Actually, with respect to Known Space (do I need to tell you that universe's precepts?), I was thinking about that for a fan-fic story under the (working) title "Catching the Lost Lazy-8".
The Lazy-8 was a "slowboat" - a Bussard ramjet with mosto f the colonists in suspended animation - aimed at $COLONY$. A short way out from Earth it stopped communicating and stopped steering - no-one knows why. When it reached turn-over point, it continued accelerating and went screaming past (at a fair range) $COLONY$, which had no technology to catch it.
Generations later, the Outsiders offer to sell Carlos Wu the location of the Lazy-8, but he has the same "exit velocity = entrance velocity" issue with Known Space's hyperdrive. But they also have tractor beams.
So, they hyperdrive into the Lazy-8's path, stich the tractor beam onto it hard enough to be dragged by whatever force the Lazy-8's hull can stand. This won't be enough, and the tractor beam gets more and more stretched... until you release it. But momentum has been transferred form the Lazy-8 (which is still under drive) to your chase ship. So you're travelling faster. You hyperdrive ahead of the Lazy-8, lather rinse and repeat. Eventually, you have a matched velocity. Board, turn the drive off, turn the ship around and head for home. Revive crew members, whatever else guff you want.
Ticker tape parade, or "accidentally" land a relativistic million-tonne spaceship in the Patriarch's hunting park - your choice.
Returning to the "outside" world (of low-c objects) is the reverse - find an empty asteroid belt and use it to shed your surplus velocity.
Actually, it might not work without the Puppeteers Q-II hyperdrive, but tractor beams are compact, and it's not going to be too far away.
Hmmm, on the "got to carry the fuel for deceleration" question... you could potentially build a robot ship to carry your deceleration fuel but without the weight of the life-support system and launch it on a slower path before you launch your human-carrying ship, so that it acts as an advance probe for the human-carrying ship.
Then your human-carrying ship takes off, travels faster, and catches up with the "deceleration fuel" ship, couples, loads fuel and discards the robot before starting deceleration. So the robot continues to act as an advanced probe.
I haven't done the maths, but separating the life-support from the deceleration fuel might save... I'd have to calculate, but would 10% of the fuel bill be worthwhile?
Alternatively, making sure that your test ships follow suitable trajectories so that the possibility of picking them up on the way isn't excluded may still be a worthwhile way of improving mission-level redundancy.
Even at 130 years, it's going to be a one-way trip. And it's never going to be a substitute for looking after the environment in your original life-support system.
Do you have source for a "legal" definition of those terms then, because as a geologist with a side serving of soil science, I find it hard to believe that they could actually return any site to a close approximation of land and soils developed on a boulder clay and other glacial debris for 9000-odd years. Sure they could grass it over, but anybody could grass over a toxic waste site well enough to fool - for example - an estate agent who didn't want the flow of his advertising spoiled by inconvenient truths.
The site remediation standards I've had to work to in the past have simply been "remove everything less than 6ft (2m) below seabed". Which is somewhat less challenging then "brownfield" versus "greenfield" - due to the sea bed bit rather reducing the chance of people living on top of it (just dredging fish and seafood off the bottom).
We have square miles of local quarries which, after economic limits were reached, were used to dump waste from local cities. Then, when they were full, remaining overburden from the quarrying was redistributed for 5 or so metres over the top, and top soil from building sites dozens of miles away, and grassed. Great - if you're an estate agent. If you actually look at the grass - wrong grasses. If you look at the trees - wrong trees (and wrong age distribution). If you look at the soil - a complete jumble. And the methane venting pipes for the landfill rather give the game away too.
(Actually, if the oil price crash hadn't got in the way, I might have had to do more detailed work on a site remediation project. But that would have been in a different country of the nation, so [SHRUG]. OTOH, working with an established expert would have been a useful thread for the CV.)
Ah, I think I see the issue. US usage of "brownfield" seems to specifically denote land that has been "contaminated" by previous use, whereas British usage is specifically for land which has been built on. So, for example, an outdoor pig-growing field (for producing "organic", "sustainable", "happy animal" pig flesh at the lowest possible cost) might easily fulfil the US definition (contaminated by nitrates in the piss, plus whatever pig-parasites are present), but not the British definition (hasn't been built on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years), whereas a different site (Shakespeare's old house) would fulfil the British definition (built on), but not the American (not significantly contaminated, outside the cess pit).
