavík has number of streets named after Norse gods and famous vikings (also, coast guard ships do the same thing), and there's even a religion here that worships the old norse gods. The viking era was a major part of the history here... really, most of the history here.
Also, unrelated, we use lots of volcano related terms. You see lots of places in town for example that have "lava" (hraun) in the name (I live near a place whose name means "lavatown"), there are candies with volcanic names, Icelandair names its airplanes after volcanoes... even the word for soft drink (gos) means "eruption":)
There is no amount of atmospheric friction that cannot be withstood in any practical circumstance. Worst case, one uses ablatives. HARP shot projectiles at those speeds without destroying their contents - even electronics.
Hmm, interesting, that's the gun that our government (Iceland) was secretly smuggling into the country (bypassing all customs processes and parliament) with the intent to have one in every police car. And then when caught claimed that it was a "gift" from Norway. And when Norway said that no, it's not a gift, you deliberately sought them out and offered to purchase them from us, they "clarified" that Norway marks things as sales for billing purposes, but they never send the bill, it's just a little wink-wink nudge-nudge game between friends. And when Norway said no, we promise you, we're sending the bill.... half a year later they eventually sent the guns back.
But I guess we have to do something about our one-of-the-lowest-on-Earth murder rates**, and the threat that ISIS wants to take over our rock in the North Atlantic (yes, these are the actual arguments made by proponents...)
** In its entire history, our equivalent of SWAT (Víkingasveitin / The Viking Squad) has had to kill a grand total of one person. And they issued an apology to his family for it (the guy was mentally disturbed and shooting at them with a shotgun in a densely populated area, hitting one officer before they decided to try tear gas, hit another after they tried to get him out with gas, and finally hitting another while they went in after him, before they finally had to shoot him).
Most 3d printing metal services online actually due a variant of lost-wax casting. The resulting prints are basically just cast objects, and have the same material properties of any other cast objects. But beyond that, since when is laser-sintered metal not capable of being strong? There's a sort of "in-between" method that sacrifices some strength (but is still quite strong) wherein you print out metal powder with a binder, sinter the part as a whole while burning out the binder, then fill in the pore space with a lower-melting-point metal. But that's not laser sintering. Yes, with laser sintering there is of course some variation, depending on the goal, but techniques designed for maximum strength like SLM fully melt the grains and yield excellent material performance. SpaceX's SuperDraco engine is 3d printed - and one of the reasons that they reportedly chose that approach was that they actually got better performance out of it than with milling in nearly every regard (strength, ductility, fatigue resistance, material uniformity, etc). They actually started out milling them and switched to laser sintering. And now there's a new 3d printing technique involving "laser spraying" that should be able to achieve significantly stronger objects than most conventional processes. The powder isn't simply laid down; it comes in as an extremely high velocity dust stream and thus not only is thermally welded with its surroundings, but also highly compacted by the impact force. A non-3d-printing variant of the technique, thermal spraying, is used to impart high performance coatings to objects. And it's even more flexible in what it can lay down than laser sintering, in that one has full control over both the impact velocity and the temperature at impact.
3d metal printing isn't a home hobbyist endeavour. But for those who need it done, the technology today is actually quite excellent.
... or, for that matter, shoot things *out* of orbit (much harder from an aiming perspective, much easier from an energy perspective; the "warhead" would be sand scattered like buckshot by explosives)
Do you know what sort of projectiles they're using? It seems one could hybridize simple projectiles with rockets. The latter would not only be a range extender due to simple propulsion alone, but it'd also fill in the low pressure wake behind the shell (even a small rocket could do that).
These sorts of velocities are comparable to the best achieved by the HARP gun. If the payload was greater they could literally shoot things into orbit via staged rocket projectile.
Yeah, you and your appalling ghetto murders unconstrained by your tiny police force - all 0,7 murders per 100k population per year. How do any of you survive? (US = 4,7 murders per 100k per year)
What are you doing on the net - don't you have a Sverigedemokraterna party meeting to attend?
I had the same issue. I fought with it for years, trying to fight one obscure reason after another for my mail getting bounced or worse (as you mention) silently dropped from different recipients, and eventually gave up. I still host my own incoming mail server but I switched to routing outgoing mail through existing services.
