If you're a content provider and are concerned about ad blocking hitting your bottom line then you need to stop using ad networks and host your own ads or I don't wanna hear any bitching.
FTFY
It stuns me that media operators who have run their own in-house advertising divisions for their dead-tree versions for decades, suddenly act like one-man amateur blogs for their online versions, needing third-party-hosted ad networks.
Frankly I wish they'd bite the bullet and finally get the pilots out of the cockpit of commercial airliners altogether, and just use remote control from a central control centre for each airline, or better yet, each airport. Similar to the harbour pilots, specialise in their own harbour. You don't need a pilot in the aircraft for 99% of the trip, so you'd save an enormous amount of labour across the fleet, even if you had four or more remote-crew controlling each approaching-landing aircraft. (Even then, the highly automated aircraft would largely land themselves. The remote-crew being for emergencies and unusual conditions.)
the king has said many time that he does not want anyone in prison for "insulting" him,
So sending people to prison for insulting the king is ignoring the king's specific, repeated request. Which seems pretty insulting.
(Does he have the power to issue pardons? If he does, and doesn't pardon "insulters", then his words are hollow. If he doesn't have any powers to overrule bad government... then what is he for?)
I look forward to seeing you out in the street with your guns, defending those who've already been denied their Constitutional rights (such as in unlimited detention without trial, torture or any compulsion to testify against themselves, military tribunals, non-combatant US and non-US citizens killed by Presidential-fiat without any trial or due process, universal monitoring without warrant, warrants issued by secret courts without probable cause, etc etc etc.)
Or is that not enough to make you take up arms and overthrow your government? Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eight, probably the Ninth and Tenth, along with plenty of individual Federal laws. Not enough? If not that, then what? What do they have to do to make you "exercise your 2nd Amendment Right"? Where is the line?
But now their novel launch system needs a tether and an orbital manufacturing facility and a reusable orbital transport system to exist before the launcher is able to justify its own existence.
That's the problem with a lot of these kinds of ideas, they can only make their business case if the demand is there. And the demand would only be there after these multi-layered systems exist and radically lower the access cost. Chicken and egg.
I mentioned tethers in the second paragraph, re:a Lunar slingatron. But "sufficient accuracy" may be impossible when launching through an atmosphere. And importantly, it limits your launch opportunities further, your only launch window is when the tether aligns precisely with launcher. (Not just the orbital plane of the tether, but the tether itself.)
[With a lunar version, your primary cargo is always going away from lunar orbit. So you can stick your tether in L1/L2, a "fixed" point to aim towards. Or in equatorial lunar orbit, from an equatorially sited slingatron, giving you multiple launch opportunities every day. (Or both, flick from one to the other.) The tether then flings the payload away from the moon, back to Earth, or into solar orbit. With an Earth launcher, your primary market is a thousand different little orbital planes near Earth. You'd need a tether in nearly every possible orbit.]
Do the maths on changing the angle of an orbital plane. It eats energy (and propellant) like crazy. Much more than merely raising perigee. Much more than a (necessarily G-hardened) OMS thruster is going to be able to provide.
(There was concern by aerospace people that if SpaceX was going to launch its reusable Falcon9 from its new Texas site, it would only be able to launch south-easterly, restricting the launch trajectories, it would at least halve the number of available launch windows.)
Personally if we are going to dream then a launch loop is my preferred "rockets suck" alternative.
The launch loop makes the slingatron look sensible and easy.
But if we're going to name favourites, then I'd pick a nuclear Verne gun. 5000 tonnes to escape velocity in one shot. All you need is a two km long mine-shaft through a salt dome... and a nuke.
In addition to g-load and not being able to reach orbit, problems suffered also by the "slingatron", a kms long mass driver up the side of a mountain also can't be aimed. Therefore you are spending billions of dollars to develop something which can launch only hardened cargoes into just one sub-orbital trajectory.
And launching at 6km doesn't gain you a lot, so you may as well build it somewhere more convenient than a mountain. (20km would be nice. 100km would be brilliant.)