Muddy waters.
Annoyingly I was 3 pages of Google results before I found a definition from a.GOV.TLD source. Lots of non-definitive sources out there, few of whom actually cite their sources.
In a relatively short time, it will be a greenfield site you would never know had a reactor on it.
You mean a BROWNfield site. It won't be a GREENfield site until either the planet gets re-surfaced, or someone actually comes up with a sensible definition of the terms.
Don't try explaining anything to a crowd in units of 140 characters. Twitter might be quick and easy, but it is a fucking stupid idea for anything more complex than "I'm pissssed. Summmun gemmme uh taxi"
Roughened mirrors, however, while they still reflect light, reflect it diffusely, which is useless for concentrating sunlight.
Diffuse reflection is less effective for concentrating, but it does still have a significant effect. The geometry of the mirror panels (whether they are flat, with each rank having a slightly different orientation ; or curved, with a focal heat collector) will still increase the illumination at the centre, though you'd get less efficiency.
More than a few people making astronomical telescope mirrors have discovered that their partly-ground "hogged-out" mirror blank can still concentrate a lot of light before the final polishing. The warning gets passed on regularly once you're starting to talk about larger (0.5m+) mirrors.
The EU is perfectly well aware that Google is not the whole of the internet. The point of the "right of privacy" dispute is that getting the links off Google is the most effective way of making it harder for Joe Random to get the links. Anyone who wants to go to (say) BBC, Daily Mail and Grauniad websites will be able to find the original articles after searching for Joe Soap's previous news stories. but the most frequently used search engine will be under orders to not return certain results for that search.
If there were two search engines totalling 90% of the search activity on the net, the the EU would be giving orders to two search engines, not one.
... or by sharing your GitHub log-in details with a half-dozen other people so that each one of you dilutes and poisons the "fingerprint" of the other 5.
Look, it's money. It's not something that impacts at other than a binary state. "Have" or "not have". Otherwise, why would you want to know about your finances?
other technologies have seen considerable improvement, particularly in the accuracy of navigation,
in the first few hundred miles of the journey, yes. But beyond that, just how are you going to get your navigational fixes? GPS is, you'll remember, designed for people on the Surface of the Earth (SoE). It's probably extendible to (SoE)+/-10km ; ti might even extend to ten times that.
By the time you're a million times outside that working range, there may well be problems. That's around 1/80 of the closest approach to Mars.
Apollo used compasses - 3-d corrected compasses, using star angles not magnetic angles, but compasses nonetheless - and so, essentially dose Hubble. JWST will use compasses ("star finders", but still compasses), and I guess that the first generations of asteroid-dwellers will also use compasses. Until someone can afford to set 30-odd satellites into high-angle polar Solar orbits with perihelion well outside the asteroid belt... I don't see them NOT using stellar compasses.
Your assumption is correct (though I adopted the NAME before I realised how presumptuous it is ; my nickname at the time was "Rockdoctor", but I have never held a PhD (Earned), and I'm pretty unlikely to get one, Earned or Honorary.) ; I earn my crust from looking at rocks.
[Reads AU link] Flash - have to read the transcript.Narrator describes "gossan", Briefly
Since the 1600s, people (who would now be called geologists) have been describing how the effects of near-surface weathering can concentrate (or disperse) ore deposits, and how miners should be aware of this. Uranium is a resistate, generally - an ore body of 0.2% might be 0.3% in the near-surface weathered deposits. That's enough to make the difference between viable and non-viable.
E.G. the next time you try to pitch something as the "the solution to every [BLAH] users needs", your audience is unlikely to believe you. While if you say "85% of users of X-DEVICE will find this useful," they" are more likely to find your presentation "credible". (The "85%" may be as crude an estimate as you like ; but you do estimate your market, no?)
"Credible" is not the same as "invest-worthy", but it's an appreciable step that way.
100 years ago, every sport played off horseback was "football".
Darts?
Billiards?
Archery (which used to be a legal compulsion, not a sport, but became a sport when guns became easier to use than bows and arrows. I'd have to check on when that was - between the Civil War and the Peninsular war off the top of my head.)?