Mir was bigger and modular (Skylab was monolithic), but it wasn't the first space station - construction started over a decade after Skylab was launched.
with by far the best safety record of any country
You mean China?
The Russians have largely gotten lucky, in that most of their Soyuz to catastrophically fail have been the unmanned launches, even though they're largely built on the same components. The failure rate has gotten pretty damned awful of late. As has the rate of dangerous "glitches" on returning vehicles
The number of deaths issue is based on a statistical sample size of only a tiny number of fatal accidents on both sides, and is thus dominated more by noise than by signal. It's also skewed by the size of the crews - each side has only had two fatal space missions, but the US crews were several times larger. The broader category that includes injuries, near misses, etc gives a greater sample size and paints a reversed picture: the rate is far higher on the Russian side.
or is the only country in the world today still capable of putting men into space.
Why does everyone keep forgetting about China in these conversations?
BTW, can someone give us a ride to the ISS, please? We'll pay for gas.
That was, of course, the US's decision to retire the Shuttle and hitch rides with the Russians. Of course, they couldn't retire the Shuttle when they wanted to, they had to keep it operating to finish the station as the Russians didn't have any launch vehicles nearly large enough to carry the larger payloads. Russia still lags behind in large payloads, particularly in reaching higher orbits - the Proton M, Russia's most powerful rocket, carries 6,7 tonnes to GTO while the Delta IV carries 14,2 tonnes. Early next year the Falcon Heavy should have its maiden launch, with a GTO payload of 21,2 tonnes. Russia has nothing even comparable in the near pipeline.
Russia has always had trouble with heavy lift. The N1 was perhaps one of the most spectacular rocket program failures in history, a rocket about the size of the Saturn V, a massive program, and every launch ended in an explosion. Perhaps their "most successful" heavy lifter was the Energia, but it never flew in its heavy lift configuration, and only flew twice in any configuration at all.
As for missions beyond Earth:
Moon race: 28 failures, 15 successes, versus 16 failures and 16 successes for the US. Notable features include a couple tiny sample returns and the first quality remote rover - versus the US... well, the Apollo Program;)
Mars: 20 failures, 2 successes (only orbiters, and only "mostly successful), versus 6 failures and 18 successes for the US. Mars was probably the Soviet/Russian space program's biggest realm of embarrassment.
Venus: 16 failures, 13 successes, versus 1 failure and 6 successes. By contrast, Venus was the Soviet/Russian program's biggest success - but largely simply because they threw a lot more things at it than the US, which by and large seemed relatively uninterested in our evil twin.
Mercury: Russia/USSR never tried. US, 2 successes.
Asteroids: Never tried. US, 3 failures, 8 successes.
In fact, Russia/USSR never went anywhere in the solar system outside of Mars. Beyond the asteroid belt, their grand total of attempts was zero. The US has not had a single outer planets mission failure, and 23 successful missions (although some of that is double-counting, as a number of spacecraft visited multiple planets).
Early on, there's no question who was in the lead - the Soviets were, unquestionably. By the mid 1960s, though, the tables had reversed. Since then, the Soviets/Russians have had a pretty spotty record with sp
Completely unrelated topic: do you have any ideas on how to stop the SPCA from harassing you about so-called "disgusting and immoral body modifications to a pet"? Preferably a means that will cause them to rue the day that they got involved? I have a small LINAC, if that would help - I just need to find him, little Schrodinger is hiding somewhere under the bed right now and doesn't want to come out.
Except that that's not actually what the documents state. As usual, whenever anything can make the US look bad, people play a game of telephone and the claim gets worse and worse every time.
The report does NOT state that 90% of the victims were civilians. It says that during a 5 month period of Operation Haymaker, there were 56 kinetic strikes with 219 "EKIA" and 35 "JP". JP = Jackpot = primary target. EKIA = "Enemy killed in action". Only 10% were "primary targets". The rest are registered as "enemies killed in action". There is no estimate of civilians killed in the document.
Now, the process for determining EKIA is questioned by the Intercept - if they're a military-age male at the same location of a JP, then they're considered EKIA, not civilian. There's no attempt to research if they *actually* were associated with the JP, or just happened to be at the same place at the same time (for example, in the same vehicle that was struck). One would expect that in many if not most cases they probably actually are EKIA, not civilian. But hardly exclusively.