Have you seen the complexity of an actual rail-gun? The "slingatron" (sigh) is a just a dumb tube mounted on a couple of dozen identical little rotating arms.
At those speeds, even a few kilos of mass is going to hit anything with some pretty serious force.
At 7km/s, the kinetic energy of each kg of mass would be about the same as a kilo and a half of TNT. But directional, more like a claymore-sized shape charge. Not really worth the effort unless you are able to throw large masses with appropriate shapes (small cross-section, long body) with pin-point accuracy. And I don't think this concept is up to that challenge.
It may make a poor man's nuke launcher. The sort of thing that North Korea would love. But I doubt their electronics and firing system would survive the launch. So swings'n'roundabouts, you know.
Payload on a ballistic arc is worthless (**) unless you can do a subsequent burn at apogee to raise the perigee above the atmosphere. They are unlikely to be able to build a rocket that is hardened enough to survive launch, but is large enough and has enough thrust to raise perigee before it and the payload reenter and burn up.
(** Outside of lobbing nukes at people.)
That said, this might be more useful on a low-gravity, atmosphere-free body like the moon, where you can build the spinner much larger, and launch at a much more horizontal trajectory (improving efficiency, and making interception easier, via an orbital tether). So as long as these guys aren't wasting my money, I'm happy for them to waste their own time and money to develop and prove version 0.01a of the technology.
You're right. We should probably first send out, oh I don't know, say a robot mission to bring a small asteroid (or a sample from a larger one) back close enough for us to be able to run lots of checks. Hell we could even combine it with the manned program in order to gain some relatively safe but challenging experience doing work beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years; two birds with one stone, so to speak.
They'd have to be amazingly stupid to try to do a lunar orbit injection where any failure could mathematically become a trans-earth trajectory.
Not necessarily, the amount of mass we're capable of moving would be less than, say, that recent Russian meteor (about 50-70 tonnes) which was barely able to knock over a couple of walls and break windows. Even then, they'd have to be amazingly unlucky to both lose control, and have it end up on a reentry trajectory, and reenter near a city.
The only actual risk for an asteroid chunk that fails during a trajectory change exactly as it passes through trans-Earth-orbit, is if it is loosely bound rubble which happens to break up and spray an extra 10-20 tonnes of dust and rubble through low- to GEO. (And the grab-bag proposal eliminates even that tiny threat.)
A single large chunk is no different than any other spacecraft in a transfer orbit. I think we've only had one or two unintended collisions between spacecraft in 60 years. It's rubble smeared out across orbits that you've got to worry about.
More than that, most asteroid plans intend to keep the rock in a high orbit, such as lunar orbit or a lagrange point, in orbit to provide a testing ground for manned space-flight beyond low orbit. Very little company up there..
if they bring this in slowly enough
Errr, no. Look, if you're curious about space, it's worth your time learning some basic orbital mechanics. The maths is just simple algebra (the harder stuff is generally already worked out by Sir Isaac and his successors, tidied up into neat formula) and it will give your a better sense of scale and how things work out there.
The real fans of Time are nice people. Assholes (and I include myself here) just don't have the patience. So unlike many other nerd/clique/cult obsessions, it's managed to select out the anti-social jerks, rather than become centred around them.
1190 is a slow pseudo-animation, posted without any special announcements. It updated one frame roughly every hour since March. You can see the whole sequence (we think its the whole sequence) only on fan sites, such as this.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're a content provider and are concerned about ad blocking hitting your bottom line then you need to stop using ad networks and host your own ads or I don't wanna hear any bitching.
FTFY
It stuns me that media operators who have run their own in-house advertising divisions for their dead-tree versions for decades, suddenly act like one-man amateur blogs for their online versions, needing third-party-hosted ad networks.
Shouldn't someone already set up an insect farm and make a deal with a supermarket?
Health inspectors would shut them down. Reason: Bugs everywhere.
