Think about it... you could easily convince some computer-illiterate person of the superiority of Windows over Linux, or vice versa, without telling a single lie. It's all about withholding the right info, and presenting it in the desired light.
Fourteen tons of tritonal explosive coupled with plastique, electronically fused. Zirconium fragments and easily-made napalm, with multiple thermite grenades attached for maximum incendiary effect.
But the best part is, if you're a teen now or in your early twenties, you could one day be working in the space industry! Maybe not as an astronaut, but as a mission planer, technician, sysadmin or accountant:)
Aerospace engineers, designing rockets, satellites etc. are not in the space industry?
I find your design interesting because of its applicability to a manned Mars mission. I had done some research on the subject and believed that a small rocket like your own might be most suitable, though I had an ablative heat shield in mind (which would remain on the Martian surface to reduce take off weight). Armadillo's rocket does not rely on a thick earth atmosphere to gain altitude, nor does it require any prepared launching area (to my knowledge) unlike aircraft with their tarmacs. It's simple, conventional and would be easily tended to far from civilization, and most importantly it looks like it will work.
It seems that your craft fills a niche of its own, that of an adaptable vehicle capable of reaching space from a very wide variety of environments with little requirements, something quite desperately needed for further manned solar exploration.
(Now if only the Martian in-situ fuel production could be nailed down, then a large portion of the technical hurdles will have been passed...)
That's like saying about AIDS spreading in third world nations, "we need to stop people from dying." Is there anyone who doesn't know that launch costs are expensive? That flow of multimillion dollar bills for getting satellites into orbit is kinda hard to miss.
The rest of your post is just stating the obvious. You say that researching new propulsion tech is hard and expensive. Wow, great insight there. Then you go on to rattle off a list of exotic methods as if they form some panacea to the cost issue. They're mostly based on sound concepts, but all of them are very far from actual employment (except perhaps a fission engine) and throwing a billion dollars at each one isn't going to turn them from engineering daydreams into working spacecraft any time soon. "Hey, here's a way of making energy cheap and clean; use fusion!" Well sir, that's a bit easier said than done.
In the end you're just trolling for karma in the great game of Slashdot. You state something pseudo-insightful (to a relatively uninformed audience), sprinkle about some "know-it-all" terms then close with a cheeky liberal appeal that the moderators (who of course are also typical/. users) are so fond of. Give me a break. Your post makes me think of the failures of rule by the masses; mostly uninformed, sometimes sensational and based more on desire rather than rational need or deep understanding.
That page mentions a 6 month transit time to Mars, then a 16 to 18 month surface stay, then 6 months back to Mars. That's 28-30 months, which matches most proposals that I've seen.
These are just some tips I've heard in my 4 years of experience.
Whichever processors you go with, make sure the entire farm uses the same type. Otherwise peculiar rendering differences might occur, in things like particles, hair/fur and fluids.
I suggest going with the Opterons just for the PC compatibility. While the CG industry is becoming more diverse hardware-wise, it is still dominated by PC's and to a much lesser extent SGI boxes (5 years ago it was all SGI). Using PC's keeps your options open. Perhaps someday you will find 3ds max and its included distributed rendreing software more suitable for a task, and that can only be used with PC's. Same goes with the Mental Ray and Brazil renderers and the Combustion compositing software. Macs just have not been widely used in the 3d graphics industry, and so the vast majority of 3d content creation software is PC and SGI only (Maya Unlimited is only available on PC and SGI, while a lower end wersion is on Mac). And VirtualPC cannot be used to emulate 3d hardware acceleration (and it shouldn't be used for anything processor intensive anyways), though this only applies to the hardware rendered viewports in the apps. Having only Macs would be risky, and could limit your capabilities significantly.
Pixar's PRMan (Photorealistic RenderMan) is a full blown renderer, not just something to help distribute render jobs. It is generally considered the best in the industry, though MentalRay and Brazil have gained significant followings. For a cheap but effective render queueing system, check out Smegde. Smedge was used by Manex Visual Effects for handling some of the effects shots in the Matrix trilogy. If you're running the Linux version of Maya (x86 only) it is not too difficult to distribute the render tasks yourself using shell scripts and the command-line renderer.
GB Ethernet should be fine, the bottleneck will be in the actual image processing not data transfer rates. 100Mb ethenet might even get the job done, thught I'd use GB for the added speed when copying large files. YMMV of course.
Overall I'd try to create a very flexible system, one that will definitely support the newest CG software down the road and one that ensures compatibility with everything, for those always short deadlines. Goodl luck with your rendering.
I really didn't think the humans in Final Fantasy: TSW looked creepy or like corpses. Not that the acting was perfect or anything, but the near-photorealism of their features didn't put me off in the least.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, you list one of my favorite Wikipedia articles. Well done.
This Might Be A Wiki: TMBW.Net
(isn't that cool?)
a recent featured article: heavy metal umlaut
Well done AC.
Regularly: Popular Science, WIRED, Jane's Defence Weekly, AirForces Monthly, Air International.
Irregularly: various aerospace engineering journals (Air & Space Power, Aerospace Engineering etc.). Astronomy, The New Yorker, The Economist.
All computer-related (anything games, linux, graphics, hardware etc.) info that I read comes from online sources.
have never noticed this.
Think about it... you could easily convince some computer-illiterate person of the superiority of Windows over Linux, or vice versa, without telling a single lie. It's all about withholding the right info, and presenting it in the desired light.