The success ratio of hitting JPs can be deduced by the above figures. 56 strikes and 35 JPs killed, assuming one JP targeted per strike (one assumes they don't get many opportunities to hit several at once - and the documents say that they were targeted one at a time), would be 62.5%. If they ever did manage to take out multiple at once, the ratio would be slightly less than that.
Again, there is no estimate of civilian casualties in the documents. So we have no way to assess from this how many are killed, although we know there surely exist.
Lastly: This isn't just about drone strikes. This is about Operation Haymaker strikes as a whole. Most of the Haymaker strikes were indeed from drones, but not all of them.
Why did I take the time to look up what the documents actually say? Because I've learned over the years whenever one sees this sort of "America Is Working For The Greater Purposes Of Evil!" article, 90% of the time when you look into it, the claims are heavily distorted, if not outright BS.
This is not "outright BS" - merely distorted. There is some legitimate criticism of the drone program here, in that ground raids - while more dangerous to the troops - seem to be significantly less lethal. They capture or kill targets at about the same rate (59,5% according to the document), but no shots are fired in 91,7% of cases. They actually have a civilian casualty events (CIVCAS) in there, and it's 14. That's not 14 civilians - there could be multiple civilians per event - and the Intercept's source says that's "highly suspect" and "I know the actual number is much higher" because they "write off most of the kills as legitimate". But even taking that into account, ground forces look to be a "cleaner" option. The documents *are* a strong argument that drones are over-relied-upon and ground forces should be used more often. Unfortunately, politics often hinders that.
BTW, I recommend checking out the documents, it gives a really interesting look into the thought process that goes behind each strike, analyzing the pros and cons of targeting each individual - aka, how much military benefit they think it will give them versus how much blowback they expect, if any, from the local population. They then define how much risk they're willing to take for the given target - risk of getting the wrong person or collateral damage - and track their confidence level on whether the person who they're tracking is who they think they are. So in a number of ways, they show a well thought out, reasoned approach. But they also show a significant willingness - whether out of cover-your-arse thinking, or a genuine belief - to consider (and subsequently label) every attack a success and every military-age male killed an enemy.
It is a myth. But the myth is grounded on real differences in approaches between the Soviets and the US at the time. Two examples:
I had a friend who went as part of a US military team as a translator during one of those mutual nuclear disarmament treaties in the 80s. The Soviets had sent their own team to the US. Each team was allowed to inspect any area large enough to conceal a "treaty-limited item", which was carefully laid out in the treaty. So the US team was sent over with laser measuring devices to figure out what they could inspect and what they couldn't. The Soviets thought the devices were really clever. What their teams had been sent over with was... a stick. If the stick fit, they could inspect it.
Another example: in the US, you know how if you get pulled over (at least at the time), the police officer would take your license back to the police car, key the number into a computer or radio it to someone who would key it in, this would look up the number in a central database for existing violations (letting them know if they needed to for example take the license away), then it'd register the new violation in the database, the officer would then get all the info, print up or write up the ticket using that, and hand the license back, right? The Soviet system was a bit... simpler. The officer would take your license and punch a hole in it. If you had too many holes, they'd keep it.;)
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That's actually correct. Ambient light on Mars is pinkish when dim, butterscotch/oolong-tea colored when bright - except near the sun at sunrise/sunset where it's bluish.
Actually I strongly recommend that people read the design documents (linked above). While the sleek look first comes across as an architect wildly fantasizing, the shape really comes from function.
1) You have to have radiation shielding. This means massive amounts of *something*, ideally from Mars. They identify water as the easiest "something" to work with. They're probably right.
2) Gantry cranes are heavy. You don't want to ship big heavy cranes to Mars. So it's best if you can build it up from bottom to top with a small device that ascends as it makes the wall. Hence their "3d printing bot" - yes, I know 3d printing is such a buzzword, but the bot design isn't actually that complex. It prints the tracks that it drives on into the wall it's making. Hence that "rippled" look to the walls. The shape doubles as a fresnel lens to focus light, which is neat and useful - but it stems from something much simpler, the need for the wall to be climbable.
3) This approach of printing tracks into walls is easiest done if the structure is highly vertical. For simplicity, the structure is also to be printed around the landing vehicle that brings all of the hardware and materials to print the shell - the vehicle also doubling as the habitat once it's been emptied out (reuse, reuse, reuse). Rockets tend to also be highly vertically-oriented vehicles. So you get - no shock - a highly vertical structure. It's function, not style - it's just that the function happens to also be stylish.