(Seriously, I'm surprised someone isn't raising insect larvae for bulk protein for the feed-lot industry.)
Also good for fish-farms (according to Australian research), instead of basically strip-mining whitefish stocks to grind up for protein.
Give me some tasty recipes.
1. Feed insects to chickens.
2. Cook and eat chickens.
Only as adults. The larva are just bags of protein.
Planes don't fly themselves... yet.
Frankly I wish they'd bite the bullet and finally get the pilots out of the cockpit of commercial airliners altogether, and just use remote control from a central control centre for each airline, or better yet, each airport. Similar to the harbour pilots, specialise in their own harbour. You don't need a pilot in the aircraft for 99% of the trip, so you'd save an enormous amount of labour across the fleet, even if you had four or more remote-crew controlling each approaching-landing aircraft. (Even then, the highly automated aircraft would largely land themselves. The remote-crew being for emergencies and unusual conditions.)
In post-Soviet Russia, government offends you!
the king has said many time that he does not want anyone in prison for "insulting" him,
So sending people to prison for insulting the king is ignoring the king's specific, repeated request. Which seems pretty insulting.
(Does he have the power to issue pardons? If he does, and doesn't pardon "insulters", then his words are hollow. If he doesn't have any powers to overrule bad government... then what is he for?)
I look forward to seeing you out in the street with your guns, defending those who've already been denied their Constitutional rights (such as in unlimited detention without trial, torture or any compulsion to testify against themselves, military tribunals, non-combatant US and non-US citizens killed by Presidential-fiat without any trial or due process, universal monitoring without warrant, warrants issued by secret courts without probable cause, etc etc etc.)
Or is that not enough to make you take up arms and overthrow your government? Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eight, probably the Ninth and Tenth, along with plenty of individual Federal laws. Not enough? If not that, then what? What do they have to do to make you "exercise your 2nd Amendment Right"? Where is the line?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE
But now their novel launch system needs a tether and an orbital manufacturing facility and a reusable orbital transport system to exist before the launcher is able to justify its own existence.
That's the problem with a lot of these kinds of ideas, they can only make their business case if the demand is there. And the demand would only be there after these multi-layered systems exist and radically lower the access cost. Chicken and egg.
I mentioned tethers in the second paragraph, re:a Lunar slingatron. But "sufficient accuracy" may be impossible when launching through an atmosphere. And importantly, it limits your launch opportunities further, your only launch window is when the tether aligns precisely with launcher. (Not just the orbital plane of the tether, but the tether itself.)
[With a lunar version, your primary cargo is always going away from lunar orbit. So you can stick your tether in L1/L2, a "fixed" point to aim towards. Or in equatorial lunar orbit, from an equatorially sited slingatron, giving you multiple launch opportunities every day. (Or both, flick from one to the other.) The tether then flings the payload away from the moon, back to Earth, or into solar orbit. With an Earth launcher, your primary market is a thousand different little orbital planes near Earth. You'd need a tether in nearly every possible orbit.]
Do the maths on changing the angle of an orbital plane. It eats energy (and propellant) like crazy. Much more than merely raising perigee. Much more than a (necessarily G-hardened) OMS thruster is going to be able to provide.
(There was concern by aerospace people that if SpaceX was going to launch its reusable Falcon9 from its new Texas site, it would only be able to launch south-easterly, restricting the launch trajectories, it would at least halve the number of available launch windows.)
I understand orbital mechanics.
The rest of your reply suggests otherwise. For example:
and it comes into the atmosphere over time due to gravity.
Personally if we are going to dream then a launch loop is my preferred "rockets suck" alternative.
The launch loop makes the slingatron look sensible and easy.
But if we're going to name favourites, then I'd pick a nuclear Verne gun. 5000 tonnes to escape velocity in one shot. All you need is a two km long mine-shaft through a salt dome... and a nuke.