Lies are completely unnecessary to convince the uninformed.
Alpha Centauri has tons of them (artificial spider silk, monopole magnets etc.).
Heh.
Heh.
Fourteen tons of tritonal explosive coupled with plastique, electronically fused. Zirconium fragments and easily-made napalm, with multiple thermite grenades attached for maximum incendiary effect.
Though actually about $300-400 billion is spent on defense for the U.S.
But the best part is, if you're a teen now or in your early twenties, you could one day be working in the space industry! Maybe not as an astronaut, but as a mission planer, technician, sysadmin or accountant :)
Aerospace engineers, designing rockets, satellites etc. are not in the space industry?
The Orion drive is our only hope.
"Scaled Composites seems to have done their homework"
Unlike all those other X Prize teams, whose meager intellects and experience are dwarfed by your own.
"Are you just a Slashdot trend follower, or someone unique?"
Is anyone else sick of these bash.org quotes?
I find your design interesting because of its applicability to a manned Mars mission. I had done some research on the subject and believed that a small rocket like your own might be most suitable, though I had an ablative heat shield in mind (which would remain on the Martian surface to reduce take off weight). Armadillo's rocket does not rely on a thick earth atmosphere to gain altitude, nor does it require any prepared launching area (to my knowledge) unlike aircraft with their tarmacs. It's simple, conventional and would be easily tended to far from civilization, and most importantly it looks like it will work.
It seems that your craft fills a niche of its own, that of an adaptable vehicle capable of reaching space from a very wide variety of environments with little requirements, something quite desperately needed for further manned solar exploration.
(Now if only the Martian in-situ fuel production could be nailed down, then a large portion of the technical hurdles will have been passed...)
"We need to lower launch costs"
/. users) are so fond of. Give me a break. Your post makes me think of the failures of rule by the masses; mostly uninformed, sometimes sensational and based more on desire rather than rational need or deep understanding.
That's like saying about AIDS spreading in third world nations, "we need to stop people from dying." Is there anyone who doesn't know that launch costs are expensive? That flow of multimillion dollar bills for getting satellites into orbit is kinda hard to miss.
The rest of your post is just stating the obvious. You say that researching new propulsion tech is hard and expensive. Wow, great insight there. Then you go on to rattle off a list of exotic methods as if they form some panacea to the cost issue. They're mostly based on sound concepts, but all of them are very far from actual employment (except perhaps a fission engine) and throwing a billion dollars at each one isn't going to turn them from engineering daydreams into working spacecraft any time soon. "Hey, here's a way of making energy cheap and clean; use fusion!" Well sir, that's a bit easier said than done.
In the end you're just trolling for karma in the great game of Slashdot. You state something pseudo-insightful (to a relatively uninformed audience), sprinkle about some "know-it-all" terms then close with a cheeky liberal appeal that the moderators (who of course are also typical
It was a project in the 50s for "gun launch" delivery system. Not to be confused with the ongoing HAARP.
That page mentions a 6 month transit time to Mars, then a 16 to 18 month surface stay, then 6 months back to Mars. That's 28-30 months, which matches most proposals that I've seen.
This is slashdot. 90% of us (including me) have read those books. Next time RTFC (read the fucking comments), please.
Hell friends.
These are just some tips I've heard in my 4 years of experience.
Whichever processors you go with, make sure the entire farm uses the same type. Otherwise peculiar rendering differences might occur, in things like particles, hair/fur and fluids.
I suggest going with the Opterons just for the PC compatibility. While the CG industry is becoming more diverse hardware-wise, it is still dominated by PC's and to a much lesser extent SGI boxes (5 years ago it was all SGI). Using PC's keeps your options open. Perhaps someday you will find 3ds max and its included distributed rendreing software more suitable for a task, and that can only be used with PC's. Same goes with the Mental Ray and Brazil renderers and the Combustion compositing software. Macs just have not been widely used in the 3d graphics industry, and so the vast majority of 3d content creation software is PC and SGI only (Maya Unlimited is only available on PC and SGI, while a lower end wersion is on Mac). And VirtualPC cannot be used to emulate 3d hardware acceleration (and it shouldn't be used for anything processor intensive anyways), though this only applies to the hardware rendered viewports in the apps. Having only Macs would be risky, and could limit your capabilities significantly.
Pixar's PRMan (Photorealistic RenderMan) is a full blown renderer, not just something to help distribute render jobs. It is generally considered the best in the industry, though MentalRay and Brazil have gained significant followings. For a cheap but effective render queueing system, check out Smegde. Smedge was used by Manex Visual Effects for handling some of the effects shots in the Matrix trilogy. If you're running the Linux version of Maya (x86 only) it is not too difficult to distribute the render tasks yourself using shell scripts and the command-line renderer.
GB Ethernet should be fine, the bottleneck will be in the actual image processing not data transfer rates. 100Mb ethenet might even get the job done, thught I'd use GB for the added speed when copying large files. YMMV of course.
Overall I'd try to create a very flexible system, one that will definitely support the newest CG software down the road and one that ensures compatibility with everything, for those always short deadlines. Goodl luck with your rendering.
I really didn't think the humans in Final Fantasy: TSW looked creepy or like corpses. Not that the acting was perfect or anything, but the near-photorealism of their features didn't put me off in the least.