If you liked the Pournelle book, you should read Project Orion by George Dyson. It's the story of the project to build the real-life version of that type of spacecraft. I'm about midway through it right now.
And if George the First had settled the job when he had a chance, there would have been even fewer. Or if that idiot, the Sultan of Turkey hadn't picked the losing side of WWI, there wouldn't have been a Saddam in the first place... Or... Or... all the way back to Cain and Abel.
Or, more succinctly, this kind of blame tossing is not very helpful, particularly on an SCO thread. If you want to talk politics, take it to Plastic, or if that is too left wing for you, freep.
How's he scare off burglars? Everyone knows that a Cylon Warrior has even poorer aim than an Imperial Stormtrooper! Must be that design flaw off combining lack of depth perception with a constantly moving eyeball.
What can be done gently with the Shuttle, with large fuel tanks and a lot of mass, can not be done with a small booster. You're going to have a much higher rate of acceleration with a Centaur or one of its children, which is what we are talking about here.
Essentially, the Shuttle can "walk" Hubble up to a new orbit. The little satellite boosters that we currently have will give it a kick in the ass, which it is not designed to take. Some of the military's satellites are.
What I'm concerned about is ISS. It's going to have the same problems for the same reasons. It's OK to gently lift the thing with the Shuttle's OMS thrusters, but Progress and Soyuz don't carry enough fuel for that, and it can't take the kick from a traditional third stage booster, either.
When Hubble was in the boost phase the unit was strapped down. The straps blow off with explosive bolts to deploy things like the solar cells. You can't put that chicken back in the egg.
Or as you so eloquently put it,
True, but so does Titanic (the ship, not the movie). Perhaps you've never heard of the Titanic Historical Society, but it's been around since the Sixties. Titanic enthusiasts are every bit as rabid as LOTR ones. I know, I fit into both camps. I went to see the movie to see the re-creation of the ship. I didn't give a flying you-know-what about the story.
At any rate, I understand the "not getting it" part. I have trouble explaining to people that neither X-Files nor Buffy interested me at all. Such is life, I suppose.
The revelation that the Al-Jazeera Director-General was an Iraqi agent pretty much doomed them in my eyes. I can trust them about as far as I can trust Faux News, which I have programmed out of my remote control settings.
I would guess that the BBC had the wool pulled over their eyes. Wouldn't be hard to do if they went in thinking that they were going to be documenting the only "western-style" Arab news source. It's really easy to show someone what they want to see. Just ask Uri Geller.
I've often wondered if we shouldn't have developed some sort of "space-tug" for doing the assembly work. Give it a crew cabin, airlock, and a robotic arm and zero re-entry capability. Park it at the station and have it go out and rendezvous with a Big Dumb Booster bringing up the parts.
The biggest problem I see with this is the need to re-fuel the darn thing. I suppose the propulsion system could either be detachable or something based on cold gas discharge. You are not going to want to play with refueling traditional hypergolic engines in orbit.
It also sent an e-mail with "I Love You" in the subject to all of your contacts. I wonder if the reason for delays on the FX card was that they'd renamed the burn-in application DukeNukemForeever.exe?
In fact, the Apollo command modules had something called the Boost Protective Cover over them during liftoff to prevent damage to the exterior of the spacecraft. It was carried away with the escape rocket when that was jettisoned.
And that was merely to protect the weaker heat shielding on the conical part of the spacecraft. The blunt end heat shield was protected by the Service Module until shortly before re-entry. The ice generating fuel tanks were also below the space craft, instead of partially above it.
One of the problems with the Shuttle design is that much of the heat shielding is exposed during lifoff. I suppose some variation of the BPC could have been designed for the leading edges of the wings, but there certainly would have been a weight penalty, and the Shuttle is a heavy bird to begin with.
This is a problem that is going to have to be solved if a production re-usable spacecraft is ever to happen. We might not be at the stage of materials science to do it yet, though.
Just to back that up, China's annual natural gas production is around 500 billion cubic feet, according to the USGS with proven reserves of a further 3900 billion cubic feet. By way of comparison, the United States production is 17,800 billion cubic feet with a further 339,000 billion cubic feet in proven reserves.
Unless the PRC finds a hell of a lot more gas, it doesn't look like natural gas is a viable generation source for it. It's too big, with too little domestic reserve.
Under maritime law, ships must be registered in a country and therefore subject to its laws. You can't sail a ship in to the middle of the ocean and declare the ship to be a country.