4) So you've got an outer pressure/radiation shell and an inner vehicle to be your habitat... but obviously you have to have insulation somewhere. What's the lightest insulation you could have? Aerogel. Okay, so you're going to bring aerogel. You can't just have it on your lander's exterior, it'll burn off on entry, so it's better to print it on when you get down to the surface - after all, you've already designed and built print bots. But if you're going to spray up a wall with your robots already designed for printing shells, why not leave a gap between the lander/habitat and the aerogel insulation, giving you more useful, room-temperature space? And another gap between the insulation shell and the ice - so now you have three independent domes providing redundancy? So right there again, function dictates form - even though the resulting form looks neat.
5) So you have room-temperature space outside your lander/habitat. And you have light filtering in through aerogel and ice, since they're mostly transparent. So why not grow plants there? Hence the greenhouse - it comes at almost no cost.
So while at a first glance it just looks like some fanciful design by a wannabe art/architecture student, there's actually solid reasoning behind it. Even the size of the habitat and its payload for making the shells was dictated by existing in-development launch vehicles (designed to fit on a Falcon Heavy or SLS).
No. Picture the following: Room temperature space, 20C -> start of insulation (20C) -> end of insulation (-50C) -> beginning of ice (-50C) -> end of ice (-60C) -> outdoors on Mars (-60C). How is ice at temperatures between -50C and -60C supposed to melt?
The actual design is more complex than that, of course (multiple shells, airspaces, etc).
It's not that simple of a design - there are multiple layers, not all of them ice, and different temperature zones. It's not even pure ice, it's an ice/fiber/aerogel composite, layered onto the inside of an inflated EFTE membrane in a modified fresnel lens shape to control where the light that filters through goes. This provides the "pressure vessel" as well as radiation shielding and some degree of insulation. A person can walk around in this area without a space suit, although it's quite cold. The next shell inward is printed using just the aerogel and binder. Inside this shell it's kept warm enough for living and plant growth; basically the whole area around the living quarters is a vertical greenhouse. The innermost section, the living quarters, isn't made on Mars. It's the landing craft that contained all of the excavation/printing hardware and supplies. It's sized to be launched on a Falcon Heavy. There's basically three separate airtight shells with airlocks leaving each one (the outer ice shell, the inner aerogel shell, and the inner living quarters/spacecraft, providing a great deal of redundancy against leaks. They even did actual 3d printing prototypes with their ice composite to test its properties, and have a pretty clever concept for how to have the printer be able to climb the walls its printing (it basically uses paired wheels (upper and lower) to grab onto the ridges of the fresnel lens structure it's printing, sort of like how some roller coasters hang into their tracks.
Really, it's not that bad of a concept, IMHO. There were certainly far worse in the competition.
North-flowing rivers in temperate and subarctic northern hemisphere regions are dangerous, as they collect rainwater or meltwater from warmer areas in the south and flow it up into areas that may still be frozen, and thus blocked off by ice dams.
Here in Iceland we have a related problem but with a different source - volcanic outburst floods (jökulhlaup). Unfortunately ours are still ongoing at regular intervals. We had one about 10-15% the size of the largest Columbia River Gorge floods in the 1800s. And in prehistoric times they've gotten far larger. It's the reason why people get nervous when big subglacial volcanoes like Bárðarbunga start rumbling. The power companies try to calm people down by saying no worries, the dams from which we get most of our power are rated to handle jökulhlaup... but when you look at the size of jökulhlaup they're rated for they're nothing, like 10k m/s or so.
Whoa, AC! A little hostile there. Maybe you should be the one in therapy. Then Mom and Dad can pay someone $200 an hour to listen to your thoughts so we don’t have to.
Wind... stop...? I don't understand the question. This concept of "stopped wind" confuses and infuriates us! ;)
Hehe, just like anywhere else we have variation. It's just like we have a higher base multiplier on wind strength than most of the world. So what would normally be an imperceptible breeze in most places is a light breeze here, what would be a light breeze is a stiff breeze, what would normally be a stiff breeze is a strong wind, what would normally be a strong wind is a gale, what would normally be a gale is like being in a tornado.... etc.