Don't put flammable materials in the area that will come into violent contact with the ground in a belly landing. E.G. put your fuel in tanks ABOVE the grounding line. (Been done for decades.) Don't put flammables in places like engines that will be spinning rapidly when they come into contact with the ground. Don't use PVC (or other toxic-smoke producers in the passenger cabin.
None of these are either rocket science, or news.
If you have a strong, stiff material, that is no reason to NOT use it for wing structure, upper fuselage structure, or tailplane structure. By the time that any of these come into contact with the ground, you are talking about the passenger area having lost all integrity, and you are spreading passengers over the landscape like jam from a tube.
Sorry, did you ever have a delusion that flying is safe? Why?
Slashdot Mirror
Relevant and useful, since I was just over there looking to see if they were any any significant amount better than Slashdot.
And yes, they were up.
The Lazy-8 was a "slowboat" - a Bussard ramjet with mosto f the colonists in suspended animation - aimed at $COLONY$. A short way out from Earth it stopped communicating and stopped steering - no-one knows why. When it reached turn-over point, it continued accelerating and went screaming past (at a fair range) $COLONY$, which had no technology to catch it.
Generations later, the Outsiders offer to sell Carlos Wu the location of the Lazy-8, but he has the same "exit velocity = entrance velocity" issue with Known Space's hyperdrive. But they also have tractor beams.
So, they hyperdrive into the Lazy-8's path, stich the tractor beam onto it hard enough to be dragged by whatever force the Lazy-8's hull can stand. This won't be enough, and the tractor beam gets more and more stretched ... until you release it. But momentum has been transferred form the Lazy-8 (which is still under drive) to your chase ship. So you're travelling faster. You hyperdrive ahead of the Lazy-8, lather rinse and repeat. Eventually, you have a matched velocity. Board, turn the drive off, turn the ship around and head for home. Revive crew members, whatever else guff you want.
Ticker tape parade, or "accidentally" land a relativistic million-tonne spaceship in the Patriarch's hunting park - your choice.
Returning to the "outside" world (of low-c objects) is the reverse - find an empty asteroid belt and use it to shed your surplus velocity.
Actually, it might not work without the Puppeteers Q-II hyperdrive, but tractor beams are compact, and it's not going to be too far away.
Then your human-carrying ship takes off, travels faster, and catches up with the "deceleration fuel" ship, couples, loads fuel and discards the robot before starting deceleration. So the robot continues to act as an advanced probe.
I haven't done the maths, but separating the life-support from the deceleration fuel might save ... I'd have to calculate, but would 10% of the fuel bill be worthwhile?
Alternatively, making sure that your test ships follow suitable trajectories so that the possibility of picking them up on the way isn't excluded may still be a worthwhile way of improving mission-level redundancy.
Even at 130 years, it's going to be a one-way trip. And it's never going to be a substitute for looking after the environment in your original life-support system.
The site remediation standards I've had to work to in the past have simply been "remove everything less than 6ft (2m) below seabed". Which is somewhat less challenging then "brownfield" versus "greenfield" - due to the sea bed bit rather reducing the chance of people living on top of it (just dredging fish and seafood off the bottom).
We have square miles of local quarries which, after economic limits were reached, were used to dump waste from local cities. Then, when they were full, remaining overburden from the quarrying was redistributed for 5 or so metres over the top, and top soil from building sites dozens of miles away, and grassed. Great - if you're an estate agent. If you actually look at the grass - wrong grasses. If you look at the trees - wrong trees (and wrong age distribution). If you look at the soil - a complete jumble. And the methane venting pipes for the landfill rather give the game away too.
(Actually, if the oil price crash hadn't got in the way, I might have had to do more detailed work on a site remediation project. But that would have been in a different country of the nation, so [SHRUG]. OTOH, working with an established expert would have been a useful thread for the CV.)
Ah, I think I see the issue. US usage of "brownfield" seems to specifically denote land that has been "contaminated" by previous use, whereas British usage is specifically for land which has been built on. So, for example, an outdoor pig-growing field (for producing "organic", "sustainable", "happy animal" pig flesh at the lowest possible cost) might easily fulfil the US definition (contaminated by nitrates in the piss, plus whatever pig-parasites are present), but not the British definition (hasn't been built on for hundreds, if not thousands, of years), whereas a different site (Shakespeare's old house) would fulfil the British definition (built on), but not the American (not significantly contaminated, outside the cess pit).