Not to mention that it's going to have to have periodic dockings for maintenance and to take on supplies. Sorry, it just won't work.
Software has bugs. Patches may have bugs. Regardless of vendor, patches are not perfect and may induce problems.
You're correct, but one of the reasons Microsoft has given in the past for being slower on security updates than the Open Source community is that they have a much more rigorous regression testing procedure that must be run before release. The idea is to make sure that something like this never happens. It is one of the ostensible reasons that you pay so much more for Windows. If the extensive test procedure is no better than Red Hat's or SUSE's, then that proposition kind of goes up in smoke.
Not all spacewalks are the same. Both the US and Russian programs have found that unrehearsed spacewalks are dangerous and rarely complete their objectives. Any good book about the Gemini program will have references to problems during that program, and the book Dragonfly discusses a few near-disasters at Mir, despite the fact the cosmonauts doing the walk were incredibly experienced.
Basically it boils down to the fact that the spacewalk experience can be tremendously disorienting. You train and train so you can do it even when you don't know which way is up. The training for one walk does not necessarily train you for the next. In fact, building generic EVA skills was one of the goals of the original, larger ISS.
That's not to say that a rescue shouldn't have been attempted, but you need to acknowledge that there was a significant chance for a mishap that could have resulted in the loss of both crews and shuttles. I still think that the effort would have been made, but let's stop all of backseat driving.
Going from the gold standard to paper money was one step. A piece of paper showing your wealth, but in essence just a piece of paper..
And a rock is just a rock. You can't eat gold anymore than you can eat paper. In some sense, all money is an illusion. It happens to be a darn useful one as well.
NWN does lack an internal "clock" but it isn't very hard to hook the rest event to increment a module global that represents time. You could also increment the counter based on the number of side quests completed.
All you need then is to create several versions of the Supreme Evil Overlord and his minions, and spawn in the correct set when the sanctum is reached. It's a fair amount of work, but it is possible.
If you wanted to do it based on actual time spent playing the game, I suppose you could keep track of the elapsed time by using a OnHeartBeat() handler, but those things often cause trouble, in my experience.
This is do-able in the Neverwinter Nights Engine. I think that there are a few user created modules that do something like this, but it is mostly keyed to the power of the player character rather than time. It wouldn't be hard to modify it though, so that a global variable tracked how quickly the player made it to the bad guy's sanctum, and adjusted the difficulty accordingly.
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
My spam has more than doubled in the past ten months. Which one of us is the anomaly? Anecdotal evidence isn't going to help here. I was trying to explain why your experience was at variance to the larger statistics being discussed in the article.
You are generalizing from a sample size of one. If I used your method of determining statistical reality, then the economy is fine. No one I know has been laid off in the past two years, and everyone's gotten raises. Unemployment doubling? Wages flat? Unlikely at best! What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics know?
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 1
OK, I was a little unclear. The number of users doesn't have to increase by that much, the number of mail addresses has to increase. Considering the number of people that get second and third addresses as "spam traps," this seems entirely plausible to me.
Re:Doubling every 42 days? I doubt it.
on
Spam, Milord
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You are assuming the number of internet users is constant for the period. Hypothetically, if the number of users doubled in that time, then no increase in your personal spam volume would still result in a doubling of traffic.
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If you liked the Pournelle book, you should read Project Orion by George Dyson. It's the story of the project to build the real-life version of that type of spacecraft. I'm about midway through it right now.
Or, more succinctly, this kind of blame tossing is not very helpful, particularly on an SCO thread. If you want to talk politics, take it to Plastic, or if that is too left wing for you, freep.
How's he scare off burglars? Everyone knows that a Cylon Warrior has even poorer aim than an Imperial Stormtrooper! Must be that design flaw off combining lack of depth perception with a constantly moving eyeball.
Essentially, the Shuttle can "walk" Hubble up to a new orbit. The little satellite boosters that we currently have will give it a kick in the ass, which it is not designed to take. Some of the military's satellites are.
What I'm concerned about is ISS. It's going to have the same problems for the same reasons. It's OK to gently lift the thing with the Shuttle's OMS thrusters, but Progress and Soyuz don't carry enough fuel for that, and it can't take the kick from a traditional third stage booster, either.
Idiot.
I think we've seen how that movie ends. Or we will, when Revolutions comes out in the fall...