I don't know when you came, but just so you know, summer is the calm season. Late winter / early spring is the peak of the windy season.
What the hell kind of name is that? It's like some sort of superhero or something.
You know, I love that movie, the way they shot it. It’s so urm like futuristic, you know?
That's pretty much what the article says - the summary only cited the bad:
Most police don't have lethal weaponry, so one shouldn't expect a difference between those two numbers.
Even ignoring that, Sweden's rate is very low - 14th lowest in the world. So hearing someone from Sweden talk about how horrid their murderous "ghettos" are just reeks of "First World Problems". Norway, which has a small fraction as many immigrants as Sweden (both on a percentage and absolute basis) has three times the murder rate (2,2 per 100k).
What's wrong with it? We use viking-related terms a lot. For example, what you call "banksters" we call "útrásarvíkingar" - that is, "outvasion vikings" ;) That is to say, they went on "útrásir" to plunder and brought home the spoils to enrich themselves. Names from the viking era (both names of people and old norse deities) are popular here, Reykjavík has number of streets named after Norse gods and famous vikings (also, coast guard ships do the same thing), and there's even a religion here that worships the old norse gods. The viking era was a major part of the history here... really, most of the history here.
Also, unrelated, we use lots of volcano related terms. You see lots of places in town for example that have "lava" (hraun) in the name (I live near a place whose name means "lavatown"), there are candies with volcanic names, Icelandair names its airplanes after volcanoes... even the word for soft drink (gos) means "eruption" :)
There is no amount of atmospheric friction that cannot be withstood in any practical circumstance. Worst case, one uses ablatives. HARP shot projectiles at those speeds without destroying their contents - even electronics.
Hmm, interesting, that's the gun that our government (Iceland) was secretly smuggling into the country (bypassing all customs processes and parliament) with the intent to have one in every police car. And then when caught claimed that it was a "gift" from Norway. And when Norway said that no, it's not a gift, you deliberately sought them out and offered to purchase them from us, they "clarified" that Norway marks things as sales for billing purposes, but they never send the bill, it's just a little wink-wink nudge-nudge game between friends. And when Norway said no, we promise you, we're sending the bill.... half a year later they eventually sent the guns back.
But I guess we have to do something about our one-of-the-lowest-on-Earth murder rates**, and the threat that ISIS wants to take over our rock in the North Atlantic (yes, these are the actual arguments made by proponents...)
** In its entire history, our equivalent of SWAT (Víkingasveitin / The Viking Squad) has had to kill a grand total of one person. And they issued an apology to his family for it (the guy was mentally disturbed and shooting at them with a shotgun in a densely populated area, hitting one officer before they decided to try tear gas, hit another after they tried to get him out with gas, and finally hitting another while they went in after him, before they finally had to shoot him).
Most 3d printing metal services online actually due a variant of lost-wax casting. The resulting prints are basically just cast objects, and have the same material properties of any other cast objects. But beyond that, since when is laser-sintered metal not capable of being strong? There's a sort of "in-between" method that sacrifices some strength (but is still quite strong) wherein you print out metal powder with a binder, sinter the part as a whole while burning out the binder, then fill in the pore space with a lower-melting-point metal. But that's not laser sintering. Yes, with laser sintering there is of course some variation, depending on the goal, but techniques designed for maximum strength like SLM fully melt the grains and yield excellent material performance. SpaceX's SuperDraco engine is 3d printed - and one of the reasons that they reportedly chose that approach was that they actually got better performance out of it than with milling in nearly every regard (strength, ductility, fatigue resistance, material uniformity, etc). They actually started out milling them and switched to laser sintering. And now there's a new 3d printing technique involving "laser spraying" that should be able to achieve significantly stronger objects than most conventional processes. The powder isn't simply laid down; it comes in as an extremely high velocity dust stream and thus not only is thermally welded with its surroundings, but also highly compacted by the impact force. A non-3d-printing variant of the technique, thermal spraying, is used to impart high performance coatings to objects. And it's even more flexible in what it can lay down than laser sintering, in that one has full control over both the impact velocity and the temperature at impact.
3d metal printing isn't a home hobbyist endeavour. But for those who need it done, the technology today is actually quite excellent.