Muddy waters.
Annoyingly I was 3 pages of Google results before I found a definition from a .GOV.TLD source. Lots of non-definitive sources out there, few of whom actually cite their sources.
You mean a BROWNfield site. It won't be a GREENfield site until either the planet gets re-surfaced, or someone actually comes up with a sensible definition of the terms.
[SELF] Rushes off to buy shares in a prison company.
I always went for "Start. Wreck."
Don't try explaining anything to a crowd in units of 140 characters. Twitter might be quick and easy, but it is a fucking stupid idea for anything more complex than "I'm pissssed. Summmun gemmme uh taxi"
Diffuse reflection is less effective for concentrating, but it does still have a significant effect. The geometry of the mirror panels (whether they are flat, with each rank having a slightly different orientation ; or curved, with a focal heat collector) will still increase the illumination at the centre, though you'd get less efficiency.
More than a few people making astronomical telescope mirrors have discovered that their partly-ground "hogged-out" mirror blank can still concentrate a lot of light before the final polishing. The warning gets passed on regularly once you're starting to talk about larger (0.5m+) mirrors.
I tried that. The Boss told me to shave my chest. And my chin. And could I please pop down to the corner store and get her some tampons.
If there were two search engines totalling 90% of the search activity on the net, the the EU would be giving orders to two search engines, not one.
... or by sharing your GitHub log-in details with a half-dozen other people so that each one of you dilutes and poisons the "fingerprint" of the other 5.
If America has been so slack as that ... well, watch out, or you'll get people hijacking your planes all over the place.
Look, it's money. It's not something that impacts at other than a binary state. "Have" or "not have". Otherwise, why would you want to know about your finances?
I continue to get spam from an Indian company about it, but, why should I care about their new viruses?
in the first few hundred miles of the journey, yes. But beyond that, just how are you going to get your navigational fixes? GPS is, you'll remember, designed for people on the Surface of the Earth (SoE). It's probably extendible to (SoE)+/-10km ; ti might even extend to ten times that.
By the time you're a million times outside that working range, there may well be problems. That's around 1/80 of the closest approach to Mars.
Apollo used compasses - 3-d corrected compasses, using star angles not magnetic angles, but compasses nonetheless - and so, essentially dose Hubble. JWST will use compasses ("star finders", but still compasses), and I guess that the first generations of asteroid-dwellers will also use compasses. Until someone can afford to set 30-odd satellites into high-angle polar Solar orbits with perihelion well outside the asteroid belt ... I don't see them NOT using stellar compasses.
[Reads AU link] Flash - have to read the transcript.Narrator describes "gossan", Briefly
Since the 1600s, people (who would now be called geologists) have been describing how the effects of near-surface weathering can concentrate (or disperse) ore deposits, and how miners should be aware of this. Uranium is a resistate, generally - an ore body of 0.2% might be 0.3% in the near-surface weathered deposits. That's enough to make the difference between viable and non-viable.
E.G. the next time you try to pitch something as the "the solution to every [BLAH] users needs", your audience is unlikely to believe you. While if you say "85% of users of X-DEVICE will find this useful," they" are more likely to find your presentation "credible". (The "85%" may be as crude an estimate as you like ; but you do estimate your market, no?)
"Credible" is not the same as "invest-worthy", but it's an appreciable step that way.
You really should check your assertions before you blurt them out in public where your lack of homework will show itself.
Seriously - are you a nerd, or scientist of some sort? Or do you just write random stuff here?
Darts?
Billiards?
Archery (which used to be a legal compulsion, not a sport, but became a sport when guns became easier to use than bows and arrows. I'd have to check on when that was - between the Civil War and the Peninsular war off the top of my head.)?
That's a US usage, and you know how often they get our language wrong.
I don't have to carry a phone, so all the other advantages you list cease to be advantages.
Sand won't ... what?
So, totally different to GRUB?
Says I, about to have to go into the depths of GRUB.
None of these are either rocket science, or news.
If you have a strong, stiff material, that is no reason to NOT use it for wing structure, upper fuselage structure, or tailplane structure. By the time that any of these come into contact with the ground, you are talking about the passenger area having lost all integrity, and you are spreading passengers over the landscape like jam from a tube.
Sorry, did you ever have a delusion that flying is safe? Why?