In addition to g-load and not being able to reach orbit, problems suffered also by the "slingatron", a kms long mass driver up the side of a mountain also can't be aimed. Therefore you are spending billions of dollars to develop something which can launch only hardened cargoes into just one sub-orbital trajectory.
And launching at 6km doesn't gain you a lot, so you may as well build it somewhere more convenient than a mountain. (20km would be nice. 100km would be brilliant.)
It is a lot more complicated than a railgun
Have you seen the complexity of an actual rail-gun? The "slingatron" (sigh) is a just a dumb tube mounted on a couple of dozen identical little rotating arms.
At those speeds, even a few kilos of mass is going to hit anything with some pretty serious force.
At 7km/s, the kinetic energy of each kg of mass would be about the same as a kilo and a half of TNT. But directional, more like a claymore-sized shape charge. Not really worth the effort unless you are able to throw large masses with appropriate shapes (small cross-section, long body) with pin-point accuracy. And I don't think this concept is up to that challenge.
It may make a poor man's nuke launcher. The sort of thing that North Korea would love. But I doubt their electronics and firing system would survive the launch. So swings'n'roundabouts, you know.
Payload on a ballistic arc is worthless (**) unless you can do a subsequent burn at apogee to raise the perigee above the atmosphere. They are unlikely to be able to build a rocket that is hardened enough to survive launch, but is large enough and has enough thrust to raise perigee before it and the payload reenter and burn up.
(** Outside of lobbing nukes at people.)
That said, this might be more useful on a low-gravity, atmosphere-free body like the moon, where you can build the spinner much larger, and launch at a much more horizontal trajectory (improving efficiency, and making interception easier, via an orbital tether). So as long as these guys aren't wasting my money, I'm happy for them to waste their own time and money to develop and prove version 0.01a of the technology.
Runeghost want big boom?
Why we are so sure asteroids do?
You're right. We should probably first send out, oh I don't know, say a robot mission to bring a small asteroid (or a sample from a larger one) back close enough for us to be able to run lots of checks. Hell we could even combine it with the manned program in order to gain some relatively safe but challenging experience doing work beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in 40 years; two birds with one stone, so to speak.
They'd have to be amazingly stupid to try to do a lunar orbit injection where any failure could mathematically become a trans-earth trajectory.
Not necessarily, the amount of mass we're capable of moving would be less than, say, that recent Russian meteor (about 50-70 tonnes) which was barely able to knock over a couple of walls and break windows. Even then, they'd have to be amazingly unlucky to both lose control, and have it end up on a reentry trajectory, and reenter near a city.
The only actual risk for an asteroid chunk that fails during a trajectory change exactly as it passes through trans-Earth-orbit, is if it is loosely bound rubble which happens to break up and spray an extra 10-20 tonnes of dust and rubble through low- to GEO. (And the grab-bag proposal eliminates even that tiny threat.)
A single large chunk is no different than any other spacecraft in a transfer orbit. I think we've only had one or two unintended collisions between spacecraft in 60 years. It's rubble smeared out across orbits that you've got to worry about.
More than that, most asteroid plans intend to keep the rock in a high orbit, such as lunar orbit or a lagrange point, in orbit to provide a testing ground for manned space-flight beyond low orbit. Very little company up there..
if they bring this in slowly enough
Errr, no. Look, if you're curious about space, it's worth your time learning some basic orbital mechanics. The maths is just simple algebra (the harder stuff is generally already worked out by Sir Isaac and his successors, tidied up into neat formula) and it will give your a better sense of scale and how things work out there.
The real fans of Time are nice people. Assholes (and I include myself here) just don't have the patience. So unlike many other nerd/clique/cult obsessions, it's managed to select out the anti-social jerks, rather than become centred around them.
1190 is a slow pseudo-animation, posted without any special announcements. It updated one frame roughly every hour since March. You can see the whole sequence (we think its the whole sequence) only on fan sites, such as this.
but it sure is greener on that side :)
Bluer. The future is luminescent blue.
(For about another 5 years. Then it will be the burnt orange vinyl of our generation.)