... or, for that matter, shoot things *out* of orbit (much harder from an aiming perspective, much easier from an energy perspective; the "warhead" would be sand scattered like buckshot by explosives)
Do you know what sort of projectiles they're using? It seems one could hybridize simple projectiles with rockets. The latter would not only be a range extender due to simple propulsion alone, but it'd also fill in the low pressure wake behind the shell (even a small rocket could do that).
These sorts of velocities are comparable to the best achieved by the HARP gun. If the payload was greater they could literally shoot things into orbit via staged rocket projectile.
Yeah, you and your appalling ghetto murders unconstrained by your tiny police force - all 0,7 murders per 100k population per year. How do any of you survive? (US = 4,7 murders per 100k per year)
What are you doing on the net - don't you have a Sverigedemokraterna party meeting to attend?
I had the same issue. I fought with it for years, trying to fight one obscure reason after another for my mail getting bounced or worse (as you mention) silently dropped from different recipients, and eventually gave up. I still host my own incoming mail server but I switched to routing outgoing mail through existing services.
Forgetting Skylab, now are we?
Mir was bigger and modular (Skylab was monolithic), but it wasn't the first space station - construction started over a decade after Skylab was launched.
You mean China?
The Russians have largely gotten lucky, in that most of their Soyuz to catastrophically fail have been the unmanned launches, even though they're largely built on the same components. The failure rate has gotten pretty damned awful of late. As has the rate of dangerous "glitches" on returning vehicles
The number of deaths issue is based on a statistical sample size of only a tiny number of fatal accidents on both sides, and is thus dominated more by noise than by signal. It's also skewed by the size of the crews - each side has only had two fatal space missions, but the US crews were several times larger. The broader category that includes injuries, near misses, etc gives a greater sample size and paints a reversed picture: the rate is far higher on the Russian side.
Why does everyone keep forgetting about China in these conversations?
That was, of course, the US's decision to retire the Shuttle and hitch rides with the Russians. Of course, they couldn't retire the Shuttle when they wanted to, they had to keep it operating to finish the station as the Russians didn't have any launch vehicles nearly large enough to carry the larger payloads. Russia still lags behind in large payloads, particularly in reaching higher orbits - the Proton M, Russia's most powerful rocket, carries 6,7 tonnes to GTO while the Delta IV carries 14,2 tonnes. Early next year the Falcon Heavy should have its maiden launch, with a GTO payload of 21,2 tonnes. Russia has nothing even comparable in the near pipeline.
Russia has always had trouble with heavy lift. The N1 was perhaps one of the most spectacular rocket program failures in history, a rocket about the size of the Saturn V, a massive program, and every launch ended in an explosion. Perhaps their "most successful" heavy lifter was the Energia, but it never flew in its heavy lift configuration, and only flew twice in any configuration at all.
As for missions beyond Earth:
Moon race: 28 failures, 15 successes, versus 16 failures and 16 successes for the US. Notable features include a couple tiny sample returns and the first quality remote rover - versus the US... well, the Apollo Program ;)
Mars: 20 failures, 2 successes (only orbiters, and only "mostly successful), versus 6 failures and 18 successes for the US. Mars was probably the Soviet/Russian space program's biggest realm of embarrassment.
Venus: 16 failures, 13 successes, versus 1 failure and 6 successes. By contrast, Venus was the Soviet/Russian program's biggest success - but largely simply because they threw a lot more things at it than the US, which by and large seemed relatively uninterested in our evil twin.
Mercury: Russia/USSR never tried. US, 2 successes.
Asteroids: Never tried. US, 3 failures, 8 successes.
In fact, Russia/USSR never went anywhere in the solar system outside of Mars. Beyond the asteroid belt, their grand total of attempts was zero. The US has not had a single outer planets mission failure, and 23 successful missions (although some of that is double-counting, as a number of spacecraft visited multiple planets).
Early on, there's no question who was in the lead - the Soviets were, unquestionably. By the mid 1960s, though, the tables had reversed. Since then, the Soviets/Russians have had a pretty spotty record with sp
Speak for yourself, my cat is a LINAC.
Completely unrelated topic: do you have any ideas on how to stop the SPCA from harassing you about so-called "disgusting and immoral body modifications to a pet"? Preferably a means that will cause them to rue the day that they got involved? I have a small LINAC, if that would help - I just need to find him, little Schrodinger is hiding somewhere under the bed right now and doesn't want to come out.