True, but so does Titanic (the ship, not the movie). Perhaps you've never heard of the Titanic Historical Society, but it's been around since the Sixties. Titanic enthusiasts are every bit as rabid as LOTR ones. I know, I fit into both camps. I went to see the movie to see the re-creation of the ship. I didn't give a flying you-know-what about the story.
At any rate, I understand the "not getting it" part. I have trouble explaining to people that neither X-Files nor Buffy interested me at all. Such is life, I suppose.
I would guess that the BBC had the wool pulled over their eyes. Wouldn't be hard to do if they went in thinking that they were going to be documenting the only "western-style" Arab news source. It's really easy to show someone what they want to see. Just ask Uri Geller.
The biggest problem I see with this is the need to re-fuel the darn thing. I suppose the propulsion system could either be detachable or something based on cold gas discharge. You are not going to want to play with refueling traditional hypergolic engines in orbit.
A reference for the confused.
It also sent an e-mail with "I Love You" in the subject to all of your contacts. I wonder if the reason for delays on the FX card was that they'd renamed the burn-in application DukeNukemForeever.exe?
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.
And that was merely to protect the weaker heat shielding on the conical part of the spacecraft. The blunt end heat shield was protected by the Service Module until shortly before re-entry. The ice generating fuel tanks were also below the space craft, instead of partially above it. One of the problems with the Shuttle design is that much of the heat shielding is exposed during lifoff. I suppose some variation of the BPC could have been designed for the leading edges of the wings, but there certainly would have been a weight penalty, and the Shuttle is a heavy bird to begin with.
This is a problem that is going to have to be solved if a production re-usable spacecraft is ever to happen. We might not be at the stage of materials science to do it yet, though.
Unless the PRC finds a hell of a lot more gas, it doesn't look like natural gas is a viable generation source for it. It's too big, with too little domestic reserve.
Sealand is a stationary platform on concrete pilings. It doesn't need to be hauled into dry dock and scraped and painted every three or four years.
Not to mention that it's going to have to have periodic dockings for maintenance and to take on supplies. Sorry, it just won't work.
You're correct, but one of the reasons Microsoft has given in the past for being slower on security updates than the Open Source community is that they have a much more rigorous regression testing procedure that must be run before release. The idea is to make sure that something like this never happens. It is one of the ostensible reasons that you pay so much more for Windows. If the extensive test procedure is no better than Red Hat's or SUSE's, then that proposition kind of goes up in smoke.
Basically it boils down to the fact that the spacewalk experience can be tremendously disorienting. You train and train so you can do it even when you don't know which way is up. The training for one walk does not necessarily train you for the next. In fact, building generic EVA skills was one of the goals of the original, larger ISS.
That's not to say that a rescue shouldn't have been attempted, but you need to acknowledge that there was a significant chance for a mishap that could have resulted in the loss of both crews and shuttles. I still think that the effort would have been made, but let's stop all of backseat driving.
Fans have blades, right? Work with me here a bit...
Could be worse. I got the FX hair clipper, and now I'm only a lollypop short of being Telly Savalas...
And a rock is just a rock. You can't eat gold anymore than you can eat paper. In some sense, all money is an illusion. It happens to be a darn useful one as well.
All you need then is to create several versions of the Supreme Evil Overlord and his minions, and spawn in the correct set when the sanctum is reached. It's a fair amount of work, but it is possible.
If you wanted to do it based on actual time spent playing the game, I suppose you could keep track of the elapsed time by using a OnHeartBeat() handler, but those things often cause trouble, in my experience.
This is do-able in the Neverwinter Nights Engine. I think that there are a few user created modules that do something like this, but it is mostly keyed to the power of the player character rather than time. It wouldn't be hard to modify it though, so that a global variable tracked how quickly the player made it to the bad guy's sanctum, and adjusted the difficulty accordingly.
You are generalizing from a sample size of one. If I used your method of determining statistical reality, then the economy is fine. No one I know has been laid off in the past two years, and everyone's gotten raises. Unemployment doubling? Wages flat? Unlikely at best! What does the Bureau of Labor Statistics know?
OK, I was a little unclear. The number of users doesn't have to increase by that much, the number of mail addresses has to increase. Considering the number of people that get second and third addresses as "spam traps," this seems entirely plausible to me.
You are assuming the number of internet users is constant for the period. Hypothetically, if the number of users doubled in that time, then no increase in your personal spam volume would still result in a doubling of traffic.