Except that that's not actually what the documents state. As usual, whenever anything can make the US look bad, people play a game of telephone and the claim gets worse and worse every time.
The report does NOT state that 90% of the victims were civilians. It says that during a 5 month period of Operation Haymaker, there were 56 kinetic strikes with 219 "EKIA" and 35 "JP". JP = Jackpot = primary target. EKIA = "Enemy killed in action". Only 10% were "primary targets". The rest are registered as "enemies killed in action". There is no estimate of civilians killed in the document.
Now, the process for determining EKIA is questioned by the Intercept - if they're a military-age male at the same location of a JP, then they're considered EKIA, not civilian. There's no attempt to research if they *actually* were associated with the JP, or just happened to be at the same place at the same time (for example, in the same vehicle that was struck). One would expect that in many if not most cases they probably actually are EKIA, not civilian. But hardly exclusively.
The success ratio of hitting JPs can be deduced by the above figures. 56 strikes and 35 JPs killed, assuming one JP targeted per strike (one assumes they don't get many opportunities to hit several at once - and the documents say that they were targeted one at a time), would be 62.5%. If they ever did manage to take out multiple at once, the ratio would be slightly less than that.
Again, there is no estimate of civilian casualties in the documents. So we have no way to assess from this how many are killed, although we know there surely exist.
Lastly: This isn't just about drone strikes. This is about Operation Haymaker strikes as a whole. Most of the Haymaker strikes were indeed from drones, but not all of them.
Why did I take the time to look up what the documents actually say? Because I've learned over the years whenever one sees this sort of "America Is Working For The Greater Purposes Of Evil!" article, 90% of the time when you look into it, the claims are heavily distorted, if not outright BS.
This is not "outright BS" - merely distorted. There is some legitimate criticism of the drone program here, in that ground raids - while more dangerous to the troops - seem to be significantly less lethal. They capture or kill targets at about the same rate (59,5% according to the document), but no shots are fired in 91,7% of cases. They actually have a civilian casualty events (CIVCAS) in there, and it's 14. That's not 14 civilians - there could be multiple civilians per event - and the Intercept's source says that's "highly suspect" and "I know the actual number is much higher" because they "write off most of the kills as legitimate". But even taking that into account, ground forces look to be a "cleaner" option. The documents *are* a strong argument that drones are over-relied-upon and ground forces should be used more often. Unfortunately, politics often hinders that.
BTW, I recommend checking out the documents, it gives a really interesting look into the thought process that goes behind each strike, analyzing the pros and cons of targeting each individual - aka, how much military benefit they think it will give them versus how much blowback they expect, if any, from the local population. They then define how much risk they're willing to take for the given target - risk of getting the wrong person or collateral damage - and track their confidence level on whether the person who they're tracking is who they think they are. So in a number of ways, they show a well thought out, reasoned approach. But they also show a significant willingness - whether out of cover-your-arse thinking, or a genuine belief - to consider (and subsequently label) every attack a success and every military-age male killed an enemy.
It is a myth. But the myth is grounded on real differences in approaches between the Soviets and the US at the time. Two examples:
I had a friend who went as part of a US military team as a translator during one of those mutual nuclear disarmament treaties in the 80s. The Soviets had sent their own team to the US. Each team was allowed to inspect any area large enough to conceal a "treaty-limited item", which was carefully laid out in the treaty. So the US team was sent over with laser measuring devices to figure out what they could inspect and what they couldn't. The Soviets thought the devices were really clever. What their teams had been sent over with was... a stick. If the stick fit, they could inspect it.
Another example: in the US, you know how if you get pulled over (at least at the time), the police officer would take your license back to the police car, key the number into a computer or radio it to someone who would key it in, this would look up the number in a central database for existing violations (letting them know if they needed to for example take the license away), then it'd register the new violation in the database, the officer would then get all the info, print up or write up the ticket using that, and hand the license back, right? The Soviet system was a bit... simpler. The officer would take your license and punch a hole in it. If you had too many holes, they'd keep it. ;)
If by "very thick shielding" you mean a meter of concrete....
There's good reason that they use radiation-hardened processors on space probes. Shielding is an impractical way to deal with the problem.